By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, July 17, 2024 The following comments refer to the interview with Michael Wolffsohn that appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on July 8, 2024. The interview is published in English translation on TelosScope here.
 October 7 and its aftermath are matters primarily concerning regional security in the Middle East, including Israeli national security, the status of the Palestinians, but ultimately the root cause, Iranian hegemonic ambitions and Tehran’s hostility to the United States. But October 7 has simultaneously unleashed a revival of antisemitism across the West, and often enough especially in the universities in the form of a pernicious left-wing antisemitism. Telos and the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute have devoted considerable attention to this phenomenon.
Academic antisemitism is not fully congruent with antisemitism in other social sectors. What happens at Columbia is not exactly the same as what transpired notoriously at Charlottesville, but it would be foolish to deny the unmistakable affinities in the varieties of antisemitism. In the same vein, it is important to keep in mind differences between national settings, but comparative reflections can help tease out important strands common across current manifestations of antisemitism. National particularity in this matter is most salient for Germany, given the shadow of the Holocaust. Germany also incubated a far left that pursued a radically anti-Israel politics at least since the 1960s, and Germany more recently welcomed large numbers of refugees from the Middle East, countries where antisemitic views are widespread. At the same time, however, Germany, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent unification, has witnessed the growth of a vibrant Jewish community. This combination of heterogeneous factors makes the German situation deserving of particular attention.
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By Gerald Berk · Thursday, May 30, 2024 I am a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Oregon, and I am an observant, progressive Jew. I appreciate the efforts of conservatives, some of whom have made valuable contributions to the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative, to expose antisemitism in my profession and among my students since October 7. I share their concern that anti-Zionism has become one plank in an anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-American project characteristic of some segments of the contemporary left. It’s vital to bear in mind that Jews have thrived when liberal, American values and institutions have been strong.
Does this mean, as Bari Weiss counsels, that I should join Jews in a lockstep turn to the right? I think not. Twenty-five years ago, in Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty challenged what he called the “cultural left” to suspend high theory, identity politics, and cultural revolution to attend instead to the economic distress of the many Americans left behind by neoliberalism. He challenged an increasingly anti-American left to build a left-wing patriotism. And he pointed to domestic historical resources to realize those aims in the work of Emerson, Whitman, and Dewey. Rorty feared the alternative to such pragmatic liberalism was an authoritarian demagogue, who would reverse the gains of identity politics and usher in an era of American fascism.
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The following is an open letter from Jewish students at Columbia University. We reproduce it here by permission of the letter’s authors. To view the original letter, which currently includes over 650 signatories at the time of this posting, click here.
To the Columbia Community:
Over the past six months, many have spoken in our name. Some are well-meaning alumni or non-affiliates who show up to wave the Israeli flag outside Columbia’s gates. Some are politicians looking to use our experiences to foment America’s culture war. Most notably, some are our Jewish peers who tokenize themselves by claiming to represent “real Jewish values,” and attempt to delegitimize our lived experiences of antisemitism. We are here, writing to you as Jewish students at Columbia University, who are connected to our community and deeply engaged with our culture and history. We would like to speak in our name.
Many of us sit next to you in class. We are your lab partners, your study buddies, your peers, and your friends. We partake in the same student government, clubs, Greek life, volunteer organizations, and sports teams as you.
Most of us did not choose to be political activists. We do not bang on drums and chant
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By Corinne E. Blackmer · Friday, May 10, 2024 The following is an open letter to the American Association of University Professors, in response to the AAUP’s statement on the recent campus protests. Earlier this week the author also wrote about the anti-Zionism on display in the trans community.
My name is Corinne Blackmer, and I am professor of English and director of Judaic Studies at Southern Connecticut State University.
I am also the co-editor (with Andrew Pessin) and contributor to a volume titled Poisoning the Wells: Antisemitism in Contemporary America (Academic Press, 2023). This work, which appeared shortly before the events of October 7, seems prophetic in hindsight. Doing this volume helped me comprehend rather than merely react to the events that are befalling us that are discussed in the impassioned AAUP statement.
