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 David Pan · Wednesday, April 24, 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 Columbia University president Nemat Shafik’s recent testimony to Congress indicates an important shift in our conception of academic freedom. While affirming the legal principle of free speech, she clearly accepted limits on academic freedom by stating that calls for genocide have no place at the university. Since at least one issue would disqualify someone from participating in Columbia’s educational project, she opens up the question of the limits of academic freedom and the duty of a university to enforce such limits through decisions on hiring and dismissal of faculty as well as suspension of students. While the American Association of University Professors seeks to criticize such restrictions on academic freedom, its 1940 statement on academic freedom stipulates that “[i]nstitutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole.” The congressional hearings have demonstrated that the common good may require restrictions on academic freedom, and such restrictions indeed are already part of the way universities see their mission.
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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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