By Turning against the Jews, Women’s Studies Admits Its Bankruptcy

In September, the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)—the most prominent academic organization in the field—gave an annual book prize to The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, published by Duke University Press. The book, written by Jasbir Puar, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, is a collection of scurrilous, perverse, and sometimes absurd accusations of Israeli evildoing. To Cary Nelson, the decision sounds the death knell for the entire field:

In the 1970s and 1980s the emerging field of women’s studies embodied hopes and goals for transforming humanities disciplines. . . . Of course, . . . faculty members and popular writers sometimes went to ludicrous extremes in contesting “patriarchy,” but academic training and the desire for academic respectability eventually moderated these impulses for many, [although the field] never settled its internal conflict between political and academic impulses. . . .

Now it is clear that politics has won; the NWSA’s political mission will not be qualified by objective standards. The organization is committed to criminalizing and delegitimating the state of Israel. In 2015 it passed the most far-reaching anti-Israel resolution of any major professional association, going well beyond an academic boycott to isolate, and condemn, and do as much economic and cultural damage to Israel as possible. With that, NWSA became officially intolerant of all alternative political opinions. . . .

The NWSA has now crossed a further line in self-discreditation by honoring Jasbir Puar’s December 2017 book. . . . Most anti-Israel [academic] publications focus on debatable propositions. Not Puar’s. You can debate the claim that Israel discriminates against its Arab citizens, but so long as there is evidence of racism among some Israelis you cannot wholly discredit the accusation. Puar, however, makes arguments that can be proved factually right or wrong. They are consistently false. . . .

Why does NWSA’s endorsement and its embrace of faux scholarship matter? Because NWSA members are encouraged to write and teach with a fiercely anti-Zionist bias and train their students to think and write that way. Several other humanities groups, most notably the American Studies Association, have launched themselves down the same rabbit hole.

Read more at Times of Israel

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

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