Is Professorial Anti-Semitism Finally Meeting Resistance?

After being denied tenure at the University of Illinois for his vitriolic expressions of hatred for Israel, Steven Salaita found himself a position at the American University of Beirut (AUB), which recently announced that it, too, is terminating his employment. Meanwhile, a group of eminent professors is suing the American Studies Association (ASA)—the first U.S. academic organization to endorse a boycott of Israeli scholars and institutions—for violating the terms of its charter. Ben Cohen takes stock of these developments:

Predictably, [Salaita’s] supporters [have begun] railing that AUB “is reproducing the trend of persecuting scholars who condemn the injustices committed in Palestine.” . . . Could it really be the case that AUB is getting rid of faculty because of their support for the Palestinian cause? Remember, this is a university with a virulently anti-Zionist tradition that goes back decades. . . .

So the notion that the AUB has somehow been penetrated by “Zionists,” and that this is what led to Salaita’s ejection, is laughable and fanciful. According to Fadlo Khuri, AUB’s president, . . . the bid to appoint Salaita to a permanent position was riddled with procedural irregularities, such as the “conflict implied by the current incumbent chairing a committee to find [his] own successor.”

Here we get to the heart of the matter, whether in America or in Lebanon. We know very well that anti-Zionist academics exist in a self-sustaining world of conspiracy theories and outlandish interpretations of history, and that when challenged their stock-in-trade response is to cry “Persecution!”

Less understood is that this kind of self-righteousness leads naturally to procedural violations of the sort described by Khuri. “We and only we are right,” their logic goes, “and therefore we are morally justified in ignoring the rules that apply to ordinary mortals.”

What AUB’s decision over Salaita represents, therefore, is a recognition that this tactic can no longer be tolerated. And here in America, the American Studies Association (ASA) may be about to learn a similar lesson.

Read more at JNS

More about: Academia, Academic Boycotts, American Studies Association, Anti-Semitism, Israel & Zionism, Steven Salaita

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society