Institutional Racism? norm is giving some straightforward examples
June 16, 2011 — David HirshMore letters in the South African Jewish Report responding to Ran Greenstein
June 16, 2011 — David Hirsh
The to and fro in the South African Jewish Report is helpfully summed up on the JFJFP website here.
And a couple of responses this week:
DAVID HIRSH asked Ran Greenstein why the University of Johannesburg singles out an Israeli university for boycott. Greenstein’s reply is that the British government has imposed sanctions against a whole lot of other countries. I don’t understand what the record of the British government has got to do with UJ’s decision to single out Israel, and only Israel, for boycott.
Richard Gold, Manchester, UK
People will have heard about the poisonous atmosphere on campus in which debates concerning Israel and Palestine take place, but last week they had the opportunity to sample it for themselves on the pages of the SA Jewish Report. Prof Ran Greenstein, a fellow sociologist, says that for me neither words nor reality matter; he says I’m afraid of equality and democracy. He characterises my academic work on anti-Semitism as a campaign to manufacture hysteria and distortions. In other words, I don’t just get it wrong, I’m getting it wrong on purpose. Ran referred, on a public website, to one of the Jewish Report’s journalists as “some stupid hag in a rag”. Why do we see such a departure from the norms of rational debate which usually insist that a person is treated with respect when the truth or falsity of what they say is addressed?
It seems to me that it is no accident that this departure accompanies a campaign to single out Israeli academia for exclusion from the global academic community. Israeli universities are to be boycotted, not because of anything they do, or say, but because they are Israeli. The boycott campaign, which exists to silence the voices of Israeli academia, prefers angry denunciation to answering the arguments of its critics.
David Hirsh, London
Deborah Lipstadt on the YIISA Closure
June 16, 2011 — David Hirsh
This piece, by Deborah Lipstadt, is from The Jewish Daily Forward.
When the news of Yale University’s decision to close its Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism was first made public in early June, the sector of the blogosphere that addresses Jewish issues began to buzz. Discussion, charges and accusations flew. Yale’s critics praised YIISA as a beacon of academic scholarship that had made a significant contribution to this field of study. They charged Yale with caving in to pressure from Arabs and Muslims, both on and off campus, who could not abide the way in which YIISA boldly shone a spotlight on Muslim anti-Semitism. To these people, it appeared as if anti-Semitism itself had brought down an educational institution devoted to the study of this terrible malaise. I registered my initial response on Twitter, describing the shutting down of YIISA as a strange, if not weird, decision and wondering what had happened.
Yale’s response to the wave of criticism constituted a classic reminder that even a place populated by exceptionally smart people can shoot itself in the foot with deadly accuracy. The university defended itself against charges of having succumbed to Muslim pressure by listing the Jewish studies courses taught at the school and stressing its extensive library holdings in the field. (Yale, admittedly, does have an excellent Jewish studies program, and its libraries have one of the best collections in Jewish studies worldwide.) Yale’s clumsy response constituted, as one blogger put it, the academic equivalent of, “Some of our best friends are Jews.”
There is, however, another side to this story. Apparently, there were people on the Yale campus who were associated with YIISA and who were eager to have it succeed. These friends of YIISA counseled the institute’s leadership that some of its efforts had migrated to the world of advocacy from that of scholarship. They warned YIISA that it was providing fodder to the critics’ claim that it was not a truly academic endeavor.
I have twice participated in YIISA’s activities. I gave a paper at one of its weekly seminar sessions on Holocaust denial and attended its conference last August. While serious scholars who work in this field gave the vast majority of the papers — and not dilettantes who dabble in it — there were a few presentations that gave me pause. They were passionate and well argued. But they were not scholarly in nature.
According to sources at Yale, the university’s leadership unsuccessfully worked with YIISA in an attempt to rectify some of these issues. Part of Yale’s discomfort might have come from the fact that a Yale-based scholarly entity was administered by an individual who, while a successful institution builder, was not a Yale faculty member and who had no official position at the university. Yale has indicated that it is intent on axing YIISA and replacing it with an initiative that will address both anti-Semitism and its scholarly concerns. It is crucial that it do so particularly at a time when anti-Semitism worldwide is experiencing a growth spurt.
Two lessons can be drawn from this imbroglio. First, there is a real need for serious academic institutions to facilitate and encourage the highest-level research on anti-Semitism. (Currently, the only one that exists is at Indiana University, under the leadership of Alvin Rosenfeld.) These institutions could explore why hatred persists even after the Holocaust starkly demonstrated what it could “accomplish.” What about anti-Semitism makes it so malleable that it is able to re-create itself in such a wide array of settings, cultures and ages? They might also ask why the world’s oldest hatred has recently been so little studied and analyzed. Exploring that conundrum is something a first-rate academic institution is uniquely qualified to do. Moreover, this research must focus not just on Christian anti-Semitism, but on Muslim anti-Semitism, as well. Today there are few universities where a young scholar who worked in this field would be granted a position or tenure irrespective of how bright and talented she is. This, too, is something well worth exploring.
