Brandeis Withdraws from American Studies Association

Becomes second university to do so after ASA’s Israel boycott

By Yair Rosenberg for Tablet Magazine

Brandeis University has become the second institution to withdraw from the American Studies Association, following the organization’s decision to boycott Israel. “We view the recent vote by the membership to affirm an academic boycott of Israel as a politicization of the discipline and a rebuke to the kind of open inquiry that a scholarly association should foster,” Brandeis’s American Studies Department posted on their web site. “We remain committed to the discipline of American Studies but we can no longer support an organization that has rejected two of the core principles of American culture–freedom of association and expression.”

Brandeis joins Penn State Harrisburg, which dropped its ASA membership yesterday. “As a prominent program in American Studies concerned for the welfare of its students and faculty, Penn State Harrisburg is worried that the recent actions by the National Council of the American Studies Association (ASA) do not reflect the longstanding scholarly enterprise American Studies stands for,” Penn State’s Dr. Simon Bronner, editor of the Encyclopedia of American Studies, said in a statement. “The withdrawal of institutional membership by our program and others allows us to be independent of the political and ideological resolutions issued by the ASA and concentrate on building American Studies scholarship with our faculty, students, and staff.”

During the run-up to the ASA vote on the Israel boycott, former Harvard President Lawrence Summers said he hoped universities would take such steps should the measure pass. “My hope would be that responsible university leaders will become very reluctant to see their universities’ funds used to finance faculty membership and faculty travel to an association that is showing itself not to be a scholarly association bur really more of a political tool,” he told Charlie Rose. It appears at least some institutions are following Summers’s lead.

Swarthmore Hillel Defies Headquarters on Boycott Israel Program Restrictions

Campus Group Condemns Guidelines for Constricting Jewish Student Debate

By Derek Kwait for The Jewish Daily Forward

Swarthmore College’s Hillel student board voted unanimously Sunday to defy Hillel International’s guidelines for Israel programming, condemning them for repressing free speech on Israel for Jewish students on campus.

The vote marked the first time a Hillel student board declared its intent to override the parent body’s guidelines, which prohibit a Hillel center from hosting or partnering with any group or individual that — among other things — supports sanction or boycott campaigns against Israel, or that “delegitimizes, demonizes, or applies a double standard to Israel.”

“This policy has resulted in the barring of speakers from organizations such as Breaking the Silence and [members of] the Israeli Knesset from speaking at Hillels without censorship,” the resolution said.

Breaking the Silence, a group composed of Israeli army veterans, has provoked intense controversy at Hillel centers for its focus on discussing ways in which it says the demands of military service in the Israeli-occupied West Bank corrode soldiers’ moral standards, and those of the Israeli Army itself.

Although the Swarthmore Hillel has not yet invited controversial speakers to campus, what is important is that the center can in the future if and when there is a student demand to hear the views of such speakers, said Joshua Wulfson, a Swarthmore undergrad and director of communications for the Hillel.

According to Wulfson, Swarthmore Hillel has little worry about regarding local censure or financial repercussions that might come from inviting speakers to campus who are not regarded as pro-Israel. “We had a fair amount of autonomy on this decision,” Wulfson said. “We are funded by our own endowment and have no board of overseers.”

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Professors' Group Calls on American Studies Association To Vote Down Israel Boycott

Vote of 5,000 Members Due December 15

By JTA


The American Association of University Professors called on members of the American Studies Association to vote down a resolution endorsing an academic boycott of Israel.

In an open letter to American Studies Association members published Dec. 6, two days after the ASA’s 20-member national council approved the boycott resolution, the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, which says it opposes academic boycotts as violations of academic freedom, wrote that it “recognizes the right of individual scholars to act in accordance with their own personal consciences.”

“No scholar should be required to participate in any academic activity that violates his or her own principles. In addition, faculty members have the right to organize for or against economic boycotts, divestment, or other forms of sanction. However, an organized academic boycott is a different matter. In seeking to punish alleged violations of academic freedom elsewhere, such boycotts threaten the academic freedom of American scholars to engage the broadest variety of viewpoints,” read the letter signed by AAUP President Rudy Fichtenbaum; and by AAUP First Vice-President Henry Reichman who is also chairman of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

The AAUP, which calls itself the “principal and oldest organization of American college and university faculty defending academic freedom,” said that it does “not have the organizational capacity to monitor academic freedom at institutions in other countries, nor are we in a position to pick and choose which countries we, as an organization, might judge.”

