antisemitism – Page 39

Where will the money go?

The Canadian government has announced that it will resume funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The government made the announcement last week, allocating $20 million to UNRWA’s budget and an additional $5 million to support the emergency appeal issued by the organization in order to aid Palestinian refugees affected by the catastrophic war in Syria.

In a statement, the government said, “with this funding, Canada joins all other G7 countries in supporting UNRWA’s efforts to meet the ever-increasing needs of Palestinian refugees, assists in providing basic services for vulnerable people, and contributes to some stability in the region.”

Canada’s previous Conservative government backed away from supporting UNRWA, reducing funding from $32 million in 2007 to $19 million in 2009 and, in 2010, cutting funding entirely. The justification at that time was that UNRWA has ties to the terrorist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.

The $20 million just announced is expected to support health, social services and education “for millions of vulnerable Palestinian refugees,” according to Ottawa. But the announcement comes just days after renewed reports that raise concerns about the more than 200 Palestinian schools sponsored by UNRWA, which teach students between first and ninth grade.

One expert on the subject told a conference organized by the Centre for Near East Policy Research (CNEPR) this month that the textbooks reflect the educational principles introduced by Yasser Arafat when the Palestinian authority gained control over the education system in the West Bank and Gaza, and have not been cleansed of hate, antisemitism and incitement. Participants in the conference obtained textbooks from the warehouse that supplies Palestinian schools and they claim the books still encourage a violent struggle for the liberation of “Palestine,” which is defined to include all of present-day Israel, the rejection of historical facts about Jewish holy places and the demonization of both Israel and of Jews.

A spokesperson for UNRWA outright rejects the accusations, saying that two significant analyses of textbooks, including one by the U.S. Department of State, debunked the assertions of incitement in the curriculum. However, David Bedein, director of CNEPR, said he was prepared to present the U.S. government with evidence that contradicts the state department’s findings but told the Jerusalem Post he was rebuffed by the White House.

These conflicting reports are disconcerting. It should be possible for funders who send hundreds of millions of aid dollars to find out for sure whether their money is funding genocidal incitement. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs is certainly correct in declaring that donor countries “have a responsibility to ensure that aid is used for the purpose for which it is given, and we are pleased Canada has taken the lead in establishing a robust accountability protocol.”

In announcing the renewed funding, the federal government promised “there will be enhanced due diligence applied to UNRWA funding … accompanied by a very robust oversight and reporting framework, which includes regular site visits and strong antiterrorism provisions.”

This would be a positive step, to say the least. It would also be a positive step if these Canadian funds do actually provide health, education and social services to people who need them. But this, too, will be difficult to discern. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that an analysis by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicates that the Palestinian Authority budgets about $75 million a year to support Palestinian terrorists – about 16% of foreign donations the PA receives. A lack of transparency about where the rest of the money goes means the world has been unable to determine how much money is lining the pockets of cronies of the dictatorship and what proportion is making positive social and economic contributions in the lives of Palestinians. Notably, the Palestinians receive more international aid per capita than any other people in the world – by far. Even as the catastrophe in neighboring Syria has seen 250,000 killed and 6.5 million refugees displaced, Syrians receive $106 per capita in international aid, while Palestinians receive $176.

One could argue whether Canadian funds are needed by the Palestinian Authority at all. And, clearly, we cannot be entirely confident that funds are going to the places they are intended. But, if the Canadian government does indeed follow the money, as promised, and determines whether it is making life better for Palestinians or is instead inciting terrorism, this might finally answer some questions that today seem subject to accusations and denials. That would be money well spent.

Illiberal world of Bannon

In considering the furor around President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Stephen Bannon, the chief executive officer of the hard-right news website Breitbart, as his chief strategist, let’s start with the perspective of those who have defended him.

On one important level, their anger over the Bannon spat is justified. It is galling to see the behemoths of the liberal left, from MoveOn.org to the New York Times, suddenly discover the threat of antisemitism after showing general indifference to its resurgence in public life during the last 16 years.

Simply put, their negative feelings towards Israel got in the way of acknowledging that larger reality. But, as Israel isn’t a factor in the case of Bannon, they can level the accusation of antisemitism safely, untainted by any association with the Jewish state or its “occupation” of Palestinian territories.

But, there is no meaningful record of statements or actions on Bannon’s part to convict him of the charge of being, on a personal level, antisemitic. And, since Americans tend to understand antisemitism as suggestive of a character defect, it is not surprising that many people also interpreted the attacks upon Bannon as a low blow against his boss, the incoming president.

It’s at precisely this juncture, however, that the Bannon quarrel has gone awry. The issue was never really about Bannon’s own sensibilities and, in fairness, that was never the focus of the much-discussed Anti-Defamation League (ADL) statement on Bannon released Nov. 13. What the ADL said is that Bannon “presides” over the “premier website” of the “alt-right,” which it then defined as “a loose-knit group of white nationalists and unabashed antisemites and racists.”

This raised the legitimate question of whether a man with such associations is suited to one of the country’s top political appointments – whether he can be one of the unifying figures the country needs. But that is not the discussion we have had these past days; it’s all been about the personalities, and not the politics.

David Hirsh, the British academic who has played a key intellectual role in confronting the academic boycott of Israel, put forward a better standard with which to make a judgment at the ADL’s Never is Now Summit on Antisemitism, held in New York Nov. 17. Bannon’s case reminds us, he said, that “antisemitism is about politics, not personal moral failure.”

Our bitterly sectarian politics compromise the discussion of antisemitism and, more broadly, racism and prejudice, in America today. In the debate about Bannon, there seems to be an assumption among his supporters that nobody as implacably opposed as he is to the progressive left – powerful elements of which have allied with Islamists, and enabled the spread of antisemitic discourse in the guise of anti-Zionism – could possibly share any of their flaws.

