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December 18, 2014 UC’s Moment of Truth

The University of California—once home of the legendary Free Speech Movement—has an academic freedom problem. Earlier this year, we witnessed Nicholas Dirks, Chancellor of UC-Berkeley, co-opt the anniversary of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement to emphasize the limits that “civility” might, in his view, properly impose on freedom of speech. Now comes a new threat to […]

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December 18, 2014 Human Rights and Inhuman Interrogation Methods

I consider torture—including waterboarding—not only morally but aesthetically revolting. But unlike Jews who miraculously always find their liberal preferences enshrined in biblical and rabbinic precedent, I find nothing in those traditions that directly bears on the question of torture except the Talmudic dictum, “ain adam mesim atsmo,” against self-incrimination. I’ve been more influenced by great […]

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December 14, 2014 For Whom the Bell Tolls

Some sixty years ago, a group of American intellectuals—many of them Jewish academics including Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Richard Hofstadter—authored “The Radical Right,” bringing social science theory to bear on the attempt to understand and counter McCarthyism. Back then, academe—especially Jewish academe—felt threatened by irrational forces, not within the university, but buffeting it […]

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December 3, 2014 Ode to the Anarchists Among Us, Then and Now

In the U.S., “anarchist” was once a dirty word. Following the 1886 Haymarket Bombing in Chicago, in which 11 including seven policemen were killed by anonymous bombers, cartoons appeared nationwide of wild-eyed, suggestively Germanic anarchists blowing America to hell. Historians for a hundred years repeated the conventional wisdom that this was an exercise in pure […]

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December 2, 2014 Terrorism, “Lone Wolves,” and “Virtual Wolf Packs”

Violence to change or impact the existing order may be as old as humankind. In terms of collective violence—let’s use the term “mob” for a phenomenon that may start small but can even morph into a revolution—it has had varied political, economic, and religious-ethnic motives over the course of the last thousand years in western […]

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December 1, 2014 Time for Jewish Harvard Grads to “Turn in Their Privilege”?

Controversy has been raging for some time about whether white Harvard undergrads–including grandchildren of Holocaust survivors– should “turn in their privilege” and, because of historic (and historical) racial injustice in America, agree to accept second place in the admissions pecking order to African Americans. Even if one accepts this argument, it’s hard to see how […]

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November 26, 2014 Time to Divest From Palestinian Terror—Not Israel

Recently, UCLA Students organized to protest the decision by the UC Regents to hike tuition, but mostly ignored an insidious behind-the-scenes spectacle. The UCLA Student government voted 8-2-2 to urge UC to divest from companies accused to doing business in the West Bank. Eerily, the vote occurred vituually at the same time that—half a world […]

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