Nelson, Cary, “Israel Denial. Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State” (Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 2019), pp.425-7
Pankaj Mishra’s Moral Mishma Liel Liebowitz Tablet, July 9, 2019Ours, said Pankaj Mishra, is a tormented world, where “the question of political evil that we grapple with presses down on our souls and minds.” The respected essayist and novelist—bylines in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the Guardian, awards from Yale University and the Leipzig Book Fair—was holding court at the Italian Cultural Institute on Park Avenue, standing beside the flags of Italy and the European Union, an oversize marble fireplace, and a tall window that poured the late afternoon directly on Mishra and made him look as if he was painted by Vermeer. He was there to talk about his guide to all this suffering, the inimitable Primo Levi.“I read him systematically as a young man in the late 1980s,” Mishra began. “I was very fortunate actually to be introduced to him relatively early in his career in the English-speaking world, but I really read him in the real sense after my own very small brush with political evil, and this happened when I went to the valley of Kashmir in 1999, 20 years ago, to report on the counterinsurgency there.” And off Mishra went, assuring his listeners that he was not in the least simplifying a complex issue by saying that the Indian occupation of Kashmir was a bacchanal of beastly acts against the local population and was viewed as such by one and all.Like some iconic actors—not the great ones, who disappear into their roles, but the plucky ones, who bake themselves into every part (think William Shatner or Christopher Walken)—Mishra’s delivery is a master class in frustrated rhythmic expectations. He never puts the emphasis on the word you’d think he’s about to favor, and just when you catch him looking down and wonder if he is lost in his notes, he throws his head up at an angle and looks at you through his thick-rimmed glasses, as if all this time he was patiently waiting for some profound observation to cohere and now that it has he’s ready to volley it your way. You hardly even have to listen to what Pankaj Mishra is saying to know that he is an intellectual: As he speaks, he barely moves at all, his body at rest in a black button-down and a khaki-colored safari jacket, his hands seizing both sides of the oaken podium, like a sailor in the crow’s-nest who keeps himself steady to better see the horizon. Only his head tilts up and down and from side to side, a visual cue that beneath these two torrents of thick, black hair, parted down the middle the way the Red Sea is often depicted in paintings of the Exodus, lies an immaculate brain that can hardly be contained. The impression is helped along by the fact that Mishra does not orate like the late Christopher Hitchens, say, used to do; instead, he contemplates, delivering observations layered with reservations, text, and commentary intertwined.“I don’t think I’m simplifying to say that the local population of Kashmir absolutely despised, with all their soul, as an occupying force, the Indian army, the Indian government, the Indian bureaucracy,” he continued. “There were local legends about places where unspeakable forms of torture were inflicted on young Kashmiris.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.] ______________________________________________________
The Department of Anti-Israel Studies Victor Rosenthal Abu Yehuda, June 20, 2019 I met Prof. Cary Nelson on Monday. Nelson, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Illinois, is former president of the American Association of University Professors, and the author of many books and articles on diverse subjects.Nelson showed us his new book, Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State. I only looked at it for a few minutes, but Elder of Ziyon has a complete review here. I want to write a little about the academic world that makes such a book necessary.It’s an attempt to push back against the remarkably ubiquitous participation of Western humanities and social-sciences university faculty in the process of demonization of Israel. It’s axiomatic that today’s college students are tomorrow’s political and business leaders, and the fact that most Western universities are monolithic anti-Israel environments today is not encouraging for the future.The most important part of the book is a detailed refutation of claims made by Judith Butler, Steven Salaita, Saree Makdisi, and Jasbir Puar, against Israel. With the exception of Salaita, whose work is so substandard and his public invective so vulgar that he has been unable to find and keep an academic position, they hold highly prestigious jobs and have no difficulty publishing whatever they write in the best venues. Butler and Puar, in fact, are professorial rock stars, with numerous awards and accolades to their credit.Nelson, who is old enough to have grown up in an era in which standards of scholarship were adhered to – facts were checked before being cited, articles were carefully vetted before being published, candidates for academic positions were evaluated on scholarly rather than political criteria, and there was an implied commitment to seek objective truth – found himself shocked by the total collapse of academic standards in the humanities and social sciences. This was particularly evident in connection with the Israeli-Muslim conflict.
