By Cary Nelson · Friday, April 26, 2024 The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative Introduction
 Every day, it seems, we advance into darkness we have not known before. It is not a journey we have sought out or chosen for ourselves. We are swept along by a current of malice that can only be avoided if we hide from the news. The spectacle of a mass antizionist and antisemitic “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on Columbia University’s central quad and elsewhere has structural predecessors, to be sure, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, but parallels with mass antisemitism require comparison with earlier historical moments. The Occupy Wall Street movement was notably accompanied by a substantial body of theoretical work, whereas the Columbia occupation is supported by little more than a Manichean view of a world divided between oppressor and oppressed peoples. The students promise to remain until Columbia meets their divestment demands—which presumably means they will be in their tents for a very long time indeed, since for governing boards to cede their investment authority to mob action means giving up their other responsibilities as well.
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By Gabriel Noah Brahm · Tuesday, April 23, 2024 A virulent, novel strain of anti-Zionist antisemitism is loose on the American campus.
In the wake of October 7, 2023’s barbaric terrorist assault on southern Israeli kibbutzim, a rave party, and a small military base, the Jewish state has been denounced loudly by extremists. As a consequence, Jewish students and faculty in the United States find themselves as unwelcome in the quad or the classroom as a troop of uniformed IDF soldiers. For pro-Hamas demonstrators, as for the terror organization itself, there is essentially no difference.
Apparently the result of a lab leak containing intellectual materials gleaned from various “studies” programs, where experimentation with conceptual “gain of function research” had gone on in relative obscurity for some time (Gender Studies, Middle East Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Critical Legal Studies), a potent “new-new antisemitism,” as it’s being called, is on the loose, spiked with heavy doses of esoteric and markedly volatile ideologemes. “Intersectionality,” in its more dubious applications, reduces all moral and political questions to matters of “oppressor” and “oppressed.” “Critical race theory” brands Jews not only as “white” (a term used on campus to mean “structurally racist”) but “hyper-white” (the whitest, therefore most racist of all). Theories of “settler colonialism” misrepresent Jews as colonizers in their own indigenous lands and the State of Israel as somehow illegitimate, despite its rather unique birth certificate, bestowed by the United Nations itself in 1947. Moreover, what the proponents of all these ideologies have in common is that they point to Jews and Israel as uniquely blameworthy personifications of all the “evils” attributed to the West, historically, by its occidentalist critics.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, April 5, 2018 Cary Nelson and Telos editor, Russell Berman, respond to Saree Makdisi and raise broader questions about the contemporary humanities. Read their essay at Fathom.
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By Andreas Pantazopoulos · Wednesday, September 20, 2017 The recent tripartite summit held in Thessaloniki in mid-June 2017 between the Greek and Israeli Prime Ministers and the Cypriot President to discuss energy- and security-related issues of the Eastern Mediterranean region, gave rise, again, to protests and strong reactions from the so-called political extremes against the visit of the Israeli Prime Minister to Greece. Within the context of the summit, the Greek and Israeli Prime Ministers also attended the official ceremony of unveiling a commemorative plaque for the planned Holocaust Museum in the city of Thessaloniki.
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By Telos Press · Monday, March 14, 2016 An important report by Alex Chalmers on antisemitic anti-Zionism and the scandal of Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) has just appeared at Fathom. An excerpt:
In a way, the antisemitic incidents I witnessed in OULC are less troubling than the culture which allowed such behaviour to become normalised. It is common to encounter antisemitic individuals in all walks of life, but the mass turning of a blind eye that has come to characterise vast parts of the Left is chilling. As antisemites can double up as vocal critics of Israel, there is a marked tendency on the Left to view them as fellow travellers whose hearts are in the right place – so their rhetoric passes the test of social acceptability.
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