After cutting-edge academics have shed light on this issue, communal organizations, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee among them, that are so adept at creating strategies to address the problem will have the diagnosis they need in order to help them move ahead with their work.
Second, this struggle also demonstrates the necessity of differentiating between those who do advocacy and those who do scholarship. Both are critical — but entirely different — endeavors. Let us not forget how rightfully disturbed the Jewish community has been in recent years about the way in which advocacy and polemics have permeated so many university courses on the Middle East. Too many students who take these classes find that they have entered a zone in which advocacy masquerades as scholarship. This is unacceptable, irrespective of the source from which it emanates.
Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, is the author of The Eichmann Trial (Nextbook/Schocken).You can follow her on Twitter @deborahlipstadt
This piece, by Deborah Lipstadt, is from The Jewish Daily Forward.
Yale project is the victim of a menacing zeitgeist – David Hirsh
June 16, 2011 — Mira VogelAt the Jewish Chronicle, David Hirsh writes:
Neither the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) nor the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s (EUMC) working definition of antisemitism are perfect but they are vilified more for what they get right than what they get wrong.
Both are being dumped, one by Yale University, the other by the University and College Union. Anti-zionists who fear critical examination of the relationship between hostility to Israel and antisemitism are now happy. They say there is a conspiracy to smear critics of Israel as antisemites and they think that YIISA and the EUMC are parts of the “Israel lobby”. The fact that this mode of thinking appears plausible at the moment is a measure of the seriousness of our current situation.
The truth is more interesting, complex and surprising than the antisemitic fantasy. Until the 1960s, Yale was a white, waspish institution with a Jewish quota. But recently, YIISA has been a global centre for the scholarly discussion of contemporary antisemitism. It has hosted everybody, in an eclectic maelstrom of political and intellectual energy; academics, activists, journalists, lawyers and politicians. [This following passage was cut by the JC - DH] Robert Fine, Moishe Postone, Brian Cheyette, Lars Rensmann, David Seymour, Annette Seidel-Arpaci, Michael Waltzer, Catherine Chatterley, David Feldman and Martha Nussbaum all went to YIISA, radical antiracist scholars, who understand that critical theory was forged in the crucible of the struggle against antisemitism. Dovid Katz, expert in the antisemitism which is portraying Holocaust perpetrators as anticommunist partisans; Deborah Lipstadt and Anthony Julius, scholars first, and heroes of the struggle against Holocaust denial; Jeffrey Herf, Esther Webman and Matthias Kuntzel who unearthed the evidence connecting Nazism to Islamism; Nora Gold and Phyllis Chesler who experienced and analyzed the back-stab of antisemitism in the feminist movement; the heavyweights of German anti-antisemitism; experts in Muslim, Islamist and Iranian antisemitism; veterans of Durban; the chroniclers of today’s British antisemitism, Shalom Lappin, Paul Iganski, David Cesarani, Michael Keith, Barry Kosmin and Mike Whine.
There were things wrong with YIISA but they should have been put right rather than mobilised as reasons to close it down. An interest in contemporary antisemitism is increasingly regarded as an indicator of vulgarity, dishonesty and selfish Jewish nationalism. Yale should have resisted this menacing anti-intellectual zeitgeist, not lent its own reputation to it.
Sometimes Americans have thought of the “new antisemitism” as an overseas phenomenon of degenerate Europe. Some American Jews, who had felt safe from antisemitism, will now be hurting.
Message from the Freeman Family Foundation Holocaust Education Centre
June 15, 2011 — David Hirsh
We are proud to announce that the Freeman Family Foundation Holocaust Education Centre has recently launched a brand new website at www.ffhec.org and invite you to take a look! For a long time now, we have hoped to spread our message to a much wider audience regarding our museum, our programming and upcoming events. At the same time, as the world has moved into the electronic age, we can be greener while saving our limited funds, by posting our Symposium Guide online. Not only will this site make our guide available to the educators who register for our symposium in a user-friendly format, it will now be available to everyone who consults our site.
In addition to the guide, the website provides a history of the museum and some accompanying photos of the artefacts presently on display. Presentations can now be booked online, which will be a boon for educators who find it difficult to call during office hours. Next September/October, we will also have have our Symposium registration forms available online as well. Information about our outreach programs is also posted, as well as contact details.
The “Awareness” section at http://www.ffhec.org/awareness.cfm contains articles selected from the electronic media all over the world regarding Holocaust-related issues as well as those pertaining to antisemitism. This section is updated regularly and worth checking frequently.