As a result, Bannon’s defenders adopt many of the same rhetorical tactics that left-wing anti-Zionists deploy when confronted with the charge of antisemitism; listing their Jewish political comrades or friends or relatives, decrying reputational smears without foundation, asserting their fondness for Jewish culture, and so on.

In rushing to Bannon’s aid, they overlook the deeper historical truth that antisemitism has always been promiscuous, finding favor on right and left. Yet, in their alternative imagining, antisemitism is solely a problem of the political left.

Let me offer a brief explanation of why some aspects of Bannon’s intellectual universe should be of concern to anyone who cares about the basic social empathies that are needed to sustain democracy – the same empathies, I would add, that have been badly damaged by the growth of identity politics on the left and right.

Small but important

There were fears that, if Donald Trump lost the election last week, his supporters would riot. Fewer people thought the opposite would happen – either that Trump would win or that those who opposed him would riot.

Nightly protest marches after the election were largely peaceful, but some were not, notably in Portland, Ore. It would be informative to learn if any participants in these street rallies were among the 45% of Americans of voting age who didn’t bother to cast a ballot. It would be galling in the extreme to find that people who couldn’t take a few minutes to vote on Nov. 8 were spending hours on the following days marching against the results of an election in which they didn’t think it necessary to vote.

But something more predictable has happened as well. Given the tenor of Trump’s campaign, and the glee with which his victory was met by such groups as the Ku Klux Klan, other white supremacists and those who go by the neologism alt-right, the Republican victory seems to have unleashed among some Americans a spurt of acting out. There have been countless recorded incidents of antisemitic, anti-black, anti-Muslim and anti-gay slurs, graffiti and even physical attacks. It was predictable that Trump’s hateful rhetoric would have an impact regardless of the election’s outcome, but the validation he received from more than 50 million Americans appears to have legitimized, or at the very least, inspired, some people to act out in antisocial, racist and violent ways.

In response, online articles, videos and infographics have been created demonstrating how to intervene and de-escalate a point of conflict. Also, a movement has emerged in which individuals demonstrate solidarity with individuals and groups who feel threatened.

A safety pin. A simple safety pin affixed to a garment is a new signal for people who may feel threatened in a situation – on a subway, in a classroom, at the mall, anywhere – that the person wearing a safety pin is a person who can be relied on for support.

It’s a small thing, but it isn’t. For an individual feeling threatened because they are identified as a target because of their ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation, a tiny signal of solidarity, support and refuge could be a lifeline.

We are in Canada, of course, not in the United States. But we would be naïve to think that what happens there doesn’t impact the social fabric here. There is racism, antisemitism, anti-Muslim bias, homophobia and other forms of bigotry under and at the surface here. The idea that we could provide a place of safety for individuals feeling threatened – or indeed that we could find ourselves looking for such a place – is as realistic for Canadians as it is for Americans.

Now that Remembrance Day has passed, we will remove our poppies, the symbol of respect for those who fought and died in the past for democratic and civil rights. Some of us, if we feel inclined, will replace it with a safety pin, evidence that we are committed to upholding these values today and in the future in whatever small but meaningful way we can.

Stories from Europe

Teaching Racism, which looks at discrimination against Roma in the Czech Republic, is one of nine videos currently comprising the Global Reporting Centre’s Strangers at Home project. (photo from strangers.globalreportingcentre.org)

Shayna Plaut has long been concerned with the plight of minorities in Europe. Her doctoral thesis focused on the Roma, and she has gone back and forth to Central and Eastern Europe to advocate for migrants, refugees and minorities since 2001. She speaks Romani fluently and, during her phone interview with the Independent, words from the Romani and other languages came out of her mouth with ease, pronounced perfectly. Plaut is clearly someone who deeply respects the details and uniqueness of different cultures.

In January 2014, Plaut began work as research and project manager on Strangers at Home, a Global Reporting Centre initiative featuring short films by a range of talented people in Europe – filmmakers, writers, cartoonists, musicians, scholars, as well as average citizens. The film project was aired at the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights in April 2016, and had its Canadian debut at Simon Fraser University Harbor Centre in September. It will screen at the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library on Nov. 19 during Media Democracy Days.

Most of the films are from the perspective of minorities – Jews, Roma, Muslims – but some are from the perspective of nativists who are acting out of fear of the increased presence of migrants and refugees. As the project website says, “Extremist voices are gaining political power, inspiring white Europeans to take to the streets to ‘claim back’ their place in Europe. As a result, millions of people in Europe are feeling like strangers at home.”

The nine videos, which can be viewed online, are rich and varied. Hate Poetry features Germans with “foreign sounding last names” reading hate mail, Queen of the Gypsies discusses how life has improved for Roma in Macedonia, Fascist Logic details the fear of immigrants felt by an Italian national, Teaching Racism looks at the discrimination against Roma in the schools of Czech Republic, Exceptionally Greek looks at the struggles of migrants in Greece, Hatschi Bratschi features a racist children’s book that continues to be a bestseller in Austria and Defending Russia presents the perspective of a paramilitary warrior in training to protect what he considers traditional Russian values.

Two videos deal specifically with Jews in Europe: Chasing Ghosts, by a non-Jewish cartoonist, examines the antisemitism present in Serbia despite the virtual absence of Jews, and Breaking the Silence looks at what the filmmaker sees as a conspiracy of silence about rampant antisemitism in Malmo, Sweden.

“We asked them, ‘What do you want people in North America to know about what’s happening in your country?” explained Plaut. “News coverage here can be sensationalistic, or overly simplistic. We wanted to hear from the people themselves, their stories. The way to do this is not to send another American journalist but rather to solicit the stories from the storytellers themselves.”

In Plaut’s view, the media jumps too quickly to simplistic narratives like “it’s 1938 again,” or lumps different countries with different problems together too quickly.

“Take Greece, for example,” she said. “The media is often quick to associate the rise of the right-wing with austerity, but we found Greek xenophobia to have more to do with deep cultural ideas about fears of impurity. When countries are portrayed in caricatures, that’s how they are engaged with. If diagnosis is incorrect, then the solution will be incorrect.”

