https://www.jpost.com/opinion/there-is-a-new-way-to-smear-zionism-opinion-667601
Jewish academic critics of Israel have come up with a new smear tactic: falsely portraying Jewish nationalism as being intimately tied to the evils of 19th-century “white-settler colonialism.”
That was the theme of a May 4 online program called “Baja California Dreaming: How US Settler Colonialism Shapes Jewish Nationalism,” hosted by the University of California at Davis. The featured speaker was Maxwell Greenberg, a doctoral candidate at UCLA, and the “respondent” was Sarah Imhoff, a professor at UC-Davis.
Greenberg’s remarks focused on a handful of American Jewish philanthropists in San Francisco who in the 1890s were looking for a way to save Russia’s Jews from the pogroms: the systemic, violent anti-Jewish riots of the time. These US Jews came up with the idea of purchasing some land in the Baja section of Mexico where Russian Jewish refugees could live and work.
But the plan never advanced past the point of a few discussions and a pamphlet or two. They didn’t purchase any land and they didn’t bring in any refugees. So why should anybody care about it today? Why did UC-Davis choose to feature the topic in its prestigious “New Directions in Jewish Studies” series, choosing Greenberg’s proposal from among 70 scholarly submissions?
Apparently because bashing nationalism is very desirable in academic circles these days, and bashing Jewish nationalism and the Zionist movement is especially popular.