Links to recaps of our recent events – our Survivors and Heroes evening and our very successful Holocaust Symposium, which attracted over 2100 students, can be found at http://www.ffhec.org/events.cfm, including press coverage, photos and a selection of speeches.
Open antisemitism doesn’t harm your reputation
June 14, 2011 — David HirshPetronella Wyatt writes in the Daily Mail (11 June 2011) [via cst and hp]:
“…It is, chillingly, not such a different sentiment than the one expressed to me not long ago by a life peer.”
“As we basked in the sunshine on the House of Lords’ terrace, he said: ‘The Jews have been asking for it, and because of the atrocious way Israel behaves, we can finally say what we think.’”
“This remark is not one I ever expected to hear in this country.”
Remember what Eve Garrard heard from an academic at a formal academic dinner (13 June 2010)?
‘Bloody Jews,’ he said. ‘Bloody Jews, bugger the Jews, I’ve no sympathy for them.’
I gazed at him, aghast. Where had this suddenly come from?
The encounter I’m here describing took place very recently, in the course of a large academic dinner at a University in another city, not my own one. It was a pleasant occasion, and the people at my table were innocuously and comfortably talking about sociological issues connected with the economic crisis, all completely harmless and (relatively) uncontentious. And then I heard the academic on my right hand side say to the person opposite him, ‘Bloody Jews.’
When he saw my appalled stare, he said impatiently, ‘Oh well, I’m sorry, but really…!’
‘I’m glad you’re sorry,’ I replied politely, collecting myself together for a fight. But then he asked, ‘Are you Jewish?’ When I nodded, this academic – whom I’d met for the first time that day – put his arm around me and said, ‘I’m sorry, but really Israel is terrible, the massacres, Plan Dalet, the ethnic cleansing, they’re like the Nazis, they’re the same as the Nazis…’
Remember Rowan Laxton, UK diplomat (9 Feb 2009)?
Rowan Laxton, 47, an expert on the Middle East, allegedly shouted “fucking Israelis” “fucking Jews” while watching television reports of the Israeli attack on Gaza in the gym.
He is also alleged to have said Israeli soldiers should be “wiped off the face of the earth” during the rant, which was overheard by staff and gym members.
Martin Linton MP (March 2010):
“There are long tentacles of Israel in this country who are funding election campaigns and putting money into the British political system for their own ends. … You must consider over the next few weeks, when you make decisions about how you vote and how you advise constituents to vote, you must make them aware of the attempt by Israelis and by pro-Israelis to influence the election.”
Sir Gerald Kaufman MP (March 2010):
“Just as Lord Ashcroft owns most of the Conservative Party, right-wing Jewish millionaires own the rest,” he said.
Karel De Gucht, the European commissioner for trade (3 Sep 2010):
“Don’t underestimate the opinion … of the average Jew outside Israel…. There is indeed a belief – it’s difficult to describe it otherwise – among most Jews that they are right. And a belief is something that’s difficult to counter with rational arguments. And it’s not so much whether these are religious Jews or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East.”
Frank Johansson, the Chair of Amnesty International in Finland, (August 2010):
“On the basis of my own visit, which occurred during the 1970s and 1990s for the final time, I agree [that “Israel is a scum state”].
Baroness Jenny Tonge, (19 Sep 2006):
“The pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the western world, its financial grips. I think they’ve probably got a grip on our party.”
Daniel Bernard, French Ambassador to Britain, (20 Dec 2001):
” … that shitty little country Israel…”
Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, 2006):
Finegold: How did tonight go?
Livingstone: Have you thought of having treatment?
Finegold: Was it a good party? What does it mean for you?
Mr Livingstone: What did you do before? Were you a German war criminal?
Finegold: No, I’m Jewish, I wasn’t a German war criminal and I’m actually quite offended by that. So, how did tonight go?
Mr Livingstone: Arr right, well you might be [Jewish], but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard, you are just doing it because you are paid to, aren’t you?
Finegold: Great, I have you on record for that. So, how was tonight?
Mr Livingstone: It’s nothing to do with you because your paper is a load of scumbags and reactionary bigots.
Finegold: I’m a journalist and I’m doing my job. I’m only asking for a comment.
Mr Livingstone: Well, work for a paper that doesn’t have a record of supporting fascism. [Ironic for a man who was once an editor of Labour Herald]
Is antisemitism an elite phenomenon?
More on the closure of YIISA – Alex Joffe
June 13, 2011 — David HirshThere is no need to impute a conspiracy here; it suffices to recognize a confluence of factors—and a mindset. Exactly 60 years ago, the young William F. Buckley, Jr., in God and Man at Yale, published a withering critique of, in the words of a recent appraisal, “the intolerance of the academy toward unfashionable concepts, . . . the stultifying effects of elitist groupthink on thought, and . . . the failure of the university to engage a wide range of ideas fairly and in simple good faith.” At the time, the particular issue salient in Buckley’s mind was the academy’s refusal to engage the subject of God and man. Today, it is the refusal to engage the global campaign to defame, de-legitimate, and demonize the Jewish people. As the fact of anti-Semitism grows, including on some North American campuses, one large, serious academic effort to study anti-Semitism has been shut down.