Of the pieces that present the perspectives of nationalists themselves, Plaut said she was torn over whether to pay nationalists to present their views, but decided that, ultimately, it is important to hear their stories and understand where they are coming from as human beings as well.

“We can’t just write people off and say they are crazy,” she said. “People need to hear and understand that story, too. We can’t just shut off stories we don’t like.”

While the Strangers at Home project currently consists of nine pieces 60 to 90 seconds long, Plaut would like to see it expanded into 10-to-15-minute films comprising a feature-length documentary to go on the festival circuit, as well as being used online as an educational tool. Fundraising efforts are underway. For more information and to watch the videos, visit strangers.globalreportingcentre.org.

Matthew Gindin is a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.

Temple Sholom’s roots

Left to right: Michael Schwartz of the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia, Rabbi Philip Bregman, Rabbi Dan Moskovitz, Mike Harcourt and Chris Gorczynski. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

Lisa Wilson, special projects coordinator at Vancouver Heritage Foundation, welcomed the approximately 60 people who gathered at Trimble Park on the afternoon of Oct. 23 for the presentation of a plaque commemorating Temple Sholom’s first building, which was firebombed in January 1985.

A joint effort between VHF, Temple Sholom and the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia, the plaque was the 86th presentation of a planned 125 in VHF’s Places That Matter project, which started in 2011, said Wilson. “Our goal is to raise awareness about the people, places and events that tell Vancouver’s history,” she said, “and we invited the public to nominate and vote online, and an independent site-selection committee selected 125 sites to receive a plaque.”

In anticipation of a website for the project, Wilson invited people to submit their memories of the original Temple Sholom building.

“I moved here in 1984 and I lived just down the street,” said Vancouver Deputy Mayor Heather Deal. “I had been here for less than a year when the fire happened, and I was shocked…. I moved here from Cleveland, Ohio, a city deeply, deeply divided along racial lines … and I was shaken to my core when this happened just down the block from me.”

Deal said Vancouver is a “great city in striving to overcome” intolerance. “I think we’ve come a long way and have a long way to go, and this is a great reminder of not forgetting that it is much closer to the surface than we think it is sometimes.”

She noted the importance of the Jewish community to the city of Vancouver, and acknowledged specifically the growth of the Temple Sholom community. “I welcome you all here to acknowledge something that’s happened and, out of that, the good that has come and the better city that we are today because we learn from our mistakes and we learn from other people’s lack of tolerance, so that we continue to move forward as a peaceful and tolerant city.”

Temple Sholom spiritual leader Rabbi Dan Moskovitz spoke of the Holocaust-related memorials he and his wife Sharon witnessed on a mission to Central and Eastern Europe this summer, stumbling blocks that indicate where a Jewish family lived or a Jewish business stood. This local memorial plaque is different, however. “This notes where we were, but it also acknowledges that we are still here,” said Moskovitz. “And though not in that physical space on West 10th, we are very much a part of the city in our ‘new’ home on Oak and 54th…. This is not a memorial plaque, but a testament rather to the roots – the seeds that were planted, the roots that grew – and to what has blossomed into a wonderful Reform Jewish community in Vancouver and, I think, an incredible member and partner in the larger faith community of our city.”

Cantor Arthur Guttman then led the group in Psalm 100, after which Philip Bregman, rabbi emeritus of Temple Sholom, briefly shared some of the congregation’s history, including the story of the firebombing and his role in helping save the synagogue’s Torahs, as the building was burning. There had been a previous arson attempt and vandalism to his car, which led the congregation to start putting iron bars on all the windows, as the police were not motivated to act. The job was almost complete when the arsonist struck again, throwing a Molotov cocktail into the one window without a grate.

Bregman spoke of his disbelief that such antisemitism could exist in Canada. He spoke of his phone call to then-mayor Mike Harcourt, who was at the plaque ceremony, and Harcourt and his wife Becky’s support of the congregation in its work to rebuild. The Harcourts attended services, said Bregman. “Mike and Becky showing up made a statement that was so very important: it was not the Jewish community that was attacked, it was Vancouver, it was Canada, it was our society that had been attacked.”

After the Temple Sholom bombing, said Bregman, there was also an attempt to torch the Chevra Kadisha, which was on Broadway and Alma at the time. “These were targeted events that were taking place,” he said. “The police were tremendously responsive then and thereafter.”

Bregman expressed his pleasure at the work that had been done to mark the place where Temple Sholom once stood, and how the congregation has grown since.

The plaque – which will be placed at 4426 West 10th Ave. – was presented by VHF board member Chris Gorczynski, who read it aloud. The event ended with Guttman leading those gathered in Oseh Shalom.

Whose holy site?

When organizers of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival select the films they will screen, timeliness is probably among the considerations. They could hardly have known they would hit the nail on the head so perfectly with One Rock Three Religions. The film explores the contending claims for the world’s most in-demand religious real estate: that which Jews call the Temple Mount.

The site of the First and Second Temples, the latter destroyed by the Romans after 70 CE, is also the location of al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, holy sites for Muslims. The Western Wall, adjacent to the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, is the holiest site on earth for the Jewish people. The Temple Mount also holds significance for Christians. This is not breaking news.

But the 58-member executive board of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, earlier this month passed a resolution – with 24 countries in favor, 32 against or abstaining and two absent – that uses language that exclusively recognizes the Muslim history of the area, implicitly erasing Jewish and Christian claims to the space. (Canada is not part of the board.)

Denying Jewish claims to the Temple Mount is not breaking news, either. This form of historical erasure has been going on for decades.

