The U.S. Should Stop Supporting the American University of Beirut

Every year, Washington sends millions of dollars to the American University of Beirut (AUB), an institution that for many decades hasn’t lived up to the ideals of tolerance and liberal education on which it was founded. Tamara Berens argues that it is time for the U.S. to end the relationship:

In recent years, the AUB has been accused of providing material aid to Hizballah, a designated terrorist organization at odds with U.S. interests.

The university has an American Studies department with a chair endowed in the memory of the [viciously anti-Israel] Arab-American scholar Edward Said. . . . From 2015 to 2017, Steven Salaita occupied this chair. Salaita had previously made headlines when the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign withdrew his tenure-faculty appointment after he was found to have issued a series of incendiary tweets relating to Israel and the Palestinians, including one that read, “Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible to something honorable since 1948.”

Before Salaita, the chair had been held by Lisa Hajjar, a sociology professor with a long history of harshly criticizing Israel and American counterterrorism policy who had expressed support for the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Though private institutions can teach what they want and hire whom they want, the U.S. should not pursue the worthy goal of liberalizing the Middle East by underwriting illiberal universities. . . . If the American University of Beirut has become American in name only, it no longer deserves America’s support.

Read more at National Review

More about: Anti-Semitism, BDS, Beirut, Hizballah, Lebanon, Steven Salaita, U.S. Foreign policy

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