Tag: Columbia

Columbia’s Israelis

On By Martin Kramer

On Friday, Amnon Rubinstein, the distinguished Israeli jurist and professor, published a column in the Israeli daily Maariv (in Hebrew), summarizing his stint as a visiting professor at Columbia University. A grim story it is: Ahmadinejad’s visit to campus stirred all the muck back up again.

Rubinstein discovered that the only truly active friends of Israel on campus were orthodox Jewish students. For him, a self-avowed secular humanist, it came as crushing disappointment that like-minded Israelis weren’t standing up. At the demonstration against Ahmadinejad, he could “count the Israelis on a hand that’s missing fingers.” At the faculty level, it was worse. He tells of being present in a meeting attended by two Israeli professors. One proposed the screening of the film Jenin, Jenin, a cinematic slander of Israel, and the other proposed inviting Israel-demonizing Norman Finkelstein to campus. Rubinstein doesn’t name the two, but the sad thing about Columbia is that their identities aren’t obvious. More than two Israeli professors there could have made these sorts of proposals.

That aside, it reminded me of some unfinished Columbia business. Avid readers of this blog will recall that Columbia president Lee Bollinger, back in 2005, tried to calm the raging waters by announcing the establishment of a chair of Israel studies. Four trustees quickly anted up $3 million. The university then appointed a search committee that included Palestinian agitprofs Rashid Khalidi and Lila Abu-Lughod. At the time, I wrote this:

The inclusion of Khalidi and Abu-Lughod on the search committee is perverse. Edward Said used to complain that the Palestinians needed “permission to narrate” their story. At Columbia, the situation is reversed: Israel can’t be narrated without the permission of the great Palestinian mandarins. They must be appeased, satisfied, propitiated.

So were they? The chair has been filled by Yinon Cohen, a former Tel Aviv University sociologist who works mostly on labor markets and migration. Cohen isn’t a hard-left post-Zionist, but he’s far enough left to have signed a May 2002 open letter by some Israeli faculty. At the time, Israel was wrapping up Operation Defensive Shield, its response to the wave of suicide bombings inside Israel that had killed Israelis in the hundreds. The letter’s signatories announced their “wish to express our appreciation and support for those of our students and lecturers who refuse to serve as soldiers in the occupied territories… [T]he present war is not being fought for our home but for the settlements beyond the green line and for the continued oppression of another people.”

I don’t think Khalidi and Abu-Lughod have much to worry about.

Update, February 28: The New York Sun has followed up this post, and collected some responses at Columbia. And Amnon Rubinstein has published an English version of his Maariv article, which discretely omits the most interesting bits about Columbia’s Israeli faculty. (He simply says they “added more fuel to the fire of hatred against Israel.”)

Update, February 29: Here is another letter (in Spanish) by Israeli academics and signed by Yinon Cohen, directed toward Palestinian students. There’s no indication of the date, but all the surrounding items are from late 2001. It begins thus: “We, faculty and students of Israeli universities, extend our arms in solidarity with your just cause, against repression of the popular uprising by the Israeli military forces…. Academic faculty in the occupied territories! We wish to cooperate with you in opposing the brutal policy of siege, closure and curfew of the IDF.”

And it’s Yinon Cohen who earlier this month brought fellow petition-signer Neve Gordon to Columbia. (Alan Dershowitz has called Gordon “one of the world’s most extreme anti-Israel academics.”) Gordon’s subject: “From Colonization to Separation: Exploring the Structure of Israel’s Occupation.” The lecture was co-sponsored by Khalidi’s Middle East Institute, and constituted a class in Cohen’s course on “Special Topics in Israeli Society.”

Searching for Israel in all the wrong places

On By Martin Kramer

Last month, Columbia University announced with much fanfare that it would establish a chair of Israel studies. Four generous trustees threw in $3 million to make it happen—and to help extricate the university from its crisis. Michael Stanislawski, a professor of Jewish history, will conduct the search. The New York Sun reported today that the search committee has been formed. When the reporter read me the names, I burst out laughing.

The committee includes Ira Katznelson, chair of the ad hoc (a.k.a. “whitewash”) committee that investigated student grievances; Dan Miron, a long-suffering Hebrew lit professor in the Middle East department; and Karen Barkey, an authority on the Ottoman empire. So far, reasonable. But then add this to the mix: Rashid Khalidi, the ubiquitous Edward Said Professor; and lesser-known Lila Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian American anthropologist and signer and supporter of Columbia’s divestment petition. Abu-Lughod, who’s writing a book on the Palestinian experience in 1948, has just published a longing letter to the departed Professor Said. “I sit here on the earthen terrace with the sunset warming the pharaonic temple across the field, wondering how to carry on your work. The first step, I know, is to keep talking about Palestine.”

The inclusion of Khalidi and Abu-Lughod on the search committee is perverse. Edward Said used to complain that the Palestinians needed “permission to narrate” their story. At Columbia, the situation is reversed: Israel can’t be narrated without the permission of the great Palestinian mandarins. They must be appeased, satisfied, propitiated.

And we know what price they will exact. The incumbent of the new chair must be someone who freely acknowledges Israel’s sins, perhaps even its original sin. It must be someone at home in the self-excoriating world of post-Zionism. It must be someone willing to consider, in all seriousness, whether the “one-state solution” is the only one left—what is called in the code “Israel/Palestine.” (Perhaps that should be the designation of the chair: Israel/Palestine studies.)