In the film, Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles and a rabbi emeritus of Vancouver’s Schara Tzedeck, notes that the supreme Muslim authority in Jerusalem published for decades a visitor’s guide to the site. From 1924 until 1953, the guidebook made clear that the location was indisputably the site of Jewish temples. The 1954 iteration of the guide omitted the Jewish connection to the holy place for the first time. Some Arab and Palestinian figures, including Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, have made it their business to deny the historical and archeological truth ever since. The denial of a Jewish connection to Jerusalem has come to coexist with the denial of Jews to a right to self-determination in our unceded ancestral territory, as part of a global phenomenon of denying Jewish history.

It may be naïve to get on our high horses and pretend that UNESCO’s appalling denial of Jewish (and Christian) connections to the Temple Mount is some new low in global attitudes toward Israel. This is nonsense, certainly, but only on a continuum of nonsense that defines the anti-Israel movement globally.

We can take some solace in the fact that the vote was not passed by a majority. As well, on the positive side, this “theatre of the absurd,” as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called it, at least forced the hands of a few leaders, including Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who promised to find out why his country’s representative abstained from the vote. Even UNESCO’s own director-general, Irina Bokova, said: “Jerusalem is the sacred city of the three monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.… To deny, conceal or erase any of the Jewish, Christian or Muslim traditions undermines the integrity of the site, and runs counter to the reasons that justified its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage list.”

In the end, it all amounts to bubkes for Israel. Israel will continue to provide, as the VJFF film demonstrated, access to all religious sites for all peoples, to say nothing of continuing to be the educational, scientific and cultural exemplar it is. If only UNESCO contributed as much.

Consumerism meets identity politics

This is Part 2 of a two-part series. The first examined Oberlin College’s “Jewish problem.”

When Nathan Heller’s “Letter from Oberlin: The Big Uneasy” appeared in The New Yorker (May 30) his sub-headline asked: “What’s roiling the liberal-arts campus?”

At least for some Jewish students, Oberlin’s obstacles to Jewish life are signs of two roiling processes: “identity politics” and higher education’s drift toward business models in which students primarily are customers.

From its origins in 1833, Oberlin College has been at the forefront of social changes. In particular, no institution in the United States has an older coeducational baccalaureate program. As well, before the Civil War, members of the Oberlin community were active in movements to abolish slavery. The college advertises that it “regularly admitted African American students beginning in 1835.”

Oberlin’s avant-garde history influences student applications and admissions, as well as faculty recruitment – and some unexpected campus activities. For example, in December 2015, unnamed members of the Africana community referred to Oberlin’s legacy and/or public relations when they delivered to the administration an undated multi-page list of “demands not suggestions,” which included a “four percent annual increase in black student enrolment”; “divestment from all prisons and Israel”; “that spaces throughout the Oberlin College campus be designated as [segregated] safe space for Africana identifying students” (exclusively?); that several professors (identified by name) should be subject to “immediate firing”; and that other professors should be given preferential treatment.

Oberlin College proclaims efforts to ameliorate affronts or afflictions perceived by cohorts such as African-Americans, Muslims, students with physical handicaps and non-heterosexual students. A “Campus Climate Report” (May 19, 2016) also includes a section on problems experienced by some Jewish students, but does not specifically deal with reports that “progressive” protesters who confront other forms of bigotry often deny the significance of antisemitism.

This phenomenon occurs on other campuses, too.

In August, the Washington Post published an op-ed focused on “an Iranian Jew,” Arielle Mokhtarzadeh, who traveled “to attend the annual Students of Color Conference” at the University of California, Berkeley. There she found: “Over the course of what was probably no longer than an hour, my history was denied, the murder of my people was justified, and a movement whose sole purpose is the destruction of the Jewish homeland was glorified. Statements were made justifying the ruthless murder of innocent Israeli civilians, blatantly denying Jewish indigeneity in the land, and denying the Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered.”

Also in the Post, Molly Harris, a student at McGill University, addressed students just beginning post-secondary education: “Get ready to meet new people, learn things that fascinate you, and figure out who you are and who you want to be.

“If you’re Jewish, you should probably also prepare yourself for the various forms of anti-Israel sentiment, and maybe even antisemitism, you’re likely to encounter on your new college campus.

“In the past year alone, as a Jewish student at McGill University in Montreal, I’ve been called a ‘Zionist b—.’ I’ve been told several times that Jews haven’t suffered (never mind the Spanish Inquisition, Eastern European pogroms and centuries of violence and marginalization leading up to the Holocaust). I’ve seen my friends mocked for their Judaism in crude, hateful language on popular anonymous social media platforms.”

Following his May “Letter from Oberlin,” Heller again wrote in The New Yorker (Sept. 1): “Students … may try out defensive ethno-racial flag waving, religious and political dogmas, athletic and fraternal self-segregation…. My work elsewhere has made me think that this isn’t just an Oberlin, or liberal, thing.”

Indeed, on Aug. 5, the New York Times printed a front-page article about racial and identity politics at many campuses. This reporting was not about Oberlin, but it named other “small, selective liberal arts colleges” as well as Ivy League universities. An Amherst graduate said, “As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot….”

But perhaps Oberlin still is a cultural leader. In an Aug. 27 article, the Times mentioned Oberlin as a counter example to the University of Chicago, which sent first-year students a letter saying Chicago did not support “trigger warnings” and did not condone “safe spaces” nor disruptions of speakers. (Disclosure: I was a Chicago faculty member from 1968 to 1970.)

In Frank Bruni’s June 23 New York Times essay about Oberlin – as one of the campuses “roiled the most by struggles over political correctness” – he wrote: “Students at Oberlin and their counterparts elsewhere might not behave in such an emboldened fashion if they did not feel so largely in charge. Their readiness to press for rules and rituals to their liking suggests the extent to which they have come to act as customers – the ones who set the terms, the ones who are always right – and the degree to which they are treated that way.”

Bruni built upon a poignant essay about “Customer Mentality,” written in February 2014 for Inside Higher Ed by a Western Carolina University assistant professor of English, Nate Kreuter. When students transformed into customers, Kreuter observed concomitant re-purposing of campus infrastructure, curriculum and faculty.

