Recently the president of Columbia University was publicly interrogated for hours by the house committee on education and the workforce about supposedly allowing anti-semitism to run rampant on campus.
Meanwhile, over twenty Jewish faculty members of the university and Barnard College published an article calling out the committee for feigning concern over anti-semitism in order to attack universities and free expression of progressive movements on campus, part of what they call a wave of a "new McCarthyism":
Rather than being concerned with the safety and well-being of Jewish students on campuses, the committee is leveraging antisemitism in a wider effort to caricature and demonize universities as hotbeds of 'woke indoctrination.'
They go on to criticize the framing of expressions of pro-Palestine sentiments as anti-semetic:
To be sure, antisemitism is a grave concern that should be scrutinized alongside racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and all other forms of hate. These hateful ideologies exist everywhere and we would be ignorant to believe that they don’t exist at Columbia. When antisemitism rears its head, it should be swiftly denounced, and its perpetrators held to account. However, it is absurd to claim that antisemitism—“discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews,” according to the Jerusalem Declaration’s definition—is rampant on Columbia’s campus. To argue that taking a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza is antisemitic is to pervert the meaning of the term.
Labeling pro-Palestinian expression as anti-Jewish hate speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with Jewishness, of political ideology with identity. This conflation betrays a woefully inaccurate understanding—and disingenuous misrepresentation—of Jewish history, identity, and politics. It erases more than a century of debates among Jews themselves about the nature of a Jewish homeland in the biblical Land of Israel, including Israel’s status as a Jewish nation-state. It dismisses the experiences of the post-Zionist, non-Zionist, and anti-Zionist Jews who work, study, and live on our campus.
So the authors point out that there are different currents of thought in the American Jewish community concerning Palestine. However, US officials are ignoring the Jewish voices critical of the state of Israel in order to smear people as bigots for questioning why billions of our tax dollars are used for funding atrocities abroad.
I just thought this would be good to share because it's receiving relatively little coverage. Read the whole article here:
