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.
Continue reading →
By Andrew Pessin · Monday, April 22, 2024 The following essay is the first in 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 I try to be sympathetic to the anti-Israel activists roiling campuses everywhere, including at Columbia University, my graduate alma mater, lately perhaps the most roiled. I do that because of my quaint conception of the academy as a place where, in the pursuit of truth, people should freely express their opinions but also be willing to listen to the opinions of others. And I think about how I would act, say, during the early 1940s, when I learned that a genocide against the Jewish people was occurring and all too many people were not paying attention. Wouldn’t I protest, loudly? Disrupt “business as normal”? Get in the face of the people ignoring it or, worse, in any degree complicit in it? Maybe even break a few rules or laws? I hope that I would.
The problem, then, isn’t the mayhem per se. Yes, it’s appropriately against the rules to domineer a campus for your cause, to rally noisily inside buildings and libraries and disrupt classes and exams, to create a hostile environment for others who are entitled to a safe and secure one to pursue their own paths, programs, politics. Those misbehaviors must be—and have been long overdue for being—punished, by methods including suspension and expulsion. But if you believe a genocide is going on and it’s a moral imperative to stop it, well, I get it: do what you need to, and accept the punishment.
The problem here runs deeper, ultimately rooted in the academy itself: it’s that they believe a genocide is going on in the first place, or have even misidentified the true genocide, as we’ll see below. More generally, it’s that they have adopted an entire narrative that is profoundly one-sided, oversimplified, ignorant of history, often counter to the facts, mistaken about who are the good guys and who are the bad, and driven, ultimately, by hatred and bigotry—and which licenses the profoundly outrageously immoral violence of October 7.
Continue reading →
Reckoning with October 7: Israel, Hamas, and the Problem of Critical Theory
A TPPI Conference
November 8–9, 2024
New York City
The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute welcomes paper proposals for a conference that reckons with the response, both within higher education at large and especially from the precincts of critical theory, to the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The conference will cap a year of webinars, podcasts, blog posts, and publications about the topic, and will form the basis of a special memorial issue of the journal Telos. Full papers intended for that special issue will also be considered at this time.
Beginning in the immediate, politicized aftermath of the Hamas atrocities, theory has been present—in ways that should give us pause. It was present in sublimated ways, as widespread presuppositions and “narratives” infused with charismatic authority by a popularized postcolonial jargon. It was there in kinetic, emotionally charged, intellectually unsophisticated responses, in “mass” demonstrations, public statements by groups and institutions, and individual social media campaigns. It was there in “intersectional” ideology. Yet above all, it was manifest in considered, open, intentional ways within universities, as well as among educated elites taught and credentialed by them. The college campus, the traditional home of critical theory—which emerged in the twentieth century most powerfully as a response to fascism and Nazism—has become a nodal point for the dramatic unfolding of a cognitively, morally, and politically deficient discourse about a present-day Kristallnacht.
Continue reading →
By The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute · Tuesday, February 20, 2024 The third webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s yearlong series reckoning with the response to October 7 will take place on Thursday, March 7, 2024, at noon Eastern Time.
Click here to register for the event.
All subsequent panels are likewise scheduled for noon Eastern Time on the seventh day of each month. Panels will run between 90 to 120 minutes, followed by a colloquy among the panelists and audience Q&A.
Our third webinar considers feminist perspectives on sex and violence in the Israel–Hamas conflict. Our panelists are Mariam Memarsadeghi and Batya Ungar-Sargon. Our respondent is Nina Power.
Continue reading →
In today’s episode of the TPPI Podcast, Gabriel Noah Brahm talks with scholar and writer Abe Silberstein. Their podcast follows a webinar about the role of critical theory in the response within higher education to the atrocities of October 7. During the webinar, which also featured Cary Nelson and Manuela Consonni, Silberstein had presented a working paper about Frantz Fanon. The podcast conversation with Silberstein and Brahm is available as a video or in audio-only form. A podcast conversation with Cary Nelson is also available here.
Continue reading →
By Gabriel Mayer-Heft · Monday, February 12, 2024 Our tour began at the central train station in Tel Aviv. My colleagues and I were delighted to see the members of our board as well as several others in the field of international relations. While waiting for our bus to arrive, we engaged in pleasant conversation. As we boarded the bus to begin our descent to Kfar Aza, I noticed that the sky was emblazoned with a beautiful double rainbow.
Once on the bus, the conversation quickly turned to our musings on the war and the future of the region. As those who attended were quite knowledgeable, it was a pleasure to listen to their erudite analysis. Conversation quickly subsided once we drove past the area in which the cars from the Nova party were parked. The enthusiastic conversation died down, and everyone looked slack-jawed upon the cenotaph. The rest of the journey was quieter.
Upon arriving at the Kibbutz, there was a palpable change in mood from when we had first departed. Though faces of those in attendance were concealed by the benches on the bus throughout the journey, it was now clear that their expressions had hardened. We donned our vests and helmets, and set out.
Continue reading →
|
|