Bruni provided photographs of water parks with pools and slides on campuses, and described campus entertainment complexes, golf putting greens and other resort-like amenities. He also wrote: “Small wonder that grade inflation is so pronounced and rampant, with A’s easy to come by and anything below a B-minus rare.”

Barry Schwartz, professor of psychology at Swarthmore, told Bruni: “There’s a big difference between teaching students and serving customers.”

Kreuter in 2014 noted that the student-as-customer business model had adverse consequences within and beyond academic programs: “The impulse to protect the brand also frequently compels universities to shirk responsibility when missteps or scandals occur, rather than immediately taking responsibility and corrective action.” He argued that administrators may “protect the brand” in instances of “high-profile college athlete crime” or sexual assaults or injuries from fraternity hazing.

A Times essay (Sept. 4, 2016) by a Yale faculty member, Jim Sleeper, argued that right-wing “wealthy donors” exaggerate negative impacts of political correctness, while they promote more potent poisons. But he also agreed that: “Most university leaders serve … pressures to satisfy student ‘customers’ and to avoid negative publicity, liability and losses in ‘brand’ or ‘market share.’…”

Oberlin College’s publicists like to recall the institution’s abolitionist era rather than its place in the history of the Anti-Saloon League and Prohibition. So perhaps it is not surprising that Prof. Joy Karega could post anti-Jewish materials and conspiracy theories for many months, and that Oberlin administrators and trustees reacted only last March, after Karega generated condemnation both online and in worldwide print media – likely to harm Oberlin’s brand.

At the University of Lethbridge, Prof. Anthony Hall’s “globalization studies” promoted “open debate on the Holocaust” and claims that the 2001 destruction of New York’s World Trade Centre was a “Zionist job.” Administrators tolerated Hall for 26 years – suspending him only this month, after news stories about “possible violations of the Alberta Human Rights Act.”

During my one-to-one conversation with Oberlin College president Marvin Krislov in April, he told me that many students gave Karega high ratings. From a marketing perspective, favorable student evaluations may help justify annual tuition above $51,000 – costs above $66,000 including room and board. But if students give high ratings to a predilection for bigotry and conspiracy theories (and lack of scholarly accomplishment) then something has gone wrong with their education.

Bruni’s essay asked, “But what does the customer model [of college students] do to their actual education?” One Oberlin graduate responding to The Atlantic in December 2015 wrote: “There is now an atmosphere of close-mindedness, intellectual submission, conformity and fear.”

College and university emphasis on marketing to customers likely is linked to cost.

Tuition – and every other post-secondary education expense – has increased at a pace beyond general inflation (or household income gains). Consequently, total student debt in the United States now is about $1.2 trillion, according to the August Forbes – exceeding total credit card debt or the total of automobile financing in the entire American population.

This precarious state of affairs may be a response to reported correlation between higher education and greater lifetime earnings or lower unemployment; but correlation does not indicate cause and effect. Bruni refers to “an expectation among many students that their purchase of a college education should be automatically redeemable for a job….” But, as Kreuter wrote, “A post-secondary education is not a guarantee of success. It is not the straightforward purchase of a better future. It never has been.”

At Oberlin, in fact, the student newspaper published an article in March 2014 stating that “40% of [our] 2013 graduates are unemployed, and one-third of graduates are working in positions that do not require a degree.”

Of course, many Oberlin students and graduates have priorities other than high-income jobs; but one unidentified correspondent, writing to The Atlantic in December 2015, stated: “Oberlin students [do] want what other college students are asking for, whether they phrase it this way or not: better control of the college’s money.”

Oberlin, unlike most American campuses, has no fraternities or sororities. Historically, students lived in residences supervised by the administration, which also oversees most meals. So, students see what Oberlin does with funds for their food. But why have many top-tier media published articles discussing campus food complaints at the college?

The emphasis of complaints has not been that the food tastes bad, has dubious nutritional value, etc. Oberlin food complaints instead focus on meals that particular students deem to be culturally inappropriate or disrespectful. Mainstream media regard Oberlin’s food criticisms as curiosities sufficiently ludicrous to entertain a wide range of readers; but these cultural food fights are quite logical outcomes when the student-as-customer model meets racial and identity politics at the topic of food.

Likewise, identity issues can lead students to denounce “cultural appropriation,” not only in meals, but also in other aspects of life – clothing, terminology, music, books, even the curriculum. Novelist Lionel Shriver says that, if she did not reject criticisms of “cultural appropriation” in literature, then “all I could write about would be smart-alecky 59-year-old, five-foot-two-inch white women from North Carolina.”

And, as customers, students can demand not to take certain courses. At Oberlin, one of the “unmalleable” demands in December 2015 was that, in the Oberlin Conservatory, “seeing as how most jazz students are of the Africana community they should not be forced to take courses rooted in whiteness” of classical music.

In the New York Times, Krislov wrote: “American higher education is at a crossroads, as it was in the 1960s when college students were galvanized by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.”

But I do not accept that anti-Zionist petitions or Africana demands for specific foods and segregated “safe spaces” in Oberlin buildings somehow are comparable to my classmates’ efforts in the 1960s civil rights movement and later protests against U.S. war policy in Vietnam. (On the campus of Kent State, one of Oberlin’s neighbors, U.S. National Guard troops shot and killed unarmed students during anti-war protests in May 1970.)

In spring of 2016, one student on the cusp of graduation said, “I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”

Marc Chafetz explained – in the New York Times – why that remark disturbed him: “I graduated 41 years ago…. Oberlin changed me profoundly. I found out how little I actually knew about the world, and it unleashed a hunger to learn that has never dissipated.”

No matter what identities students bring or what paths they follow afterward, higher education should involve them in exploration and intellectual discovery – and civil encounters with one another.

