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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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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By David Pan · Wednesday, April 24, 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 Columbia University president Nemat Shafik’s recent testimony to Congress indicates an important shift in our conception of academic freedom. While affirming the legal principle of free speech, she clearly accepted limits on academic freedom by stating that calls for genocide have no place at the university. Since at least one issue would disqualify someone from participating in Columbia’s educational project, she opens up the question of the limits of academic freedom and the duty of a university to enforce such limits through decisions on hiring and dismissal of faculty as well as suspension of students. While the American Association of University Professors seeks to criticize such restrictions on academic freedom, its 1940 statement on academic freedom stipulates that “[i]nstitutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole.” The congressional hearings have demonstrated that the common good may require restrictions on academic freedom, and such restrictions indeed are already part of the way universities see their mission.
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By Gabriel Noah Brahm · Tuesday, April 23, 2024 A virulent, novel strain of anti-Zionist antisemitism is loose on the American campus.
In the wake of October 7, 2023’s barbaric terrorist assault on southern Israeli kibbutzim, a rave party, and a small military base, the Jewish state has been denounced loudly by extremists. As a consequence, Jewish students and faculty in the United States find themselves as unwelcome in the quad or the classroom as a troop of uniformed IDF soldiers. For pro-Hamas demonstrators, as for the terror organization itself, there is essentially no difference.
Apparently the result of a lab leak containing intellectual materials gleaned from various “studies” programs, where experimentation with conceptual “gain of function research” had gone on in relative obscurity for some time (Gender Studies, Middle East Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Critical Legal Studies), a potent “new-new antisemitism,” as it’s being called, is on the loose, spiked with heavy doses of esoteric and markedly volatile ideologemes. “Intersectionality,” in its more dubious applications, reduces all moral and political questions to matters of “oppressor” and “oppressed.” “Critical race theory” brands Jews not only as “white” (a term used on campus to mean “structurally racist”) but “hyper-white” (the whitest, therefore most racist of all). Theories of “settler colonialism” misrepresent Jews as colonizers in their own indigenous lands and the State of Israel as somehow illegitimate, despite its rather unique birth certificate, bestowed by the United Nations itself in 1947. Moreover, what the proponents of all these ideologies have in common is that they point to Jews and Israel as uniquely blameworthy personifications of all the “evils” attributed to the West, historically, by its occidentalist critics.
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By Andrew Pessin · Monday, April 22, 2024 The following essay is the first in 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 I try to be sympathetic to the anti-Israel activists roiling campuses everywhere, including at Columbia University, my graduate alma mater, lately perhaps the most roiled. I do that because of my quaint conception of the academy as a place where, in the pursuit of truth, people should freely express their opinions but also be willing to listen to the opinions of others. And I think about how I would act, say, during the early 1940s, when I learned that a genocide against the Jewish people was occurring and all too many people were not paying attention. Wouldn’t I protest, loudly? Disrupt “business as normal”? Get in the face of the people ignoring it or, worse, in any degree complicit in it? Maybe even break a few rules or laws? I hope that I would.
The problem, then, isn’t the mayhem per se. Yes, it’s appropriately against the rules to domineer a campus for your cause, to rally noisily inside buildings and libraries and disrupt classes and exams, to create a hostile environment for others who are entitled to a safe and secure one to pursue their own paths, programs, politics. Those misbehaviors must be—and have been long overdue for being—punished, by methods including suspension and expulsion. But if you believe a genocide is going on and it’s a moral imperative to stop it, well, I get it: do what you need to, and accept the punishment.
The problem here runs deeper, ultimately rooted in the academy itself: it’s that they believe a genocide is going on in the first place, or have even misidentified the true genocide, as we’ll see below. More generally, it’s that they have adopted an entire narrative that is profoundly one-sided, oversimplified, ignorant of history, often counter to the facts, mistaken about who are the good guys and who are the bad, and driven, ultimately, by hatred and bigotry—and which licenses the profoundly outrageously immoral violence of October 7.
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Reckoning with October 7: Israel, Hamas, and the Problem of Critical Theory
A TPPI Conference
November 8–9, 2024
New York City
The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute welcomes paper proposals for a conference that reckons with the response, both within higher education at large and especially from the precincts of critical theory, to the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The conference will cap a year of webinars, podcasts, blog posts, and publications about the topic, and will form the basis of a special memorial issue of the journal Telos. Full papers intended for that special issue will also be considered at this time.
Beginning in the immediate, politicized aftermath of the Hamas atrocities, theory has been present—in ways that should give us pause. It was present in sublimated ways, as widespread presuppositions and “narratives” infused with charismatic authority by a popularized postcolonial jargon. It was there in kinetic, emotionally charged, intellectually unsophisticated responses, in “mass” demonstrations, public statements by groups and institutions, and individual social media campaigns. It was there in “intersectional” ideology. Yet above all, it was manifest in considered, open, intentional ways within universities, as well as among educated elites taught and credentialed by them. The college campus, the traditional home of critical theory—which emerged in the twentieth century most powerfully as a response to fascism and Nazism—has become a nodal point for the dramatic unfolding of a cognitively, morally, and politically deficient discourse about a present-day Kristallnacht.
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