Sent: Friday, May 10, 2002 12:22 PM Subject: Anti-Semitism on College Campuses is growing; Shades of Weimar I am forwarding an email from the Jewish Studies program at SFSU. Similar anti-Semitic activities have been occurring at UC Berkeley. LWW "Repsponse of the Director, Jewish Studies Program.eml" From: Jewish Studies Date: Thu, 09 May 2002 13:16:34 -0700 To: jewish@sfsu.edu Subject: Repsponse of the Director, Jewish Studies Program Dear Colleagues, Today, all day, I have been listening to the reactions of students, parents, and community members who were on campus yesterday. I have received email from around the country, and phone calls, worried for both my personal safety on the campus, and for the entire intellectual project of having a Jewish Studies program, and recruiting students to a campus that in the last month has become a venue for hate speech and anti-Semitism. After nearly 7 years as director of Jewish Studies, and after nearly two decades of life here as a student, faculty member and wife of the Hillel rabbi, after years of patient work and difficult civic discourse, I am saddened to see SFSU return to its notoriety as a place that teaches anti-Semitism, hatred for America, and hatred, above all else, for the Jewish State of Israel, a state that I cherish. I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled "canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license," past poster after poster calling out "Zionism=racism, and Jews=Nazis." This is not civic discourse, this is not free speech, and this is the Weimar Republic with brown shirts it cannot control. This is the casual introduction of the medieval blood libel and virulent hatred smeared around our campus in a manner so ordinary that it hardly excites concern-except if you are a Jew, and you understand that hateful words have always led to hateful deeds. Yesterday, the hatred coalesced in a hate mob. Yesterday's Peace In The Middle East Rally was completely organized by the Hillel students, mostly 18 and 19 years old. They spoke about their lives at SFSU and of their support for Israel, and they sang of peace. They wore new Hillel t-shirts that said "peace" in English, Hebrew and Arabic. A Russian immigrant, in his new English, spoke of loving his new country, a haven from anti-Semitism. A sophomore spoke about being here only one year, and about the support and community she found at the Hillel House. Both spoke of how hard it was to live as a Jew on this campus how isolating, how terrifying. A surfer guy, spoke of his love of Jesus, and his support for Israel, and a young freshman earnestly asked for a moment of silence, and all the Jews stood still, listening as the shouted hate of the counter demonstrators filled the air with abuse. As soon as the community supporters left, the 50 students who remained praying in a minyan for the traditional afternoon prayers, or chatting, or cleaning up after the rally, talking -- were surrounded by a large, angry crowd of Palestinians and their supporters. But they were not calling for peace. They screamed at us to "go back to Russia" and they screamed that they would kill us all, and other terrible things. They surrounded the praying students, and the elderly women who are our elder college participants, who survived the Shoah, who helped shape the Bay Area peace movement, only to watch as a threatening crowd shoved the Hillel students against the wall of the plaza. I had invited members of my Orthodox community to join us, members of my Board of Visitors, and we stood there in despair. Let me remind you that in building the SFSU Jewish Studies program, we asked the same people for their support and that our Jewish community, who pay for the program once as taxpayers and again as Jews, generously supports our program. Let me remind you that ours is arguably one of the Jewish Studies programs in the country most devoted to peace, justice and diversity since our inception. As the counter demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews to "Get out or we will kill you" and "Hitler did not finish the job," I turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter demonstrators from the Plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised. The police told me that they had been told not to arrest anyone, and that if they did, "it would start a riot." I told them that it already was a riot. Finally, Fred Astren, the Northern California Hillel Director and I went up directly to speak with Dean Saffold, who was watching from her post a flight above us. She told us she would call in the SF police. But the police could do nothing more than surround the Jewish students and community members who were now trapped in a corner of the plaza, grouped under the flags of Israel, while an angry, out of control mob, literally chanting for our deaths, surrounded us. Dr. Astren and I went to stand with our students. This was neither free speech nor discourse, but raw, physical assault. Was I afraid? No, really more sad that I could not protect my students. Not one administrator came to stand with us. I knew that if a crowd of Palestinian or Black student had been there, surrounded by a crowd of white racists screaming racist threats, shielded by police, the faculty and staff would have no trouble deciding which side to stand on. In fact, the scene recalled for me many moments in the Civil Rights movement, or the United Farm Workers movement, when, as a student, I stood with Black and Latino colleagues, surrounded by hateful mobs. Then, as now, I sang peace songs, and then, as now, the hateful crowd screamed at me, "Go back to Russia, Jew." How ironic that it all took place under the picture of Cesar Chavez, who led the very demonstrations that I took part in as a student. There was no safe way out of the Plaza. We had to be marched back to the Hillel House under armed SF police guard, and we had to have a police guard remain outside Hillel. I was very proud of the students, who did not flinch and who did not, even one time, resort to violence or anger in retaliation. Several community members who were swept up in the situation simply could not believe what they saw. One young student told me, "I have read about anti-Semitism in books, but this is the first time I have seen real anti-Semites, people who just hate me without knowing me, just because I