Ned Glick lives in Vancouver. His baccalaureate is from Oberlin College and his PhD is from Stanford. After teaching at the University of Chicago, he had University of British Columbia appointments in mathematics, in statistics and in the faculty of medicine. He retired to emeritus faculty status in 1992.

Some battles need fighting

Author Deborah E. Lipstadt, right, with actor Rachel Weisz, who portrays Lipstadt in the film Denial. (photo by Liam Daniel/Elevation Pictures)

In 1996, Deborah Lipstadt, an American historian and author of Denying the Holocaust, was sued by British Holocaust denier David Irving. Unlike in the United States, British courts put the onus on the defendant to prove they did not libel the plaintiff. But this trial had larger stakes than whether Lipstadt (and her publisher, Penguin Books) were guilty of libeling Irving by characterizing him as a denier of the Holocaust. To media and many in the general public, the case put the Holocaust on trial.

A major motion picture scheduled for release Oct. 7 in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, is a retelling of the events around the trial. The film, Denial, starring Rachael Weisz as Lipstadt, captures the contending forces inside and outside the Jewish community as the trial burst onto the global news cycle.

Lipstadt told the Independent in a telephone interview Sunday that the film focuses emphatically on actual events. Insubstantial details may have been changed – a meeting portrayed as taking place in a restaurant actually took place elsewhere; she didn’t own a dog at the time of the trial – but the substance of the film was subject to absolutely no dramatic or artistic licence.

“Every word that comes out of David Irving’s mouth is exactly as he said it,” Lipstadt offered by way of example. In fact, the film opens with remarks Irving made in Calgary and every statement he makes throughout the film seems intended not to convince but to rub salt in historical wounds.

The film captures Lipstadt’s frustration with the strategy of her British legal team, which refused to allow Lipstadt or survivors of the Holocaust to testify. Lipstadt thought she would be seen as a coward for not speaking in court and, in a poignant scene in the film, she promises a survivor of the Holocaust that the voices of survivors will be heard. Her lawyers stood firm, however. This was not to be a trial about the Holocaust, they insisted, nor was it a trial about Lipstadt. It was about whether Irving was what Lipstadt had said in her book: a denier of the Holocaust.

She sparred with the legal team throughout but, in retrospect, she is completely happy with their strategy.

“Absolutely 110%,” she said. “First of all, we won. Second of all, not only did we win, but we got the most damning judgment, one of the most crushing libel judgments against anyone that has ever been issued, certainly in recent years, against anyone in England. [The judgment] calls the man a liar, a falsifier of history, his version of history is mendacious, that no sane, thinking historian could ever doubt the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. In fact, everything we needed. Obviously, the lawyers’ strategy was precisely the right one. It would not have added anything to have me go in on the stand. It would not have added anything to have survivors go on the stand. This wasn’t an emotional excursion to make me feel good that I can stand up there and challenge Irving or could give survivors a modicum of comfort that they could stand and confront him. This was to win a major case and that was what it was about.”

In fact, of the whole experience, which on film appears to be a horribly emotional and wrenching multi-year battle through arcane legalities and unanticipated notoriety, Lipstadt would only change one thing if she could.

“I might have learned to trust the lawyers faster than I learned to trust them,” she said.

The trial and the events around it did not affect her academic career – she was then and is now a professor at Emory University in Atlanta – but it allowed her a bigger stage.

“It gave me a far higher profile than I had before,” she said. “I don’t think it’s changed me, but it’s changed the size of the megaphone I happen to have to speak out on things.”

While Lipstadt was not formally involved in the making of the film, she credits the filmmakers and Weisz, who depicted her, for their willingness to engage her.

“No film will be made if the author of the book is going to be meddling,” she said. “They would never go ahead with that. But the filmmakers were exceptionally generous with wanting my input … passing the script by me, meeting with me, the director coming to Atlanta to meet with me, the screenwriter coming to meet with me, and Rachel Weisz asking for my help … in my spending time with her and hanging out with her and talking with her. Not just about the role, but about myriad things. They gave me far more input than is normally the case.”

When she saw a pre-final cut of the film the first time, it was with a test audience in a multiplex, and it left her “sort of speechless,” she said.

“You can buy your popcorn and your oversized Coca-Cola and go into your reclining chair and there was my story on the screen,” she said. “It was very weird. It was very, very stunning and very, very weird.”

She hopes the film helps people understand that not everything is subject to opinion.

“There are facts,” she said. “There are not two sides to every opinion. Not everything is up for grabs. There are facts, opinions and lies. I could say to you, it’s my opinion that the earth is flat. Well, just because it’s my opinion that the earth is flat doesn’t make it flat. Not all opinions hold water. Some opinions are based in ridiculous, nonfactual … claims.”

She also encountered, particularly in Britain but elsewhere as well, Jewish individuals and groups who believed that by not settling with Irving and instead going to trial, Lipstadt was giving Irving a platform he did not deserve. Similar to the way she came around to see her legal team’s strategy as the right course, Lipstadt believes those who thought she should settle now realize that going to trial was the right course.

“You can’t fight every battle, but there are certain battles you cannot turn away from and certain battles you have to take on,” she said. “There were lots of people who didn’t want me to fight this and I did and I’m glad I did. And I think they are glad I did, too. Lots of those people came around and recognize that we were right and they had been wrong.”

Oberlin’s Jewish problem

Protesters at Oberlin College. (photo by Pteranadons via Wikimedia Commons)

(This is Part 1 of a two-part series. The second article examines the student-as-customer approach at universities and its relation to identity politics on campus.)

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote in a June article that “Oberlin College would certainly be in the running” if he picked one campus “that has been roiled the most by struggles over political correctness.”

While university president Marvin Krislov has acknowledged upheaval, he wrote – in the same Times section – that Oberlin’s “faculty and staff … maintain high academic standards and rigor.”

Since I attended the 50th reunion of my class, I realize I do care about the calamity that Oberlin College now exemplifies.

