The third webinar of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s “China Keywords” series, entitled “The Greeks according to Chinese Nationalist Intellectuals,” will take place on Thursday, May 16, from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time (16:00 to 17:00 Central European Time). Our guest will be Prof. Shadi Bartsch, who will discuss the reception and use of ancient Greek philosophers in contemporary Chinese political thought. Plato and Aristotle figure prominently in anti-Western polemics.
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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 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. 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
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. 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
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. 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
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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