When It Comes to Israel, Dissenters Must Face an Academic Mob

After finding that a recent special issue of the scholarly journal Israel Studies questioned certain academic orthodoxies, a few professors wrote an open letter and garnered over 100 signatures from colleagues condemning the journal’s editors and demanding that the issue of the journal be retracted completely. To Andrew Pessin, this reaction demonstrates that the letter’s authors and not the journal’s authors are the ones seeking to undermine scholarly norms:

[I]n the name of “academic standards” and “anti-partisanship,” the critics casually refer to “Israel/Palestine,” as if Palestine were an existing state, which it is not, at least not yet, and which can only be assumed to be one by deeply partisan intellectual acrobatics. They [furthermore] attack the credentials of the contributors, thus providing a textbook case of the ad-hominem fallacy. [Finally], they accuse the journal’s authors and editors of “policing and shutting down debate” when they are a mob of 170-plus making demands for a public disavowal, phased removal of those responsible for the issue, and an overhaul of an editorial process that, prior to this issue, no one had any concerns about. . . .

A scholar is welcome to disagree with [any] arguments and conclusions, of course. One could, for example, do the scholarly thing: engage with the essays and write critiques and rebuttals. [The journal’s editors] offered the critics precisely that opportunity in the pages of the journal itself, but that was apparently not sufficient for them. Instead the mob went full-throttle ad hominem, slinging the ludicrous charges that the essays in question violate “scholarly standards and norms,” and clamoring for disavowal, resignations, and overhaul.

That the charges are ludicrous is apparent from simply reading the essays themselves, many of which are very good. . . . With the mob’s hysterical response, trammeling of the normal deliberative process, and attack on basic academic freedom, with its demands that the issue be condemned and people removed, it’s clear that the members of this mob don’t want anyone to read these essays — and hard not to conclude that what they are really upset about is not the “academic standards” but that the issue committed the sin of — providing material supportive of Israel.

Read more at Medium

More about: Academia, Israel on campus

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