Every town in northern Ohio has history built around either its bar or its liberal arts college. Oberlin was a “dry” town, founded in 1833, the same year as Oberlin College. Then, in 1893, Oberlin became the birthplace of the Anti-Saloon League, the political movement behind the U.S. Constitution’s 18th amendment: prohibition, which took effect in 1920. That social experiment was a disaster, and the 21st amendment repealed the 18th in 1933. Oberlin College finally eased its ban on beer decades later, yet zealotry still haunts the campus.

Bruni scorns “the demand for a so-called trigger warning to students who might be upset reading Antigone,” and he seems bemused by “complaints about the ethnic integrity of the sushi in a campus dining hall.” But it was not funny when, in September 2013, a Latina Jewish student helped plan a Shabbat dinner where Latin American food would be served – and another Oberlin Latina student denounced the event’s “cultural appropriation.” As one Jewish student recalled in a Tablet article this past May, posters for a previous Asian Fusion Shabbat were “defaced with graffiti about appropriation and orientalism. Comfort food Shabbat was also ill received, with comments about appropriating black cooking.

“There is a common belief at Oberlin that all Jews are white and rich” – so a Jew cannot be Latin American, cannot be a “person of color,” etc. – and, therefore, all Jews on campus should eat “white” food. Of course, such dogma defies both fact and logic, harms individuals and undermines the college’s stated “diversity” goals.

In the same Tablet article, it was noted that, in 2013, the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association revoked affiliation of one dining hall, “the Kosher-Halal Coop (used predominantly by Jews).”

Timothy Elgren became Oberlin’s dean of arts and sciences in July 2014. In February 2016, Oberlin’s online news site posted the transcript of conversation in which Elgren told Krislov that “changes to the way we run our faculty searches have been very important.”

One such search for an assistant professor led to the appointment of Joy Karega. By March, Karega had received worldwide attention for her social media postings of anti-Jewish hatred and conspiracy theories. Karega has neither denied nor disavowed her connection to these items.

In November 2015, for example, Karega wrote that “ISIS is not a jihadist, Islamic terrorist organization. It’s a CIA and Mossad operation….” In other online postings, Karega asserted that Israel and/or Jews also were responsible for bringing down the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Centre on Sept. 11, 2001; for murders at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris in January 2015; for the massacres of 130 people in Paris in November 2015; for shooting down a Malaysian passenger jet over Ukraine; and for “weaponizing the weather” to inflict the damage of Hurricane Sandy in New York City.

Karega’s illustrated postings also have claimed that the Rothschild family is “worth 500 trillion dollars,” owns “nearly every central bank in the world” and owns “the media, your oil, and your government.” Abraham Socher, an Oberlin associate professor of religion, noted in the student newspaper, the Oberlin Review, that such notions harked back to the infamous antisemitic fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He reminded his readers that a U.S. government definition of antisemitism specifically includes: “Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as a collective – especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.”

While Karega posted anti-Jewish bigotry and conspiracy theories online, she also taught “social justice writing” to Oberlin students. When I spoke with Krislov on April 6, he could not identify any actual research or publication by Karega at Oberlin. Yet, Karega retained her professorial position there.

Starting in March, publicity about Karega and Oberlin spread among online news sites and print newspapers in the United States, then to papers in England and Israel. Articles about controversy at Oberlin had appeared months earlier in The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, as well as a New Yorker feature that followed in May.

As I learned about Karega, I found that broad anti-Jewish manifestations at Oberlin predated her – and that other campuses in the United States and Canada may have similar cultures, in which it is acceptable to denounce, mock, bully or intimidate any student who is perceived to be Jewish. Perhaps only “fringe” individuals on campus indulge in bigoted behavior, but the community as a whole may ignore or appease the fringe – as part of “free speech” and “academic freedom” or to avoid personal reprisals?

Some of the fringers, however, restrict free speech. They disrupt presentations that they disdain and they have invaded Hillel meetings or other Jewish activities, according to one unnamed “longtime Oberlin professor,” quoted in the same Tablet article as the student cited previously.

Hadas Binyamini, a 2014 Oberlin graduate and co-founder of the college’s J Street U chapter, wrote in the Forward in March this year: “I was uncomfortable publicly identifying as a Zionist” but, even more importantly, “What I didn’t find at Oberlin were spaces to engage with prevalent forms of antisemitism that have nothing to do with Israel. No tools were offered for students to critically examine American Jewish identity and to deconstruct antisemitic motifs….” And, Binyamini continued, “the Multicultural Resource Centre … remains silent on antisemitism. Similarly, the department of comparative American studies, which trains students to ‘investigate power, inequality and agency through the analysis of … race … class … and citizenship,’ [seems] unable to engage students with these same issues when it comes to American Jews.”

Marc Blecher, an Oberlin professor of politics and East Asian studies, agreed: “our Multicultural Resource Centre has been silent on antisemitism.” It is worth noting that, this year, Oberlin celebrates the 20th anniversary of its MRC, which “strives to advance … multicultural understanding among all campus communities.”

Isabel Sherrell, another Jewish graduate of Oberlin – who, according to the Forward, attempted some dialogue with Karega – compiled a list of anti-Jewish incidents and attitudes on the campus. She permitted the use of her name when a Washington Post blog publicized her observations this past February. For instance, Item #6 on her list is anti-Zionist advocacy in the classroom of an African studies professor. Item #18 includes, “Being told I was simply European and Judaism is a religion not an ethnicity,” although the latter view logically contradicts the (false) campus dogma that a person cannot be both Jewish and a “person of color.”

