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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The video of the fifth webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative is now available and can be viewed here. Titled “Our Troubled Institutions: The End(s) of Higher Education, Post-Journalism, and Antisemitism after October 7,” the panel featured Russell A. Berman, Gadi Taub, and Paulina Neuding, and their conversation was moderated by Israel initiative director Gabriel Noah Brahm.
The next webinar in the Israel webinar series will take place on June 7.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, May 9, 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 In the immediate aftermath of the attacks of October 7, and now again during the spring, coordinated protests have spread through colleges and universities. The rapidity with which normal functioning was disrupted and the initial helplessness of administrators both point to fundamental weaknesses in higher education: I doubt that there can be a return to a pre-October 7 normalcy. Public dismay with universities was already pronounced before these events, and the campus chaos has triggered memories of the lawlessness of the George Floyd riots.
There are certainly deep and substantive problems inside academia that explain these events—and I will turn to them in a moment—but it is important first to take stock of what really transpired and not surrender to sensationalist overstatements. It is true that demonstrations have taken place at many colleges, but the number of participants at each has been limited when measured against total enrollment. There were 119 arrests at Columbia, where the student body totals some 36,000. It is also true that antisemitic discourse has emerged, but the extent of its spread is unclear. At Stanford a student vote calling for divestment won 75% support—which is disheartening—but only about 25% of eligible voters took part, so the result only documents an anti-Israel sentiment of 18% of the student body. We need more data.
From the arrest records, we learn that many of the protestors were not students or faculty but came from outside activist organizations. At Columbia, 32 of the 119 were outsiders; at CCNY, 102 of the 173 were not from the university. There is enough evidence to point to a coordinated plan by groups to promote disruption, to commit crimes and especially to radicalize the discourse. For example, a well-meaning student attracted to the logic of a two-state solution—hardly an extremist position—might well show up at an encampment but then be pushed into supporting Hamas or the elimination of Israel, indisputably extreme stances. That radicalization has gone unquestioned. There are no signs of internal debate between, say, supporters of Palestinian national self-determination on the one hand and, on the other, proponents of “global intifada” and “smashing” capitalism. Those are two very different programs, but radical leadership has managed to establish the latter as the norm in the protest camps. It has also left previously unorganized students facing the consequences of arrest and the career damage of a criminal conviction.
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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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