Jasbir Puar, for example, has recently published a book called The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), in which she accuses Israel of deliberately and sadistically starving, maiming, and stunting the Palestinian population in order to achieve its “biopolitical goal” of breaking the bodies and spirit of the Palestinians to end their “resistance.” One reviewer called the book a modern “blood libel,” similar to the medieval accusations that Jews murdered Christian children in order to use their blood to make matzot. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.] ______________________________________________________
Nelson, Cary, Israel Denial. Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State (Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 2019), pp.425-7
We can…expect to see individual faculty, especially those wanting to win recognition based on original research, invent new and unpredictable ways of advancing BDS arguments and furthering the delegitimization of Israel. Graduate students will be increasingly able to earn doctorates with explicitly anti-Zionist dissertations. The anti- Zionist faculty publications analyzed in Israel Denial display a number of consistent patterns that are both ideological and methodological. The resulting prose is relentlessly polemical and accusatory, suffused with unqualified conviction. These projects are not conducted as traditional academic analyses that reach conclusions by comparing and contrasting different positions. There is no effort to weigh alternative views…These publications instruct the next generation of faculty members about how “research” can and should be conducted. That is good cause to be concerned about the BDS movement’s long-term influence….
Another message that BDS-allied faculty members send to their students is that faculty political activism is crucial to faculty authenticity…anti-Zionist faculty activism may be unique in combining a failure to adhere to ethical principles in both scholarly and active pursuits, most pointedly when the two enterprises intersect….
We can expect such activism to increase. The biased anti-Zionist pedagogical scene will also get worse before it gets better, if ever. Barring some dramatic destructive action like a formal Israeli annexation of much of the West Bank, the larger academic disciplines with diverse memberships will likely continue to resist adopting academic boycotts, though maintaining that record will require vigilant monitoring, evaluation, and the hard work of responding. Campus divestment resolutions meanwhile show no sign of abating, and anti-Zionist initiatives within the Protestant denominations will surely continue. This is not a struggle with an end in sight…
[W]e can expect to see waning support for academic freedom, both within and outside the academy. In addition to the explicit contempt for and misrepresentation of academic freedom shown by BDS advocates, there is some frustration in the Jewish community with the anti-Zionist pedagogy and anti-Semitic hate speech that academic freedom protects. Academic freedom oddly enough is at least somewhat imperiled from constituencies on opposite sides of debates over Israel. We need to do everything we can to make it clear that academic freedom is the bedrock of higher education. Its benefits vastly outweigh its costs. The defense of Israel’s fundamental right of existence is now linked to a defense of the academy’s guiding principles. That includes the academy’s fundamental search for the truth. ______________________________________________________
An Education Horror Show Wall St. Journal, July 7, 2019
The National Education Association held its annual convention this past weekend, and the Democratic presidential candidates made their pilgrimage to promise the teachers union more money—and even more money. One word we didn’t hear on stage was “Providence,” as in the Rhode Island capital city whose public schools were recently exposed as a horror show of government and union neglect. Peeling lead paint, brown water, leaking sewage pipes, broken asbestos tiles, rodents, frigid and chaotic classrooms, and student failure were all documented in a 93-page review by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. The review was conducted in May at the request of the Rhode Island education commissioner, and it deserves attention nationwide as an example of government failure.
“Very little visible student learning was going on in the majority of classrooms and schools we visited—most especially in the middle and high schools,” the report says. “Our review teams encountered many teachers and students who do not feel safe in school. There is widespread agreement that bullying, demeaning, and even physical violence are occurring within the school walls at very high levels.”
No surprise, then, that only 5% of Providence eighth graders on average scored proficient in math in the 2015 through 2017 school years. That compares to 21.3% in Newark, N.J., where students have similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Low-income students in Worcester, Mass., not far away, were twice as proficient as those in Providence.
“Teachers did not press students to become engaged with the mathematics instruction, resulting in a variety of student off-task behavior: chatting with peers, checking phones, staring into space, or, in some cases, taking phone calls and watching YouTube videos,” the report says. Student performance actually drops the longer students spend in Providence schools. Proficiency in English fell from 18.7% of students in fifth grade to only 8.5% in eighth.
