Charles A. Small LDB Academic Advisor Charles A. Small (ISGAP) reports the following interesting events this week at his Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (after the jump). Impressively, this week’s events feature Israeli Justice Elyakim Rubinstein and Dr. Amichai Magen, as well as Dr. Small himself. Dr. Small, as our readers will recall, was the founder and director of Yale University’s former anti-Semitism research center (YIISA), which was controversially disbanded. We are pleased to see the range and quality of ISGAP’s current offerings at a number of universities, including Harvard, Stanford, McGill and Fordham. (more…)
Maurice Samuels Having just blogged on Charles Small’s impressive offerings through his Institute for Global Antisemitism and Policy, it should be noted that Small’s former university has not been idle. Maurice Samuels, the scholar of French and Jewish culture and literature, heads Yale’s new anti-Semitism center, which is known as the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism (YPSA). Samuels’ Center has also been conducting interesting conferences. This week, for example, YPSA will present a panel on ”Antisemitism in the Ancient Mediterranean? Early Christianity and Anti-Judaism,” featuring several academics with impressive credentials within their respective fields. Details after the jump. (more…)
After a bumpy ride with Israel during his first term, President Barack on his first official visit to the Jewish state appears to have made a stabilizing mid-course correction. Though most attention has been paid to his Jerusalem speech, Obama’s remarks on landing at Tel Aviv may have the greater historical importance. In Cairo in 2009, Obama appealed to Arab and Muslim empathy for “the Jewish people [who] were persecuted for centuries, . . . [by] anti-Semitism in Europe [that] culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.” Suffering from historical amnesia, he failed to mention any historical bond between Jews and the Holy land predating the Shoah. In 2013 landing in Israel, he corrected this grave oversight: “More than 3,000 years ago, the Jewish people lived here, tended the land here, prayed to God here. And after centuries of exile and persecution, unparalleled in the history of man, the founding of the Jewish State of Israel was a rebirth, a redemption unlike any in history.” Debate now rages about whether Obama reinvented himself into being a new Bill Clinton—whose sympathy for Israel shined through even after many arguable blunders—from being a recycled Jimmy Carter whose dislike for the Jewish state casts a dark shadow despite his accomplishment at the Camp David Summit. I want to focus instead on Obama in relation to the historic African American bond with the Zionist idea and reality. Given the decades-long deterioration in African American relations with Jews, it is not surprising that, in the twentieth-first century, a certain cynicism has begun to color interpretations of even the historical affirmation of Israel by the Reverend Martin King, Jr. (more…)
David Hirsh David Hirsh, the English sociologist, has just circulated a “preliminary response” to the UK Employment Tribunal’s controversial decision in the academic anti-Semitism case, Fraser vs. UCU. Hirsh’s piece was initially posted to the Engage website, an important English online journal which opposes the BDS movement. Hirsh, who occupies a politically interesting position as both a left-wing critic of Israeli policy and also as a defender of Israel against anti-Semitic boycott efforts, thought that our readers might also be interested in his latest thoughts. We agree, and we are x-posting his blog here. We have also recently run excellent essays on the same case by Lesley Klaff (“Employment Tribunal Sanctions Antisemitism”) and Harold Brackman (“Which is the Englishman Here, and Which the Jew? Or Is It the Zionist?”) Hirsh’s response follows right after the jump. (more…)