There will be plenty of willing and able candidates. Israeli universities are teeming with academics who fit the bill, and who’ve taken their oaths to Saint Edward. The search hasn’t formally begun, but some hopefuls have already floated their names to friends at Columbia. Did you really believe that the great mafia on Morningside Heights would cede any of its home turf without a fight? These people are militants, and they fight for every inch as though the world depended on it. I’m not going to guess how the battle for the Israel chair will end, but it will leave bloodstains on the upholstery, and it will perpetuate Columbia’s crisis right through the next academic year.

The affair also raises the larger question of whether Israel studies are the answer to the problems at Columbia or anywhere. Last month, the Forward did a piece on the drive for Israel studies on campuses, quoting its various boosters. I was the sole dissenter. “The answer to flawed Middle Eastern studies,” I was quoted as saying, “isn’t Israel studies, it’s better Middle Eastern studies.”

Without broader change, the malaise of Middle Eastern studies is bound to infect Israel studies. Last year I showed how Berkeley’s Said-set took funds given by pro-Israel donors for visiting Israeli professors, and hijacked them to serve post-Zionist purposes. They did it by rigging the selection committee. (“Anyone with experience in academic administration,” I wrote back then, “will tell you that most battles are won or lost by the selection of committee members.” Memorize that sentence.) Here and there, it may be possible to protect an Israel studies position, by burying it deep in an isolated Jewish studies program. But who wants to go down there? That really is “fortress Israel,” and it doesn’t do anything to improve the lot of students with broader interests, who are left with holy rollers like Joseph Massad and Hamid Dabashi.

So I don’t rejoice every time some heavily padded chair in Israel studies gets planted in the sand. I will rejoice when the entire public begins to understand that America (and not just Israel) deserves better. Low Library isn’t home to the kind of courage it takes to change the big context. The U.S. Capitol just might be.

Back at Columbia, I do look forward to the adventures of Professor Stanislawski, skipper of the search committee, as he tries to steer his boat while members of the crew row furiously in different directions. Of course, he’s busy giving assurances that only “academic qualities” will determine the outcome of the search. (He’s a precedent-setter.) Speaking to the Columbia Spectator on who might fit the chair, he promised an international search, and added: “It could be an American, Israeli, Australian, Austrian, Swede, a Palestinian.” I think he should be taken literally.

Then there are Bollinger’s trustees, whose money pads the chair. Let’s name them: David Stern, Mark Kingdon, Richard Witten, and Philip Milstein. However this ends up, the composition of the committee leaves them looking like cuckolds for the next year—and, possibly, forever. It’s an open question whether their current plight is tragic or comic. But whenever guys in master-tailored suits get taken for a ride by the tweed jacket gang, you’ve gotta chuckle. I do. It’s best to end where I ended my exposé of Berkeley last year: In academe, as in real estate, buyer beware.

• 2008 update: The chair has been filled. And guess what?

Who threatens Columbia?

On By Martin Kramer

In Professor Joseph Massad’s mid-March statement to the ad hoc committee investigating faculty intimidation of students at Columbia, he listed the support he’d received from various quarters, including petitions and letters. He then added this:

The Middle East Studies Association’s Academic Freedom Committee also issued a letter defending my academic freedom, as did the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

I’d seen all of these missives, with a major exception: the letter from the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP has much more weight than any of the other outfits: it’s the union of professors, and the prime defender of their academic freedom and tenure rights. It can and does censure universities for infringements. I’d assumed that the AAUP hadn’t entered the Columbia fray, so Massad’s reference to an AAUP letter surprised me. I asked the AAUP.

The AAUP confirmed to me that it wrote not once but twice to the Columbia administration the first time, prior to Massad’s appearance before the ad hoc committee, and the second time, after the committee issued its report on March 31. When I asked the AAUP whether it had plans to release the texts of these letters, it answered in the negative. So I asked a journalist to follow up, and he confirmed that neither the AAUP nor Columbia is prepared to release the letters.

Why? Let me propose a hypothesis: the AAUP laid down the law to Columbia. Do this, and we’ll stay silent. Do that, and we’ll go against you. It’s all hush-hush, of course, but it’s massive secret pressure. For all we know, the first letter may have framed the ad hoc committee report, which has been so widely criticized as a whitewash. The second letter may well set the parameters of Columbia’s future treatment of Massad and the Middle East department.

Isn’t it ironic? The ad hoc committee and the Columbia profs have denounced the outside pressure of the tiny David Project, Campus Watch, etc. Well, at least they applied their pressure in a public way, fully above the board. It now turns out that the AAUP, a national advocacy organization with 45,000 members and 500 campus chapters, has been sending missives straight to Low Library missives that Columbia and the AAUP are resolved to keep secret.

When the ad hoc committee issued its report, it said the following: “Although we originally anticipated producing two documents (a confidential report to the Vice President and a public summary), in the interests of transparency we have prepared a single document.” If the interests of transparency are so paramount in this case, let Columbia release the AAUP letters. Let’s determine whether they contain explicit or implicit threats. Let’s find out whether the members of the committee knew the contents of the first letter as they deliberated. (After all, Massad told them it existed.)

Until we see the secret letters, they’ll hang like a black cloud over the ad hoc committee report and over whatever the university might do to resolve the faculty crisis in future.

Update: Guess who’s the featured speaker at the AAUP’s annual convention in Washington in June? It’s Lisa Anderson, dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. She was Massad’s thesis adviser, she later defended him in a letter to Columbia’s president and she still somehow wound up as a member of the ad hoc committee. (A New York Times editorial said the university had “botched this job” by appointing her.) I imagine she knew precisely what the AAUP expected of the committee. How about letting the rest of us in on the secret?