SPME logo Scholars for Peace in the Middle East SPME is circulating a faculty Petition to Condemn Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Against Israel. The timing is important, as the BDS movement has recently scored a rare string of victories in North America. Student governments have lately passed anti-Israel BDS resolutions at the University of California campuses at San Diego, Irvine and Riverside. Meanwhile, Canada’s largest student government, which is at York University, last week endorsed the anti-Israel boycott. Efforts to counteract the BDS movement have also had some traction, as pro-Israel groups have succeeded in convincing UC Riverside’s student government to reverse itself and revoke its divestment resolution. In this volatile environment, SPME has intervened with an international faculty petition drive that attacks the BDS movement, rather than merely defending Israel against false charges. In its message to “All Faculty” (below), SPME charges that the BDS movement BDS “uses false premises that mischaracterize Israel in order to justify calling for sanctions against it.” Specifically, SPME argues that BDS’ real purpose is to eliminate the State of Israel and undermine Jewish ethnic identity, while its affects are to bolster anti-Semitism and undermine peace: (more…)
Anti-Semitism researchers at Tel Aviv University have announced that anti-Semitic incidents surged by 30 percent last year. Tel Aviv’s Kantor Center, headed by LDB Advisor Dina Porat, issues the authoritative annual report on global anti-Semitism. This year’s report highlights a significant global surge, including last year’s Toulouse school massacre, and expresses concern about anti-Semitism in extreme right-wing political parties in Hungary and Greece.
The Algemeiner Who are the 100 most influential living Jews? Do you have some ideas? Here is your opportunity to share them in an influential forum. The Algemeiner (which is sometimes called the “Jewish Huffington Post“) wants your help compiling its own new list. Until now, the Jewish Daily Forward has been the most widely discussed list-maker in this area, but the Algemeiner apparently now want to compete with the Forward’s well-known Forward 50 list. (Our own LDB President Kenneth L. Marcus is a current member of the Forward 50 list.) Here is how the Algeneiner describes its task: (more…)
Like much else about the 1960s, the mantra that “all politics is personal” was rather naïve compared to earlier, more pointed formulations. According to Harold D. Lasswell, who authored Psychopathology and Politics (1930) during the first wave of Freudian debunking, all politics is the displacement of private motives unto public issues, rationalized in terms of the greater good. Herman Melville—a first-hand student of the rise of “Jacksonian democracy”—put it succinctly in Moby Dick: “all mortal greatness is but disease.” Not surprisingly, it was soon after the making and unmaking of Richard Nixon, that James D. Barber’s The Presidential Character (1977) launched a new wave of psychoanalyzing presidents. The problem with many of these studies is that they may be strong on psychology, but are weak on politics—specifically, the nexus between “presidential character” and public policy decisions. Another problem: historians have proved as prone to projecting their own agendas as politicians. It is true that liberal historians, disillusioned with LBJ, have not been reluctant to dissect his character, and that—given that they really had no other choice—they relatively soon fessed up about JFK’s peccadillos. However, the iconic FDR and—to a lesser degree, Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman—have long received kid gloves treatment. (more…)