I do not by any means regard the AAUP’s statement as antisemitic, nor do I think it intended to traffic in antisemitic tropes. However, it accidentally both was and did. This occurred in small part because of culturally inculcated patterns but mainly because the statement was rhetorically divided against itself by attempting to meet the demands of its primary audience while doing a modicum of compromised justice to the myriad issues that contradicted its arguments. Please understand, I have no interest in overplaying—or underplaying—the role that antisemitism has played in these protests; nor do I have less than an excruciating sense of how both Democrats and Republicans have, in classic antisemitic fashion, positioned Jewish people as a political football to be tossed around like a bauble. As a result of this invidious sport, Jews, with a few exceptions in both camps, have no place to go that feels like home.
I wish to go over these matters in the hope that my comments might prove helpful in articulating more form-fitted responses to future crises as they unfold around us. We have not seen the last of these kinds of protests for various reasons, so it behooves us to see matters clearly in order to anticipate the future and stay resilient and savvy.
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By Corinne E. Blackmer · Wednesday, May 8, 2024 The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative Recently, I bore witness to events on the Yale campus that made me wonder about the meaning of being Jewish at the present, and that recollected to my mind the tales of the Mishnah, which delineate, in tractate Nezikin, judicial actions for damages. Section one explores how humans should behave in relation to the famous “goring ox.” Amidst the many concrete cases stands one in which the ox of a man of “sound sense” gores the ox of a “deaf-mute, an imbecile, or a minor” (m BK 4.4). In this instance, the sound-minded man is culpable for damages, whereas the opposite holds true for the owner who is deaf, intellectually disabled, or a minor. However, this matter cannot end there since the ox of these latter owners must be prohibited from inflicting further damage without consequence. The court “must appoint a guardian” over these owners unless their status changes, at which point the court can deem the ox harmless once again (m BK 4.4).
Few if any other faith-based traditions outside of Judaism would perceive tales of goring oxen and their owners as appropriate or intelligible subjects of religious discourse. But Judaism, a corporeal ethical practice, holds that even dangerous animals and ordinary humans must be redeemable through intentional, responsible human conduct under divine mitzvot. The oxen, even when they gore, are, like the differently situated humans who own them, deserving of respectful consideration as creatures made in the image and likeness of Ha-Shem.
In contrast to these embodied Jewish narratives, modern American religion has two contrastive discursive modes: a literalist obedience to a sacred text and a transcendent exaltation of feeling. Unlike the Mishnah, this construct evades the bodily dimension of human sacred experience in opposing the literal (concrete and rule-bound) and the spiritual (exalted and immaterial). Achieving transcendence means liberating persons from the snare of their bodies, implicitly inscribed as mindless or debased. Such binary formulations are doomed to failure as accounts of human existence, since without conscious thoughtfulness, the body becomes merely the site of appetite, whether indulged or constrained in excess. Any legitimate issue or concern arising from the body must be silenced or forced to vanish—not treated with mindful solicitude and regard.
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By Cary Nelson · Friday, April 26, 2024 The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative Introduction
Every day, it seems, we advance into darkness we have not known before. It is not a journey we have sought out or chosen for ourselves. We are swept along by a current of malice that can only be avoided if we hide from the news. The spectacle of a mass antizionist and antisemitic “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on Columbia University’s central quad and elsewhere has structural predecessors, to be sure, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, but parallels with mass antisemitism require comparison with earlier historical moments. The Occupy Wall Street movement was notably accompanied by a substantial body of theoretical work, whereas the Columbia occupation is supported by little more than a Manichean view of a world divided between oppressor and oppressed peoples. The students promise to remain until Columbia meets their divestment demands—which presumably means they will be in their tents for a very long time indeed, since for governing boards to cede their investment authority to mob action means giving up their other responsibilities as well.
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