Last week, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley law school and a distinguished constitutional lawyer, hosted members of the school’s graduating class for a dinner at his house. Anti-Israel activists had already put up posters with grotesque caricatures of a cannibalistic Chemerinsky reading “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves.” At the dinner itself, some of the guests stood up (with a microphone) and began ranting about the evils of Israel. The professor and his wife asked them to leave, and the students have since accused her of Islamophobia and of violating their First Amendment rights.
David Schraub comments on the incident:
Protests like this are exploitations of trust, they rely on and take advantage of the host’s unguarded openness and welcoming. . . . To take advantage of that, to extract costs on that openness, invariably leads to more closedness, more guardedness, and more cloisteredness—a loss for everyone, and one that can and should be mourned.
Schraub then takes a closer look at why the protesters picked Chemerinsky as a target:
The most specific thing I’ve seen people point to in justification of “why Chemerinsky” is an editorial he wrote this past October—just a few weeks after 10/7—recounting the anti-Semitism he’s experienced as a Jew at Berkeley in the wake of the Hamas attack. The usual suspects make the usual claims in response: that Chemerinsky’s claims about anti-Semitism are wrong, unfair, smears, [and] conflations of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and those sins justify what might otherwise seem an obviously abusive overreach of a protest. On that point, one thing I haven’t seen commented on much is the deep and dangerous chilling effect this sort of position has (and is intended to have) on Jewish faculty speaking on the subject of anti-Semitism.
Schraub, a law professor himself, also explains why the protesters’ complaints about their freedom of speech being violated have no merit. If only there were some institution where they could have studied such things.
Read more on Debate Link: https://dsadevil.blogspot.com/2024/04/assorted-thoughts-on-chemerinsky.html