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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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 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 Gabriel Noah Brahm · Monday, February 27, 2023 Israeli public intellectual Paul Gross was clearly right when he wrote in Fathom, last November, that the latest electoral defeat for the center-left in Israel “feels different” to the losers. It feels that way, as well, to many of his sympathizers in the United States, self-described “American liberals and liberal Zionists,” for whom this crisis is “a crisis for us, too, and for people like us.” People like them view what’s happening here now, in the Jewish state, as in their own words, “by definition a threat to stability.”
And why is that? Because, understandably, the liberals feel their monopoly on power, exercised through the deep state—or Israeli “deep shtetl”—slipping from their grasp, after decades of Ashkenormative rule by judicial fiat. As John Goodman sang in David Byrne’s 1996 film True Stories, “We don’t want freedom, we don’t want justice, we just want someone to love.” And that someone is themselves—in their ideal, Platonic form as moderate managers with correct opinions about everything.
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By Dr. Jacqueline C. Rivers · Monday, October 5, 2020 The following essay originally appeared on June 12, 2020, at Religion Unplugged. Reposted here by permission.
For more than a week, hundreds of thousands of Americans, black and white, have taken to the streets across the country in an enormous outpouring of pain and rage. People, throughout the nation, primarily youth and of every race and ethnicity, have been responding to the vicious murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. Their powerful emotions have overwhelmingly been channeled into protests in over 75 cities.
Starting in Minneapolis and spreading to cities as far-flung as Atlanta, Boston, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and even to London and Paris, people have gathered in large numbers from coast to coast, in the north and south. The vast majority of protesters have been peaceful, and the events themselves have generally been nonviolent throughout their scheduled duration. However, a smaller number of rioters have resorted to shocking levels of violence, often after the official end of the protest. Their actions have been extremely destructive and deeply troubling: police cars have been burned; police officers have been pelted with projectiles; a police precinct in Minneapolis was torched; small businesses have been destroyed. In many cities such as Boston, some police officers have shown great restraint in the face of insults and harassment. But in almost every city, we have seen arrests and the use of violence against peaceful protesters, notably in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.
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