If a majority of the ASA’s voting members do not vote to endorse the boycott resolution by December 15, the national council said that it will withdraw the resolution and determine next steps. Voting is being undertaken electronically by the body’s 5,000 members.

The boycott is not binding on ASA members, meaning it would apply principally to the activities of the ASA as an organization.

The Settlements Fallacy

Tom Wilson for Mosaic Magazine

Israeli settlements do not make peace less likely, nor is there any logical reason why they should. In many cases, the very opposite is true

At the beginning of last week the French President Francois Hollande was in Ramallah and, as is customary, he was calling on Israel to halt settlement building, “for the sake of peace and to reach a deal”. In doing so the French President was giving voice to the Settlements Fallacy.

Of course, it would be unfair to single out the French government as being uniquely misguided on this subject; which Western country doesn’t essentially take this line?

That, however, doesn’t change the fact that it is quite mistaken to assert causality between an increase in settlements and a decline in the prospects for peace.

Experience thus far certainly suggests that settlements do not make peace less likely, nor is there any logical reason why they should. In actual fact, those places that Israel has removed its civilians from, are today some of the most lawless, radicalised and dangerous areas in the region.

Presently within the West Bank, while Jewish communities sit on less than two percent of the territory, Jews constitute around twenty percent of the population there. Many of these people were born and raised in the communities they live in, they are second and third generation West Bank Jews.

In other words, this group, the so called settlers, are a well-established ethnic community, a reality that is not going anywhere, much like the Arab-Israeli citizens living within the rest of Israel.

For nineteen short years, during the Jordanian occupation 1948-1967, the West Bank was ethnically cleansed of Jews. Prior to that, there were ancient and flourishing Jewish communities throughout the West Bank, most prominently alongside the religious sites in Hebron and in the Jewish villages south of Bethlehem.

There were Jews in the West Bank continuously before the Jordanian occupation and there have been ever since.

What reasonable person could seriously advocate returning this area to its Judenrein status during the brief Jordanian occupation? The very fact that this is what the Palestinians have been demanding hardly speaks of an attitude towards coexistence and reconciliation.

Just as the Palestinian leadership refuses to officially recognise the Jewish State, if Palestinians are unable to countenance living alongside Jews as neighbours then what does this say of their willingness to end hostilities with the Israelis?

By encouraging Palestinians in their desires to see Jews exiled from settlement communities, the international community radicalises and emboldens Palestinian hopes of successfully waging a war for driving out all Jews and totally defeating Israel. In those places that Settlements have been uprooted the Palestinians have increased their support for hardline groups and Islamic extremists have taken control.

The most obvious example is Gaza. There, in August 2005, the Israeli government evicted nine thousand Israelis and pulled out entirely with the intention that this area would serve as the first step towards full Palestinian independence.

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For One Teen, Getting a Jewish Education Was a Form of Rebellion

Lilit Marcus' Quest Back to Her Roots — On Her Own Terms

By Lilit Marcus for The Jewish Daily Forward

Someone once asked Pamela Anderson — the regular Playboy centerfold and “Baywatch” star — what she thought her two sons would be like when they grew up. She joked that in order to rebel against her, they would probably become accountants.

Though the quote seemed like a throwaway comment, it creeps back into my mind occasionally when I think about my own upbringing. It’s normal for kids to rebel against their parents or try to make a dramatic turn from the way that they grew up. My parents have an interfaith marriage (Dad’s Jewish, Mom’s Presbyterian) and never encouraged me to be involved with a particular religion. No bat mitzvah, nothing. And yet somehow I grew up eager to learn about world religions, embraced Judaism as my spiritual path and eventually worked as a religion reporter.

For many of my close friends, though, exactly the opposite happened. Having grown up in kosher homes, declining invitations to birthday parties that took place on Friday nights and spending years in boys-only or girls-only yeshivas, many of them now rebel against Judaism. Most of the people I know who eat bacon for breakfast and are highly critical of Israel are people who grew up in Jewish homes and think that religion was “forced on them.”

Yes, this is all anecdotal evidence. But it also made me wonder if the best way to raise a child who embraces Judaism is not to spend thousands on summer camps, day schools, bat mitzvah training and confirmation, but to back off and let that kid come to the faith on her own. If kids are going to rebel, don’t you want to trick them into rebelling in the least rebellious way possible?