Scottish socialist contextualizes the beheading of a 3 month old baby
June 13, 2011 — David HirshUdi and Ruth Fogel and three of their children were murdered in a West Bank settlement in March. The youngest victim, three month old Hadas, was decapitated. Jim Bollan the councillor behind West Dunbartonshire Council’s boycott of Israel said:
“Violence breeds violence. Have you any idea what may have motivated this man [Awad] to commit this crime? Could it have been because he may have seen Palestinian children slaughtered by the IDF?”
We need a union campaign against antisemitism
June 10, 2011 — David Hirsh“…when you start talking about Jewish ritual murders of Christian priests, or organ-harvesting by the Israeli army, or deny the very existence of anti-semitism — you’ve crossed a red line. Trade unions in Europe, including in the UK, are increasingly crossing that line.”
“It’s not enough that the Jewish community has spoken out on this. Trade unionists must speak out and say that enough is enough — that anti-semitism has no place in our movement and should be outcast.”
“It’s time for a trade union campaign against anti-semitism in the UK and Ireland.”
Sally Hunt pretends not to understand the term “institutional racism”
June 10, 2011 — David HirshBefore UCU Congress the Jewish Leadership Council wrote this letter to Sally Hunt, arguing that its repudiation of the EUMC Working Definition of antisemitism would constitute yet another manifestation of the institutional racism which is present within the union in relation to Jews.
Sally Hunt replied, as did Trevor Philips, the Chair of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, who had been copied in.
UCU Congress, with the support of the National Executive Committee of UCU voted overwhelmingly to repudiate the EUMC Working Definition. The reason that the definition was repudiated was that the union wanted to carry on doing things which the definition warned ‘could be’ antisemitic in certain contexts.
Jeremy Newmark, chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, said, following Congress: ‘After this weekend’s events, I believe the UCU is institutionally racist.’
The Board of Deputies of British Jews president, Vivian Wineman, also wrote to university vice chancellors asking them to consider whether maintaining a normal relationship with UCU could still be compatible with their requirement to ‘eliminate discrimination and foster good relations’ with minorities.
Engage is a pro-union network and so is highly criticial of this move to help University managements to de-legitimize the union. Of course we are highly critical too, of our unoin, which has a serious and unacknowledged problem of institutional antisemitism.
Sally Hunt has now sent out a letter to all UCU branches. It is an astonishing letter. She says that the union is “implacably opposed” to antisemitism and that it has expressed its “abhorrence” of antisemitism. The letter also says that the union supports the Macpherson principle which says that a person who experiences an incident as a racist incident should, at first anyway, be presumed to be right by an institution which is responsible for investigating. The principle was established in the Macpherson report, which found that the Metropolitan Police in the 1990s had a problem with institutional racism. At that time, everybody understood that the term ‘institutional racism’ did not mean that individual police officers were racist and it didn’t mean that the police failed to ‘abhor’ or to ‘oppose’ racism. What it meant was that there were racist assumptions, practices and norms within the institution which had led to Stephen Lawrence’s murder inquiry being screwed up and to his friend and family being treated apallingly.
In her new letter, Sally Hunt pretends that she doesn’t understand what institutional racism is. She responds to a charge, instead, that the union hates Jews. In this way, she refuses to take the charge of institutional racism seriously.
Sally Hunt’s new letter is here (pdf)
One way of undertanding the charge of institutional antisemitism is by looking at the letters of resignation and other things which have been written by UCU members over the last few years.
In 2009 UCU Congress was asked to mandate the union to investigate these resignations. But Congress said no, it didn’t want an investigation into why people were resigning from the union citing antisemitism as a reason.
Jon Pike, Open University, Resignation from NEC
Michael Yudkin, David Smith and Dennis Noble, Oxford
Shalom Lappin, King’s College, London
Raphaël Lévy, Liverpool University
Jonathan G. Campbell, Bristol University
Colin Meade, London Metropolitan University
Tim Crane, Univesity College London
Dov Stekel, University of Birmingham
Raphaël Lévy, University of Liverpool
Sarah Brown, Anglia Ruskin University
Robert Fine’s account of Congress, Warwick U
Norman Geras, Manchester University
Eva Fromjovic, Leeds University
Lesley Klaff, Sheffield Hallam
Stephen Soskin, Buckinghamshire New University
After looking at this material, is Sally Hunt still going to pretend that she can’t tell the difference between taking ‘institutional antisemitism’ seriously and mouthing pious words about ‘abhorrence of antisemitism’?
