By Alex Stein · Wednesday, May 15, 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  “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” and “We don’t want no two states, we want 1948” are two of the slogans that have been heard on American campuses during the protests in recent weeks. These reflect the idea that Israel should be replaced by a Palestinian-Arab state and violence should be used to achieve this goal if necessary. While much of the discourse since October 7 has focused on the nature of Hamas’s attack—the rapes, the burnings, the shootings—not enough has been written on what it actually sought to achieve.
There is nothing surprising about violent Palestinian opposition to Zionism. As Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote: “The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists. . . . Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.” Ireland, Algeria, India, Vietnam—it is the same every time. What makes the Palestinian case different is that the Jews also have a legitimate claim to the land. This is why Israelis have responded differently to Palestinian violence than in all the examples above. As the famous Zionist song puts it: “I have no other country.”
This rejectionism creates a situation whereby the use of violence has always been more catastrophic for the Palestinians than it has been for the Jews. This phenomenon goes all the way back to 1929. That year, following false claims regarding Jewish ambitions toward the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa, violent riots broke out across Palestine, with the main focal points being Jerusalem, Jaffa, Tzfat, and Hebron. They lasted around a week, and by the end 133 Jews had been killed—the vast majority of whom had been murdered by Arabs—and 116 Arabs were killed—around 20 of whom were murdered by Jews, with the majority being killed because of police and military activities.
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By Michael S. Kochin · Monday, May 13, 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 How should American universities foster enlightening and challenging debates on matters of public, faculty, and student concern while maintaining a university community that is as politically, religiously, ethnically, and racially diverse as the country in which they sit? In the century or so that the leading American universities have wandered, unguided by their previous Christian mission, this problem—balancing academic freedom and diversity—has become the principal challenge for their administrators, from presidents and trustees down to dorm counselors.[1]
Columbia’s new president, Nemat “Minouche” Talaat Shafik, Baroness Shafik of Camden in the London Borough of Camden and of Alexandria in the Arab Republic of Egypt, was plucked from the London School of Economics by the Columbia trustees to address that challenge, and she has had to brave it amid harsher circumstances in her first year than those faced by her predecessors for decades.
The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel had as its objective the mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of as many Israeli men, women, and children as it could sadistically brutalize. The success of Hamas at achieving that objective has stimulated enthusiastic and even violent demonstrations of support—not only at Columbia but especially at Columbia, the academic home of some of the West’s most effective and most uncompromising Palestinian nationalists, such as the late Edward Said, as well as current professors in that same mold, Rashid Khalidi and Joseph Massad.
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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 Julius Bielek · Tuesday, April 30, 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 When a student at the well-known Berlin art school Universität der Künste (UdK) used psychoanalytic terms to question her teacher’s assertion that we should listen to the “trees talking” more, she was attacked for her “colonial racist thinking,” using concepts of the white man, Sigmund Freud, to delegitimize “indigenous knowledge.”
A few weeks later, UdK students protested against Israel fighting back against the insurgents of October 7th, with banners that read “Stop the Genocide” or “It’s Not Complicated.” Dressed in all black, wearing black corona masks, and holding up red hands, supposedly meant to symbolize the blood that was on Germany’s hands, or bingo!, it’s “indigenous custom.” The president of the university tried to intervene, but the protestors shouted him down.
Such protests marked the onset of a series of disturbances at Berlin universities following October 7th. These reached a culminating point when a Jewish Freie Universität student, Lahav Shapira—a known critic of the pro-Palestine protests and himself a descendant of one of the Israeli athletes murdered in the 1972 Munich massacre—was brutally attacked by an anti-Zionist Muslim student who recognized Shapira as he was exiting a bar. At first this made headlines in Germany—not because a Jew had been hospitalized after an antisemitic attack, but because he is the brother of the well-known comedian Shahak Shapira.
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