Teachers Union of Ireland

Teachers Union of Ireland

The Teachers’ Union of Ireland, which represents Irish secondary and post-secondary school teachers and lecturers, has voted at its annual meeting to boycott all academic collaboration with Israel, as the Jewish Chronicle (U.K.) reports.  The Union’s new resolution steps up its campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against what it calls “the apartheid state of Israel until it lifts its illegal siege of Gaza and its illegal occupation of the West Bank.”  Significantly, the Union’s boycott would exclude Israeli scholars from Ireland, rather than merely blocking cooperation among Irish and Israeli academic institutions in research programs.  Palestinian activists have gleefully characterized the resolution as: “an historic precedent, being the first such motion in Europe to explicitly call for an academic boycott of Israel.”  In fact, the resolution may be important for a very different reason, which the union does not advertise.  As sociologist David Hirsh has pointedly observed, this motion does not even maintain the fiction of being an “institutional boycott.”  On the Engage blog, Hirsh argues that the Irish teachers’ motion “is a boycott of a significant proportion of the world’s Jewish academics and students for reasons which are nothing to do with anything that those academics have said or done.  Nobody but Israelis are to be boycotted.”

Catherine Chatterley

Catherine Chatterley

Historian Catherine Chatterley, a member of the Louis D. Brandeis Center’s Academic Advisory Board, will deliver a lecture on April 11 on “Canada’s Struggle with Holocaust Memorialization:
The War Museum Controversy, Ethnic Identity Politics, &
the Canadian Museum for Human Rights” at the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research in Montreal.  It is sadly true that the preservation of Holocaust memory has become an intensely polarizing political issue in some academic and political circles, not only in the Middle East and Europe but also in North America.  Dr. Chatterley, the Founding Director of the Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitismis an astute social critic as well as an accomplished scholar, so this event promises to be worth attending. (more…)