And I don’t mean the “itbach al-Yahud”-chanting crowd.
A friend sent me an article to read which appeared in the October 6th Jerusalem Post. The author, Aaron Magid, is a Masters candidate in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. This brought back some painful memories of my own masters and doctoral studies in this same field decades ago. His essay was titled Feeling Uncomfortable At J Street. Here’s how he opened it…
“Attending the annual J Street Conference for the first time, I wanted to be proven wrong. Supporters of Israel within the Jewish community had ridiculed the newly created lobby group for launching harsh and unfair attacks against Israel. As a supporter of Israel who is also firmly opposed to increased settlement building and in favor of ending the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, I believed J Street would be my perfect home.”
Aaron will likely succeed where I failed. He attended this year’s annual J Street Conference because he sings some of those folks’ same tunes–he’s all for a Judenrein Judea, for example. This goes over nicely with too many running the duplicitous show in the Ivory Tower as well.
I naively expected that the same lenses of academic scrutiny would be applied towards Arabs and others pointing fingers at Jewish nationalism and Israel and paid the price. I was denied a Ph.D. dissertation advisor by the chief honcho, a specialist on Turkey, who, among many other such things, managed to never mention the word “Kurd” once and who liked to speak about “fascist Zionists” and such. I raised the wrong issues and asked the wrong questions.