A few days ago, I happened upon a letter of August 17 in the Chronicle of Higher Education calling upon Professor Judith Butler to step down as president-elect of the Modern Language Association. I was pleased to suppose that at least some professors of literature were expressing shock, outrage, and indignation at the news that a fanatical Israel-hater, Israel-boycotter, Israel-slanderer, and would-be destroyer would soon accede to the presidency of America’s largest professional organization of college teachers of literature and language. I had in fact expected that droves of MLA members, especially Jewish ones, would react by heading for the exits.
(True, MLA has in the past elected some very unfit presidents. In the late sixties Louis Kampf (MIT) was the first to be elected to represent “leftist” professors. He would express, for teachers who never liked literature much in the first place, a rationale for their hostility: literary studies were both a result and an instrument of oppression. In later years, when “Palestine” became the leftists’ “revolution du jour,” Edward Said, a member of the PLO executive committee, was elected president. But Said was virtually a Zionist compared with the Jewish Butler; also, unlike her, he could write English prose. In 1997 Butler, a stupefyingly opaque writer, won the annual Bad Writing Contest conducted by the journal Philosophy and Literature.)
But I was wrong. The Chronicle letter calling for Butler to step down was written by an Illinois associate professor of “Israeli Literature and Culture” named Rachel Harris. Yet it expressed not the slightest concern about how an organization presided over by someone whose febrile imagination depicts Israel as the devil’s own experiment and aligns herself with Hamas might interfere with (or even impede) her own scholarly work and impose an MLA boycott of the country on whose existence Harris’ writing depends.