Item #10 on Sherrell’s list begins, “The fact that so many Jewish students are bullied into silence….” Unlike Sherrell, I have zero personal knowledge of “cyber-bullying” or “trolling” or “doxing” via “social media” and I have no idea how a target on campus should respond to such abuse. But Jonathan Weisman – who is not a student, but rather is an editor at the Washington bureau of the New York Times – announced in June that he felt obliged to quit Twitter altogether, because, “For weeks, I had been barraged on Twitter by rank antisemitic comments, Nazi iconography of hooknosed Jews stabbing lovely Christians in the back, the gates of Auschwitz, and trails of dollar bills leading to ovens.” (Weisman believes that the tweets he received came mostly from right-wing white supremacists, not from left-wing campus “social justice” warriors.)

By mid-April, Oberlin’s board of trustees and a majority of faculty members had publicly criticized Karega. Also, some sort of investigative process was announced. But at least three members of the Africana studies department individually voiced some support for Karega. One concern was that

Karega might be a scapegoat, burdened with blame for an anti-Jewish climate that pervaded the campus before she arrived.

I have found no record of public comment by Krislov regarding Karega or related issues until after her story went viral. Then, he issued a statement, which the Oberlin news site posted on March 1, about “The Mission of Liberal Arts Education”: “At Oberlin, we are deeply committed to … ensuring our students a diverse, inclusive and equitable educational experience. We demand intellectual rigor….”

In his mission statement – as in his Times essay and elsewhere for months – Krislov minimized campus problems, promulgated platitudes and did not mention Karega by name.

Oberlin has an Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and it released on May 19 a “Campus Climate Report,” which also did not include Karega’s name in its Jewish section.

During the first week of August 2016 – five months after the earliest Times article about Karega, and fast approaching the start of the 2016-2017 academic year – Oberlin finally announced that “Dr. Karega has been placed on paid [emphasis added] leave and will not teach at Oberlin” until “the faculty governance process … plays out.” Karega’s attorney accused Oberlin of “pandering to the dictates of a handful of vocal and wealthy religious zealots.”

The Atlantic, back in 1941, invited and published an article on “The Jewish Problem in America,” in which the journalist (formerly an Episcopal priest) Alfred Jay Nock wrote: “The problem, stated in the fewest words, is that of maintaining a modus vivendi between the American Jew and his fellow citizens which is strong enough to stand any shocks … such as may occur in the years ahead.”

From New York City, he observed with alarm: “… in the late summer of 1939 … anti-Jewish street demonstrations … were going on in Brooklyn, Jackson Heights, the Bronx and Yorkville at the rate of 50 or 60 a week. “These were assaults, baitings, intimidations, picketings, soapbox speeches, incitements to boycott, and the like.

“I think it is not impossible that I shall live to see the Nürnberg laws reenacted in this country and enforced with vigor.”

The Nürnberg – or Nuremberg – laws, which were announced by Nazi Germany in 1935, stripped Jews of citizenship and institutionalized their persecution. Happily, Nock lived to see Hitler and Nazism defeated in 1945.

In 2014, the Nuremberg city council adopted a one-page resolution stating: “We are decisively opposed to every form of antisemitism…. Jewish life in Nuremberg enjoys our very special protection and our care [and] demonstrations in the context of the Israeli-Palestine conflict must be prevented from being misused as political manifestations of antisemitism.”

Oberlin’s official online optimism outshines Pollyanna, Pangloss and Pinocchio. But the actual campus – the college on the ground in Ohio, about 35 miles southwest of Cleveland – does have a Jewish problem in 2016.

Much more yet to learn

Outright denial of the Holocaust is a phenomenon almost exclusively in the realm of utterly discredited figures who deserve condemnation. One of those figures is David Irving, who lost his libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt, an American professor and author, who correctly characterized him as a Holocaust denier in her book Denying the Holocaust. A new film, called Denial, about the trial, opens today in Vancouver and the Independent interviewed Lipstadt earlier this week.

It only takes a quick Google search to find that there are certainly people in the world today who, for various reasons, make it their business to allege that the Holocaust did not happen or, in an insidious manner presumably intended to lend a hint of credibility to their position, acknowledge that it happened but quibble about details – as if the number of millions murdered can be considered “details.”

There is, however, a different kind of Holocaust denial that also deserves attention and is potentially more dangerous. This form of denial does not rest on the supposition that the Holocaust did not happen. Rather, it is more often an expressed view that it doesn’t matter. Of course, these ideas are rarely expressed so crudely. Yet, this is the subtext of a commonly expressed position, even in so-called polite company, that the Holocaust has had its run, that we have spoken enough about it, that it happened 70 years ago, that it is time for people other than the Jews to have their historical grievances addressed.

The idea that we talk about the Holocaust too much has both particular and universal consequences. The Holocaust was particular in its intention to eradicate the Jewish people from the earth. However, as most individuals and organizations devoted to Holocaust education, commemoration and awareness understand, work about the particular experience of Jewish genocide is foundational to the prevention of future genocides affecting other groups, as well as violence and discrimination that does not meet the level of genocide.

This should not diminish the Jewish particularity of the Holocaust, and it need not. However, while the Holocaust was a particular product of Nazism and of Germany, we will fail the future if we do not recognize the Holocaust as a keystone to understanding the human capacity for genocide, as well as less cataclysmic group targeting, isolation and discrimination. Ultimately, the Holocaust was perpetrated on human beings by other human beings.

The word genocide was invented to find language for the Shoah. Tragically, we have been able to apply it to many terrible incidents since – and before, such as the Armenian genocide. To create a better future, we need to devote more resources to understanding these events and their antecedents. These are not pleasant topics to discuss, to put it mildly. There can be nothing in human experience more distressing to confront than genocide. Yet we must.

There are many truths around the Holocaust that cannot be denied. One of them is that, because human motivations are not an exact science, particularly when extrapolated into the madness of crowds, we really do not understand why the Holocaust or other genocides have happened. The proof of this statement is that, we hope, if we did understand genocide in a complete way, we would have eradicated it from the world.

In the context of how much it matters and how much we have left to learn, we are certainly not talking too much about the Holocaust, devoting too many resources to it or moving far enough away from it in time to start deemphasizing it. No. We have barely begun to discuss and understand it.