Yale and the study of Antisemitism

“There 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 elites groupthink on thought, and…the failure of the university to engage a wider 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, deligitimate, and demonize the Jewish people. As the fact of antisemitism grows, including on some North American campuses, one large, serious academic effort to study anitsemistism has been shut down.”

First, credit must be given to Yale for its original decision to house Charles Small, YIISA’s Director, and the Institute. Ben Cohen a prolific writer on today’s brand of antisemitism does just that: “The silly distortion of antisemitism’s meaning is precisely why Yale’s 2006 decision to house YIISA, ….was such a welcome milestone.  One of the world’s finest universities was effectively saying that antisemitism, the hallmark of the two great totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, cannot be reduced to a matter of personal opinion.”

But for that great good, the decision to shut YIISA down says the opposite and represents something very bad. Alan Dershowitz: “The precipitous decision to close YIISA, made without even a semblance of due process and transparency, could not have come at a worse time.  Nor could it have sent a worse message.”

Observers critical of this action generally agree that a catalyst for ending YIISA was a conference of great note last year that pinpointed Islamist antisemitism as a raging fever in Muslim precincts that was spilling into the rest of the world. The Washington representative of the PLO, Maen Areikat, complained in a letter to Yale’s President Richard Levin and called for YIISA’s disassociation with Yale. How Yale reacted to the conflict between Muslim censorship versus Western norms was signaled when the university interceded in the printing of a book at Yale Press which was to include illustrations deemed to be critical of Islam by Islamist activists. Notwithstanding that these representations were an important part of the content of the book, Yale was pressured under the threat of possible violence to remove them and it did.  As they were to do in the matter of YIISA, Yale genuflected to the gods of political correctness. {The noted scholar Martin Kramer viewed the book incident as one choreographed to mollify potential sources of funds from the Arab world.}

Academic maneuvering for Arab endowments may or may not be in play here, but the lack of transparency and the high-handed manner in which the removal of YIISA was executed, will prove to be a source of continued speculation until there is more information about this decision to terminate what many felt was a productive and academically sound venture. As Dershowitz said, there was no due process.

Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League also commented that rather than repair the shortcomings they perceived in YIISA, the administration was trashing it.

One thing we can note is that YIISA’s institutional successor will be headed by an able scholar of French and Jewish themes who focuses on the 19th century.  Professor Maurice Samuels, the new faculty head of the YPSA effort, gave two classes recently which were “Jewish Identity and French Culture” and “Representing the Holocaust” – hardly themes that grapple with the contemporary problems of antisemitism in our world today. The study of modern day Jew hatred that permeates increasing parts of the world and emanates from Islam, will find it hard to find traction in this new milieu.

Yale is a private University. We continue to hold them in a privileged place in our society.  But actions like this, though they might bring them into harmony with academia throughout the rest of the world, are at odds with American culture. In the meantime, the Ledger expresses its admiration and gratitude to Charles Small for creating and growing his Institute and we hope that he and YIISA have even greater success as he moves forward.

–nrg