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Showing Original Post only (View all)Jewish faculty reject the weaponization of antisemitism [View all]
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2024/04/10/jewish-faculty-reject-the-weaponization-of-antisemitism/
Dear President Shafik,
We write as Jewish faculty of Columbia and Barnard in anticipation of your appearance before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on April 17, where you are expected to answer questions about antisemitism on campus. Based on the committees previous hearings, we are gravely concerned about the false narratives that frame these proceedings to entrap witnesses. We urge you, as the University president, to defend our shared commitment to universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production against this 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.
Its opportunistic use of antisemitism in a moment of crisis is expanding and strengthening longstanding efforts to undermine educational institutions. After launching attacks on public universities from Florida to South Dakota, this campaign has opened a new front against private institutions. The prospect of Rep. Elise Stefanik, a member of congress with a history of espousing white nationalist politics, calling university presidents to account for alleged antisemitism on their campuses reveals these proceedings as disingenuous political theater. In the face of these coordinated attacks on higher education, universities must insist on their freedom to research and teach inconvenient truths. This includes historical injustices and the contemporary structures that perpetuate them, regardless of whether these facts are politically inexpedient for certain interest groups.
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 dont 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 antisemitismdiscrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews, according to the Jerusalem Declarations definitionis rampant on Columbias campus. To argue that taking a stand against Israels 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 understandingand disingenuous misrepresentationof 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 Israels 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.
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Here's AIPAC making common cause with anti-semitic conspiracy theorists, from Viktor Orbn to all manner of far-right
Celerity
Apr 17
#3
Apparently, as per Colombia's own Office of the President, antisemitism is indeed rampant on its campuses
Beastly Boy
Apr 18
#4
I don't think endorsing the campaign of killing of 10,000 children and same sex marriage are equivalent.
David__77
Apr 18
#6
Listen - you either support Likud / Netanyahu unquestioningly, or, you're a raging anti-Semite.
Oneironaut
Apr 18
#8
If that were the only distinction, I would expect, given their total silence on Syria, that
Beastly Boy
Apr 18
#21