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The video of the sixth webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel Initiative is now available and can be viewed here. Titled “Free Speech and Campus Antisemitism: Academic Freedom, to What End?,” the panel featured Michael S. Kochin, Geoff Shullenberger, and Jacob Siegel, and their conversation was moderated by Israel Initiative director Gabriel Noah Brahm. The next webinar in the Israel webinar series will take place on July 7. 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 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. 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
Collin May’s essay “Critical Theory as an Anti-Emancipatory Project” appeared earlier this week in TelosScope.
To the contrary. May is himself a lawyer, trained philosopher, theologian, and scholar of Islam. Yet he ran afoul of the powers of “woke” that be, over the publication of an academic book review on the subject of Islamic history, published years ago in a prestigious outlet, just when he had stepped into a prominent role as a Canadian civil servant. The following comments refer to Robert Redeker’s piece from Le Figaro on December 30, 2022, published in English translation on TelosScope here. In a notable comment in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud compares Oedipus Rex with Hamlet in order to describe what he calls “the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind.” Between Sophocles and Shakespeare, civilization underwent an enormous increase in the control of affect and a withering away of the formerly unmanaged space of some original freedom. Of course Freud was talking about widely separated historical moments, ancient Greece and Elizabethan England. Today, through hyper-acceleration in a much shorter period, we are undergoing a comparable quantum leap of control (see: surveillance) accompanied by restrictions on free speech and free thought unthinkable only a few decades ago. The following text originally appeared in Le Figaro on December 30, 2022, and is published here in English translation with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here. In 1793, the great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte discovered what the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris does not know today, if one can judge by the complaint that he filed against the author Michel Houellebecq, i.e., that freedom of thought is divine. Let us listen to Fichte: “It is both a human and divine truth that man has inalienable rights and that freedom of thought is one of these rights.” What does that mean? It means that denouncing and opposing freedom of thought is blasphemous; that this sort of anger simultaneously offends the divine part of humanity and, indirectly, God himself; and that this sort of attack is dehumanizing because it attempts to tear out of the human conscience what God himself gave it. Through its legal action, the Grand Mosque of Paris poses two risks, for the writer and our country: the risk of forcing the writer, a candidate for the Nobel Prize, to live under close police protection or, in other words, to become a sort of prisoner of conscience in his own country, and the risk of inciting a fanatic ready to spill the blood of the man targeted as an “Islamophobe.” Let us recall that since Islam is not the state religion of France, one has the right to speculate, perhaps erroneously, that it is wrong and alien to the soul of French civilization. One similarly has the right to discuss this idea, as long as one stays at the level of general ideas and refrains from defamations or direct calls for violence. |
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