RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/berkeley-safe-space-for-hate

If graduate school has any function, it is as a preserve of a serious clash of ideas. But the UC Berkeley campus is the stage for a confrontation of a different kind. Last month, ahead of a lecture by Ran Bar-Yoshafat, a reserve combat officer in the Israel Defense Forces and a regular on the lecture circuit, Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine promised a reprise of the Hamas pogrom, hanging from the campus’ main entrance a pledge to “Flood Sather Gate”—a reference to “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the code name for Hamas’ rampage in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

On the night of the lecture, the group’s undergraduate fellow travelers, Bears for Palestine, made good on that vow, disrupting a pro-Israel event in a protest and quickly escalating into a riot. The mob smashed windows, shouted antisemitic chants, and sent at least one student to urgent care. The attendees, this author included, had to be evacuated, ironically, via a tunnel. We, the Jewish students, had forfeited our right to security after coming to hear Bar-Yoshafat’s lecture. The university had assured the campus Jewish organizations behind the event that police officers would fend off disruptive protest and uphold our First Amendment rights. The administration did little to protect the safety of the speaker and audience, and even less to protect their free speech rights.

The antisemitic riot capped months of harassment, terror apologia, and occasional outbursts of violence from the campus “Free Palestine” movement. The university’s response has been consistently craven. Meanwhile, some faculty members, such as in the history department, where I am a Ph.D. student, have justified and covered for this behavior. My department has been a microcosm of a larger institutional failure, in which “equity” and “anti-colonialism” act as shields for rank antisemitism.

Leading a coterie of Ph.D. students in the UC Berkeley history department is professor Ussama Makdisi, the chapter president of what Harold Bloom labeled the school of resentment. Makdisi wrote his first books on sectarianism in the late Ottoman Empire, and his latest volume rhapsodizes about a 19th-century convivencia in the Levant that Zionism supposedly ruined. Even before the Hamas pogrom, he told a lecture hall full of students that Jews should have founded their state in postwar Germany. The university press office rewarded him for this in an article in which he was lauded, including by Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and inclusion, for creating a “learning space” that exemplifies “what’s possible when we imagine, create and actualize the conditions that support thriving for every member of our campus community.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/rutgers-university-professors-bash-privileged-jews/

American Jews enjoy and suffer from, respectively, “white privileging and white fragility,” stated Sahar Aziz, director of Rutgers University Center for Security, Race, and Rights (CSRR), during its February 21 webinar. While Jews in America and beyond face a global surge in antisemitism following Hamas’ brutal October 7, 2023, attack upon Israel, CSRR and its factually-challenged director have once again displayed anti-Jewish, jihadist apologetics.

Aziz spoke with her likeminded colleague, Noura Erakat, Rutgers University associate professor of Africana studies, in a webinar titled after her 2019 book, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. She concurred with Aziz, stating that Jews have effectively “become white in the United States,” like groups such as Irish Americans, who have entered mainstream society following past prejudice. American Jews should recognize that they “are privileged vis-à-vis their Muslim, their Palestinian, their Arab counterparts and colleagues,” Aziz said of groups increasingly notable for their hatred of Jews and Israel.

“With privilege comes responsibility and not the abuse of that privilege to oppress other people,” Aziz lectured supposedly powerful, oppressive Jews while Muslims worldwide have celebrated jihadists such as Hamas. She contrasted in America “how easily vilified and dehumanized the Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab communities” are while Jewish “voices are centered, their experiences are centered.” “White fragility is all about feelings of the white privileged group and to hell with the bodily autonomy, the liberty, the life, the dignity, and the physical safety of black bodies,” she said without showing concern for Jewish bodies.

https://www.nysun.com/article/congress-adds-mit-to-its-list-of-targets-in-investigation-into-antisemitism-at-elite-universities?

Et tu, MIT?

A House committee has already subpoenaed Harvard’s top leaders and demanded documentation from Columbia as part of an unprecedented inquiry into antisemitism at elite universities. Now, it’s throwing the spotlight at yet another top school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for its alleged failure to protect its Jewish students.

“We have grave concerns regarding the inadequacy of MIT’s response to antisemitism on campus,” the House Committee on Education and the Workforce said in a letter sent on Friday to MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, and the chairman of the school’s corporation, Mark Gorenberg. Since October 7, the school has been engulfed by anti-Israel and pro-Palestine protests, which have taken up campus buildings, disrupted the educational experience, and targeted Jewish students. 

Ms. Kornbluth was the only one out of the three university presidents to remain in her post after they testified before the Committee in December on the issue of antisemitism. Amid national outcry over what many deemed a damning testimonial performance, Penn’s president, Liz Magill, resigned the next week. Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, lasted another month. 

Yet MIT’s board quickly expressed their “full and unreserved support” for Ms. Kornbluth in a statement endorsing her leadership. That show of support could come crumbling down at the hands of the committee, led by Congresswoman Virginia Foxx.

She told the Sun she has made it her mission to hold elite universities accountable for surging antisemitism which she says is undermining their reputations for academic excellence — even if means suspending federal grant money.

https://www.nysun.com/article/harvard-in-a-dramatic-development-as-antisemitism-engulfs-the-university-asks-bay-state-taxpayers-for-a-bailout?

Should the state of Massachusetts issue up to $2 billion in tax-exempt bonds to help Harvard build a new building for its economics department, renovate dormitories, and modernize the medical school dean’s office?

That is the question the board of the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency will consider in a teleconference scheduled for 1:30 p.m. on March 12, according to a hearing notice issued Monday.

That it’s even under consideration shows the pressure Harvard is under. When the university was in stronger shape, it relied on private donors to fund new buildings, or renovate old ones, voluntarily.

Now, with several large donors reportedly having cut ties to Harvard or “paused” giving because of concerns about Harvard’s maladroit response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack, the university is increasingly turning to the lender of last resort, the government.

The notice makes it sound like Harvard is seeking to borrow money for at least some projects that are already well under way, a reversal of the standard sequence for financing construction. It mentions “renovation of the Adams House undergraduate housing project.” Yet the university announced in September 2023 “the completion of the second phase of Adams House renewal,” declaring that “the third and final phase…is currently underway.”

It also mentions “renovation of Gordon Hall, a Harvard Medical School administration building.” Yet the 2023 medical school dean’s report said, “construction has begun on transforming the Gordon Hall of Medicine, our signature campus building, into a flexible co-working space. This design will create a positive work community for our administrative units.”