am a Jew." She lives in the dorms. Her mother calls and urges her to transfer to a safer campus. Today is advising day. For me, the question is an open one: what do I advise the Jewish students to do? Laurie Zoloth, Director, Jewish Studies Program R. Chaim Mahgel Administrative Assistant to the Director Jewish Studies Program HUM 416 San Francisco State University 1600 Holloway Avenue San Francisco, CA 94132 415-338-6075 jewish@sfsu.edu www.sfsu.edu/~jewish SIGH, OUR ALMA MATER. MORE WORK TO BE DONE. Our tax dollars at work! The Wall Street Journal on 5/9/02 had an op-ed piece (p.A14) (see below) that discusses a course offered at UC Berkeley called "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance. "This is a poetry class with the mission of romanticizing the Palestinian cause with justification for suicide bombings and other terrorist acts. The course description states that "conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections (classes)". It is a sad statement when there is no invitation for ideological debate in a classroom at a major university which by the way in this case is publicly funded and sponsored. It is also a concern when there is such a clear political agenda guised in an English/humanities course and what appears to be no avenue for debate. Please circulate this around so that people can voice their opinion on this, especially to UC Berkeley. You may want to send your comments to: Robert M. Berdahl, Chancellor Telephone: (510) 642-7464 Ralph Hexter Dean, Arts & Humanities ralph_hexter@LS.Berkeley.EDU The Intifada Curriculum By ROGER KIMBALL Are the regents of the University of California asleep? This past winter, the Daily Californian, a student newspaper at Berkeley, reported on a women's studies course that involved such educational activities as writing papers about sexual fantasies, visiting strip clubs, and watching an instructor have sex. All of which earned students units toward graduation at U.C. Berkeley. After the national press picked up the story, embarrassed university administrators shut down that particular exercise in transgression. Have they learned their lesson? Dream on. Consider this item from the Berkeley English department's fall course catalog. It is for English R1A, "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance," which will earn students four units toward their degree. The description is worth an extensive quote: "The brutal Israeli military occupation of Palestine, [ongoing] since 1948, has systematically displaced, killed, and maimed millions of Palestinian people. And yet, from under the brutal weight of the occupation, Palestinians have produced their own culture and poetry of resistance. This class will examine the history of the [resistance] and the way that it is narrated by Palestinians in order to produce an understanding of the Intifada. . . . This class takes as its starting point the right of Palestinians to fight for their own self-determination. Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." Let's leave aside the gross tendentiousness of this little bijou. Let's leave aside, too, the question of what a class on Mideast politics is doing under the rubric of English. The real question is what such agitprop is doing on the curriculum. "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" is not an academic or scholarly inquiry. It will not attempt to step back and assess the merits of arguments for and against a certain interpretation of historical events. On the contrary, "conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." Diversity? Phooey. Universities used to be dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. It was understood that if they were to be successful, they had to presuppose what Matthew Arnold called the ideal of "disinterestedness." In describing criticism as "disinterested," Arnold did not mean that it speaks without reference to a particular point of view. Rather, he meant a habit of inquiry that refused to lend itself to any "ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas." We might say that Arnold looked to criticism to provide a bulwark against ideology, something that John Searle, a very different sort of Berkeley professor, put with his customary lucidity: "The idea that the curriculum should be converted to any partisan purposes is a perversion of the ideal of the university." Since the 1960s, however, universities have become havens for displaced radicals and the humanities instruments of political agitation. Arnold's vision of the civilizing potential of "the best that has been thought and said" gives way to a smorgasbord of attacks on Western civilization that are a part of the "multicultural" agenda. It may be tempting to dismiss what goes on at Berkeley as nothing more than the twittering of academics -- a group, after all, that is notorious for being out of touch with reality. The problem is that the fate of academic life is not only an academic issue. It is an issue that touches deeply on one of the chief crucibles of the future. When U.C. Berkeley allows classes like "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" to be conducted under its aegis, it betrays a public trust in several ways. For one thing, because Berkeley is widely regarded as a premier educational institution, what it does will be emulated elsewhere. Therefore, condoning courses that are merely fronts for political activism abets the degradation of the humanities. In allowing classes in which conservatives are unwelcome, Berkeley provides further evidence that universities are beholden to leftist ideology. Universities loudly promulgate a rhetoric of diversity, yet practice strict intellectual conformity on all contentious issues. Finally, by allowing such courses, Berkeley further erodes the line that once separated academic life from the hurly-burly world of political affairs. The integrity of that line has earned universities a special status as places apart in our society -- and tax-exempt because their inquiry was not merely partisan. In the late 1800s, the German aphorist G.C. Lichtenberg noted that "Nowadays we everywhere seek to propagate wisdom: who knows whether in a couple of centuries there may not exist universities for restoring the old ignorance?" Now we know. Mr. Kimball is the editor of New Criterion. Updated May 9, 2002 12:06 a.m. EDT