I reached out to people who work in Jewish education to ask them about my early-education theory. Unsurprisingly, I got a lot of blank stares and prolonged silences. After all, why would a person who makes his or her living teaching kids about Judaism want to say that his or her line of work didn’t really matter? It is like asking a reporter to say that newspapers are obsolete and that kids should never read books.

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Friend and Photographer to Frida Kahlo

By Renee Ghert-Zand for The Jewish Daily Forward

Many people are familiar with an iconic photograph of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo titled “Frida at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, NYC 1933.” In the picture, Kahlo is seated, and a small painted self-portrait hangs above her and slightly to the left on the wall. Less known than the photograph itself is the name of the woman who took it. Her name was Lucienne Bloch, and she was Kahlo’s friend, and an artist in her own right.

The Jewish Community Library in San Francisco currently has an exhibition of photographs by Lucienne Bloch, along with some taken by her father, the famous Swiss-born Jewish musical composer Ernest Bloch (1880-1959). The show, titled “A Shared Eye,” highlights the father’s interest in artfully documenting nature, and the daughter’s preferred focus on people and what the camera can catch of their psychological make-up.

Some of Ernest’s photographs of life in the Swiss countryside grab the eye, including “The Mushroom Lady, 1912” featuring an elderly woman in a witch-like ensemble looking straight into the camera while holding a giant mushroom in each hand. Lucienne’s photos of social and political demonstrations in New York and Detroit in the mid-1930’s are well composed. Also of note is her rare photo of Albert Einstein playing violin in a musical group at Princeton.

However, it is Lucienne’s intimate portraits of her friend Kahlo in the 1930s that fascinate and steal this show. There are a few photos that include Kahlo’s husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, but a group of seven images of Kahlo alone command the most attention. One photo has Kahlo with a doily on her head, another with her biting her necklace, and yet another with her by a window.

One titled, “Frida with Cinzano Bottle” was taken in 1935. “Frida caught Diego having an affair with her favorite sister, Cristina. To rebel against him, Frida cut off her long black hair. The Cinzano Bottle she holds represents the unborn child she could never give him,” Lucienne Bloch wrote in her diary about the image.

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An Inter-Everything Conversation About the Pew Survey

A three-part response to the Pew Survey. Read all three responses.

by Derek M. Kwait for NewVoices

We might just be the last Jewish organization to respond to the big bad Pew Survey and we’re fine with that. It seems like every response so far is other people telling us what how we need to feel about it, whether we should be scared, take it as a a dare to engage singles in their 20′s suffering attrition, be optimistic, or think they got it all wrong. But here at New Voices, we (and by “we” I mean “me,” editor Derek Kwait) aren’t so into having other people doing our thinking for us. To this end, we’ve engaged two of the best and brightest Jews in academia and two of NV’s best and brightest student writers to participate in an inter-generational, inter-denominational, inter-gender, inter-orientation, inter-community, inter-national (we included a Canadian)…in other words, inter-human dialogue on the Survey’s results in the hopes that, after hearing all these varied perspectives, you will be able to find yourself a little in all of them, and be a little offended by all of them.

By engaging such different Jews in conversation with each other here, we hope to engender better conversations among different Jews in campuses and communities out in the world, thus bolstering what all agree to be the most important thing about Jewish life: a strong and vibrant Jewish community.

Meet the conversers:

Dr. Steven M. Cohen [SMC] is Research Professor of Jewish Social Policy at Hebrew Union College in New York, and Director of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU Wagner. He received an honorary doctorate from the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, the Marshall Sklare Award of the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry, and a National Jewish Book Award. He had been cited as one of the Forward Fifty. In 2012, he was elected president of the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry.

Dr. Sarah Bunin Benor [SBB] is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Linguistics in 2004. She teaches about the social science of American Jews, as well as about language and culture. She wrote the acclaimed book Becoming Frum, about the way Jews who become Orthodox later in life use language, has published many academic papers, and given lectures around the country about Jewish languages, linguistics, Yiddish, and American Jews. She edits the Journal of Jewish Languages and the Jewish Language Research Website, both of which she founded.

Eliana A. Glogauer [EAG] is New Voices’ chief editorialist. She currently studies government at IDC Herzliya, and is a co-founder of the Israel advocacy initiative, AskMeMore. She is the promised Canadian, from Toronto.

Jonathan P. Katz [JPK] is a New Voices contributor, and studies history and geography at the University of Chicago. Originally from New York City, he is also a polyglot and was a summer research intern for the Urban Land Institute.

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