January 15, 2015--Fanatics All

Do you know what happened to Angela Merkel?

I mean, I thought she was in Paris last Sunday to participate in the Je Suis Charlie march, joining governmental leaders from 40 or so other countries. (As a sidebar--not including the United States which sent the ambassador.)

I may have been hallucinating, but I thought I saw a picture of the front row of marchers with Francois Hollande, president of France in the center, locking arms with Palestinian president Mahmond Abbas on his right and Chancellor Merkel on his left.

But then when I picked up my copy of HaMevasar, the Israeli newspaper of the ultra-Orthodox, there was that same picture but no Angela Merkel.

So either I'm confused or losing it.

Before I could see if the New York Times had anything to say about this, I spoke with a friend who knows a lot about neurology to see if he thinks I'm losing it (yes and no, he said) and about the possibility that the image might have been doctored.

"Send me a link to the HaMevasar picture," he said, and within 15 minutes of my doing so he called to report, "It's obviously Photoshopped. I mean, the editor of the paper had Merkel crudely deleted from the photo. And also a few other female world leaders who were in the first two rows, making it look as if the march was an all-male affair. Just like a . . ."

"Just like an ultra-Orthodox Jewish wedding," I interjected, "where the men and the women attend and participate separately, including dancing with each other."

"Exactly," he said, "And here are a few ironic thoughts. First, they cut out the picture of the chancellor of the country that spawned the Nazis and perpetrated the Holocaust, but the country that now stamps out any manifestations of renewed anti-Jewish behavior and still pays reparations to Israel. Then the paper, HaMevasar, ranted about how the whole Hebdo massacre was about Islamic anti-Semitism, ignoring the fact that the initial victims were mainly French Christians. Finally, they completely ignored the fact that the march in Paris was about defending France's essential freedoms, very much including the right to free expression. And though HaMevasar does mention that the attack was on freedom of the press, it is in a journalistic context that is self-contradictory since by cropping the photo as they did it gives the lie to the very freedom this massacre was planned to stifle."

"Then there was Benjamin Netanyahu's reaction," I said. "On the day after the massacre he sent the French an impassioned letter of condolence that claimed, to quote him, that 'Israel is being attacked by the very same forces that attacked Europe.' As if the arrack on Charlie Hebdo was about Israel rather than about France."

"And he followed it up the next day when he linked the Paris suspects to Israel's enemies, likening the killings to the rockets fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip."

"Talk about chutzpah."

"And can you explain to me how the four Jewish victims of the kosher supermarket shootings all wound up in Israel for a ceremony and burial?"

"As I understand the situation," I said, "only one of the four had any direct connection to Israel. I think he had two chidden living there."

"The other three are either from North Africa or born in France and had no family in Israel. I don't want to be overly cynical," he said, "But it feels as if the Orthodox forces there have co-opted the situation and are representing the attacks in France as being about Israel and anti-Semitism. That is not to say that there isn't a reemergence of anti-Semitism in Western Europe, including France, though mainly from nationalistic forces, and so what Netanyahu and HaMevasar are up to is shameful."

December 18, 2013--Professing

Having been one at a number of institutions, from up-close observation, professors are not among my favorite professionals. For the most part, I prefer dentists.

Professors--tenured professors--have about the best job in the history of the world.

With what other kind of work can one make a very comfortable living with generous benefits, work two to three days a week, eight or at most nine months a year, and have frequent vacations? Almost as many as members of Congress. And then every few years have sabbaticals, which for a half to a full year offer full or half salary with no classroom or other university responsibilities. And, perhaps best of all, with tenure a professor can work until he or she drops and in no way be let go. Even for demonstrable incompetence or lack of research and publications.

And with all of this, professors are often among the world's most prolific whiners. About their university responsibilities (many would like to be paid, and paid more, for doing even less); about university politics (usually much to do about nothing or at most very little); about their colleagues and administrators; and about much that goes on in the world.

Criticizing and complaining they are very good at, but doing something about it is another matter.

So I was not surprised when a day or two ago, the American Studies Association, with about 5,000 professors as members, voted by a two-to-one margin to boycott Israeli academic institutions to protest Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

This means they will oppose academic exchange programs and Israeli professors will no longer be welcome as ASA members; invited to ASA-sponsored events; or, if the ASA has anything to do about it, be allowed to have sabbaticals in the U.S.

Next month, the much larger and more influential Modern Language Association will vote to ask the State Department to criticize Israel for allegedly barring American professors from going to Gaza or the West Bank when invited by Palestinian institutions.

The boycott is the first the ASA has ever instituted and what the MLA is calling for is equally unprecedented. They have not seen fit to take similar action in regard to Russian or Chinese academic institutions even though those governments curtail basic freedoms for almost all of their citizens. They did not call for the boycott of South African institutions during the Apartheid years. They are apparently OK with Iranian, Egyptian, Cuban, Venezuelan, Saudi Arabian, and Pakistani academic institutions though basic freedoms are severely restricted in these and, sadly, many other countries.

The fundamental case in favor of lifetime employment--tenure--is to protect academic freedom. To make professors impervious to arbitrary or ideological retribution when they express their contrarian views. So it is more than a little ironic that the ASA, for which one of its principals is the protection of freedom of thought and scholarly activity, would so blatantly, for ideological reasons, take such a censorious position.

The good news is that the major higher education organization in the United States, the American Association of University Professors opposes the boycott, saying that it makes little sense to focus on Israeli universities where criticism of government policy often originates.

Even Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas opposes the boycott. He said that it is inappropriate, as the ASA did, to compare Israel to Apartheid in South Africa. Further--

We are neighbors of Israel, we have agreements with israel, we are not asking anyone to boycott products of Israel.

But members of the ASA do not perceive any contradictions in their position. One member said that--

People who truly believe in academic freedom would realize protesting the blatant and systemic denial of academic freedom to Palestinians, which coupled with material deprivation of a staggering scale, far out ways concerns we in the West might have about our own rather privileged academic freedoms.

I am having trouble figuring out why we in the West who have the privilege of academic freedom should be immunized from the consequences of denying it to others.

I may have once been a professor, but I need help from other professors to help me understand and parse this tortured tangle of rationalization.