10/04 Links Pt2: Campus Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Excludes and Targets Jews; Events at Berkeley Law Demonstrate a Campus Crisis on Antisemitism

From Ian:

Armin Rosen: Campus Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Excludes and Targets Jews

In practical terms, a reversal of DEI regimes’ determined obliviousness toward Jew-hatred probably wouldn’t help much. New York University is one of the only institutions that Stop Antisemitism surveyed to include Jews in its DEI efforts; it is also one of three universities in the report to have received formal federal-level complaints from a Jewish student under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Heritage study examined student surveys on the state of campus life at schools with DEI bureaucracies of varying size and found that “there appears to be little relationship between DEI staffing and the diversity climate on campus.” In an April 2021 story, Tablet’s Sean Cooper reported that despite their newfound ubiquity and high cost, there is shockingly little proof that DEI programs result in more tolerant workplaces and college campuses or reduce racism.

The DEI regime is often framed as a brave and honest reckoning with structural racism, educational inequity, individual bigotry, and other abiding sources of establishment shame. In fact, the purpose of DEI, and perhaps of the ideological and quasi-spiritual project underlying DEI, is to delay or deflect hard conversations about how universities operate, or any awkwardly critical assessments of the value of the education they provide, or the kinds of spaces and citizens they now produce. If it had any other purpose but creating a false edifice of reassurance and moral rectitude, campus DEI would have a lot to say about the higher education system’s continuing role as a locus of American antisemitism, rather than nothing at all.

Campus DEI regimes’ total lack of interest in antisemitism makes it obvious that Jews are not seen as part of the social justice mission of the university. Then again, much of the organizational architecture and bureaucracy of the contemporary university, from the stringency of the admissions process, to the emphasis on “diversity” itself, originated with the institutions’ attempts to keep Jews out, as Tablet has been recounting in Gatecrashers, a podcast exploring the history of antisemitism within the Ivy League.

One key difference between now and the 1920s, when the last largescale movement to exclude Jews from American campus life happened, is that Jews now lead and hold prestigious tenured chairs at major American universities, which host entire academic departments devoted to Jewish life and learning. That thousands of Jewish faculty and administrators, as individuals and as scholars, have allowed this resurgence of academic scapegoating and exclusion of Jews from campus life to happen with only occassional bursts of dissent is striking, at least to anyone who doesn’t spend their life on campus.

The institutional world’s hesitation to examine or even acknowledge its antisemitism problem points to a larger academywide fear of confronting institutional sins of the type that have little to do with Harvard’s or Yale’s involvement in the slave trade 200 years ago. Today’s universities are content with being unaffordable behemoths and lifestyle brands for the same reason they remain uninterested in the antisemitism they have historically practiced and indulged. The academy’s flaws, and the literal and figurative costs they arrogantly impose on the rest of American society, fall outside the purview of institutions that are rushing to add thousands of administrators who are supposedly dedicated to making the world a more tolerant and equitable place. In truth, the goal of these universities in a moment of disorienting and unpredictable social and political change is to protect their cartel from the scrutiny it has earned through its glaring inability to productively educate millions of students, and its determination to saddle ordinary taxpayers with the cost of its failures.

The future of American Jews on campus

To today’s college students: You are not the first generation of Jews to endure anti-Jewish animosities. You will not be the last. Do not begrudge these years; they can make you better. Nothing inspires us more than the fight for principle. Moral sentiment and grim resolve lift the heart and stiffen the spine. We get better through moral struggle. Rediscover your Jewish pride. Fight back – and fight back hard. Fight as hard as our opponents. You will find many allies, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Do not ignore the outrages perpetrated against you and fellow Jews on American campuses. We have learned throughout Jewish history that if we allow these anti-Jewish mindsets to fester, eventually antisemitism worsens. To ignore antisemitism is to allow the culture of Jew-hatred to settle in institutions, rendering its eradication much more difficult. Antisemitism devastates not only Jews, but also the institutions and societies that allow or encourage it.

You are the future. My generation will continue for a while longer, but it is you who will determine the destiny of American Jewish life. Whether you are ready or not, whether you even want it or not, we will soon hand the Jewish torch to you, as we received it from our parents. The reason there are Jews in the world today is that the Jews of yesterday willed it and bequeathed Judaism to us. I feel blessed for the privilege of spending a few years in the sun, linking your generation with generations past in our eternal quest for meaning.

When you reach mid-life, Israel will be celebrating its centennial. I hope I will be there with you. In 2048, we expect that two-thirds of the world’s Jews will be living in Israel. There will still be plenty of anti-Zionists. Israel will still have enemies seeking to destroy it. But Jewish anti-Zionism will be an anachronism. The historians of tomorrow will view today’s anti-Zionist Jews as the historians of yesterday viewed past fringe Jewish movements: a streaking comet blazing through the skies of Jewish life, making a dramatic impression in the crazed intensity of these times, but soon disappearing into the vast nothingness of Jewish time.

This is the irony: the struggle against Israel waged by some American Jews, is not really about Israel at all. Israel will survive and prosper with or without them. It is about you. It is about the future of American Judaism. We cannot survive separated from the vast majority of our people. Jews who tell you otherwise are deluded.

Looking back through the centuries, it has been a long, hard, tragic march from Sinai. But the journey has also been filled with exhilarating accomplishment, transcendent meaning, and noble purpose. I hope you feel this, sense this, and are empowered by it. I hope that you, too, will do what our ancestors did: Walk the long and winding Jewish road with faith in the ultimate redemption of our people and all people.

University of Toronto Newspaper Column Refers to Israel’s Creation as “Nakba” – Catastrophe

In a column published on October 2 in the Arts & Culture section of The Varsity, the University of Toronto’s student newspaper, entitled: “Finding a voice through storytelling at the 15th annual Toronto Palestinian Film Festival,” Milena Pappalardo reviews the 2022 Toronto Palestinian Film Festival (TPFF), which ran in late September.

Pappalardo’s commentary was peppered with anti-Israel disinformation, beginning with her background of the TPFF creation in 2008, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the Nakba, Arabic for the catastrophe, which Pappalardo explains “is a sombre day in Palestinian history that commemorates when Israeli militias terrorized and forcibly removed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people from their homes during the establishment of Israel in 1948.”

This oft-repeated proclamation, made frequently by anti-Israel activists, is extraordinarily misleading.

On May 14, 1948, following the United Nations Partition Plan, Israel declared its independence, marking the rebirth of the Jewish nation-state for the first time in almost two thousand years.

Almost immediately, the tiny reborn country was invaded by surrounding Arab armies, attempting to destroy the nascent Jewish State before it had a chance to defend itself. Living inside the new state were hundreds of thousands of Arabs, as well as Jews, and while it is true that roughly 750,000 Arabs were displaced during this period – similar in number to the 800,000 Jews forcibly exiled from their homes in Islamic lands – Pappalardo has missed the true culprit.

Historian Benny Morris noted that Arab leaders actively encouraged their community members to leave the country as a strategic move. “Arab officers ordered the complete evacuation of specific villages in certain areas, lest their inhabitants ‘treacherously’ acquiesce in Israeli rule or hamper Arab military deployments,” he wrote in “The Birth of the Palestinian Problem Revisited.”

Read More