To Avoid Anti-Semitism Scandals, Universities Should Avoid Hiring Professors Whose Work Is Contaminated by the Hatred of Jews

On Tuesday, a group of Jewish students met with administrators at England’s University of Bristol to express their concerns over the anti-Semitic rantings of Professor David Miller, whose complaints at a recent online event targeted even the campus Jewish Society. But this is not a case of a professor who suddenly revealed his true colors in some offhand comments, or a scholar who happens to hold radical political views, notes Dave Rich. Rather, Miller’s hatred for Jews and the Jewish state is baked into his research:

Before arriving at Bristol, Miller made his name with his theory of the “Five Pillars of Islamophobia,” which claimed that anti-Muslim prejudice was encouraged and spread by, among others, “parts of the Zionist movement.” To justify this claim, Miller produced reports which aimed to prove that the “wealthy businessmen and financiers” who gave money to organizations he deemed to be Islamophobic also gave money to pro-Israel and Jewish causes; thereby putting “the financial and political resources of the Israel lobby” in the service of global Islamophobia.

His research was based on cherry-picked data and his conclusions relied more on inference than evidence, but astonishingly this was enough for Bristol University to give him a professorship and allow him to teach this dangerous nonsense to students. It can’t be stressed enough that Bristol University hired him in full knowledge that this was the nature of his academic work.

Miller believes his academic freedom is under threat, but it is his spurious accusations that threaten the academic freedom of his Jewish students to study free from the suspicion and hostility he clearly feels towards them.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Anti-Semitism, United Kingdom

 

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