One student reported that “my best teacher’s desk was urinated on, and nothing happened.” Another noted a teacher “was choked by a student in front of the whole class. Everybody was traumatized, but nothing happened.” One district leader observed, “the students run the buildings.”
One culprit are policies that discourage student discipline. Rhode Island Democrats in 2016 passed legislation backed by the American Civil Liberties Union that limits school suspensions, which progressives claim discriminate against minorities. Teachers are reluctant to punish students, and violence and misconduct make it harder to retain good teachers.
The reviewers also note that collective-bargaining agreements limit the ability of school principals to fire lousy teachers. “In the case of an abusive teacher, s/he is placed on unpaid administrative leave but then ‘lawyers up’ through the union and ultimately returns to the classroom,” one principal noted. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
On Topic Links
Fake News and Fake Education?: James Freeman, Wall St. Journal, June 24, 2019 — The good news is that people who disagree with you about politics aren’t nearly as unreasonable as you think. The Rise of Artificial Freedom: Charmaine Yoest, RealClearPolitics, May 16, 2019 –– In multiple settings, we are seeing a trend toward narrowing the scope of opinions allowed in the public arena An Israeli Soldier Went MIA 37 Years Ago. International Intrigue and DNA Testing Brought Him Home: Loveday Morris, National Post, July 11, 2019 — For decades, Israel’s National Center for Forensic Medicine has tested skeletal remains secreted across its northern border, checking whether the DNA matched that of Israeli soldiers missing in action behind enemy lines in Lebanon or Syria. Jerusalem: The Beating Heart of Jewish History: Rabbi Pini Dunner, Jewish Journal, May 30, 2019 — If you do a Google search on any Jewish topic, you will almost certainly be directed to the site myjewishlearning.com. _______________________________________________________________
SUMMER INTERNS
It is a delight to recommend, with great enthusiasm, CIJR’s summer Interns, Jacques Chitayat and Jonathan Wasserlauf. Working with these able and committed young scholar-writers has been a pleasure and an honor, and it is good to see that they both feel that their exposure to the Institute’s independent, academic pro-Israel research and advocacy has been a useful learning experience for them.
We look forward to their ongoing involvement in pro-Israel work and wish them’ every success in their future academic, and intellectual-professional, endeavors. Prof. Frederick Krantz
JACQUES CHITAYAT
As I approach the end of my internship at the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR), realize how this experience has, by enhancing my professional skills, served me well in the future. Thanks to the help of my colleagues, my writing style has consistently improved: as time went by, I was writing better articles, delivering my arguments with more impact and efficiency. This internship was an excellent introduction to the world of research and journalism and helped me put what I had learned in my Political Science studies to good use. Even as an intern, the position I had in this organization was an important one: not only was my role crucial in online promotion and content creation, but my opinion was always heard and considered during Board meetings.
I spent two months in a very friendly atmosphere, where each colleague was helping the other. What made the experience interesting was that I had a great deal of freedom to write about what interested me, as I was often encouraged to pitch ideas for articles. I also had the opportunity to discover fascinating books, authors and websites that I would not have been exposed to in university or in my daily life. It felt great to be an advocate for Israel, with my articles being read by followers on the internet. During this very enjoyable and valuable experience, the weeks went by quickly. JONATHAN WASSERLAUF
CIJR, the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, is by far the best, and most pro-Israel and pro-Jewish work environment I ever had the opportunity to work in. Aside from writing articles and publishing on CIJR’s Isranet website (Isranet.org), I was able to experience working with and being mentored by journalists, professors, historians, lawyers, and political scientists, among other pro-Israel professionals.
As a Poli-Sci Major, and a Grad student, I can vouch for the comfortable and constructive work environment CIJR provided me throughout my internship. While giving a detailed account of my time here would be way too lengthy, I believe that my work was not only valuable but valued. I felt appreciated and was even invited to sit in with professors from Concordia University, Université de Montréal, McGill University, as well as other respected businessmen and professionals in the community at their bi-weekly meetings.
Thank you CIJR, for the greatest advocacy experience — I cannot wait to work together again in the future. _______________________________________________________________
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