Bringing Holocaust Denial to Campus: Interview With ‘Hoaxocaust!’ Star Barry Levey

by Derek M. Kwait for newvoices.org

Yesterday, I reviewed Hoaxocaust!, a new play performed and written by Barry Levey that satirizes Holocaust denial simply by putting the arguments of some of its biggest proponents, Arthur Butz, David Irving, Robert Faurisson, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in context. I saw the show the night of September 11 (coincidentally), then on September 12, I caught up with Levey in a coffee shop in Downtown Manhattan to discuss what it is like to portray such horrible people, how Holocaust denial and similar conspiracies spread, the Holocaust’s role in American Jewish identity, and his plans to take the show to campus.


Have you heard  from anyone portrayed in the play?

No. Sometimes I’m grateful I haven’t heard from any of them, and sometimes I think getting sued by a crazy Holocaust denier wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

It would be good publicity.

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Popping New York’s Jewish Bubble

by Jonathan Katz for newvoices.com

I grew up in the New York area: capital of the world, city of no rival, the Fourth Rome (defeating the Third, and there shall be no Fifth). True, I could note that this place – city and suburbs thereof – is overconfident, maddeningly arrogant, and rude to a horrifying degree. Yet it was a marvelous, diverse place to grow up, filled with the strange wonder and confident hum of a global center. Especially as a Jew – for this city and its surroundings comprise a Jerusalem of America.

To be a Jew in New York is to in many ways be completely normal: though our people only comprise one out of ten of the region’s population, the number of Jews in New York is overwhelming. One out of eight Jews in the world lives somewhere on a MTA or New Jersey Transit line leading to Midtown Manhattan; the city of New York has more Jews than any city other than Tel Aviv. Rosh Hashanah is a city-wide public school holiday. To be a Jew in New York is remarkably easy, especially compared to anywhere else in the Diaspora; some, myself included, argue that it is even easier than Israel. One never has to worry about kashrut or finding a synagogue for the observant, events and memory for the secular, and finding a Jewish match for us all. Who would want to live anywhere else?

…there are many reasons to leave this bubble of Jewish ease.

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Jewish Professors Hit Back Against Pro-Israel Campus 'Blacklist'

40 'Heavyweight' Academics Attack AMCHA Initiative

By Paul Berger for The Jewish Daily Forward

A Jewish advocacy group is warning students about 218 Middle East studies professors in colleges and universities across the country whose classes might contain “anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric.”

The AMCHA Initiative singled out the professors because, during the conflict between Israel and Hamas this past summer, they signed a petition calling for an academic boycott of Israel.

“We believe the professors who have signed this petition may be so biased against the Jewish state that they are unable to teach accurately or fairly about Israel or the Arab-Israel conflict, and may even inject antisemitic tropes into their lectures or class discussion,” wrote Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith, co-founders of the AMCHA Initiative.

Now, 40 of America’s leading Jewish studies professors, including Hasia Diner of New York University and Robert Alter of the University of California, Berkeley, have signed a statement calling AMCHA’s actions “deplorable” and a threat to academic freedom. Bernard Avishai, a business professor who splits his time between Dartmouth College and Hebrew University and who has written extensively on Jewish matters, also signed the statement, which said, “We find it regrettable that AMCHA, so intent on combating the boycott of Israel, has launched a boycott initiative of its own.”

The Jewish studies professors say their worries go beyond AMCHA’s list of Middle East professors.

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First Results of the Jewish Student Survey are In!

from newvoices.com

Preliminary results of the Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students 2014 are out. Started last spring by Drs. Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar at the Trinity College Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, this is the first comprehensive scientific survey ever of an underrepresented and under studied demographic: American Jewish college students. They polled 1,157 self-identified Jewish students across the country on a number of key issues to find out what’s on the minds of the next Jewish generation. So, according to their findings, what are the crucial issues facing young Jews today? Kosmin and Keysar prepared this Wordle of student answers to that question:

Chart 1

“In your opinion, what are the crucial issues concerning young Jewish people like yourself today?”

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For College Students Who Keep Kosher, More Campuses Offer More Options

Kosher food is becoming an option at a growing number of schools, from Hillels to dining halls to restaurants

By Yair Rosenberg for Tablet Magazine

The great knish controversy erupted at Harvard in the spring of 1992. It began with a toaster oven. The unassuming appliance was introduced into the dining hall of Dunster House—one of Harvard’s 12 residential dormitories for upperclassmen—as a courtesy to kosher-keeping students. Until then, observant Jews had been restricted to consuming the few kosher staples on offer, like sliced bread and tuna fish. Now for the first time, with the aid of their new toaster, they could sample such delicacies as rabbinically certified frozen knishes and pizza bagels.

But this did not sit well with Noel Ignatiev, a tutor in History and Literature at Dunster. In a letter to the dining-hall manager, he protested the use of “public funds” to finance “sectarian” concerns, which he deemed an unacceptable breach in the “separation of church and state.” It was a curious complaint, given that Harvard is a private institution with its own Divinity School and that the money for the $40 toaster was essentially coming from religious students, who would otherwise be paying for a meal plan from which they could not actually eat. “I don’t know whether to be offended, annoyed, or simply to laugh,” then-Hillel President Shai Held told the Harvard Crimson. Students decided to split the difference, and Ignatiev was alternately condemned and mocked in the pages of the school paper, which reported the outcry under the immortal headline “Students Support Kosher Toaster.” That May, Ignatiev’s contract with Dunster House was not renewed.

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The ‘Mainstreaming’ Of Jewish Studies

Steve Lipman, Staff Writer, The Jewish Week

Houston — Administrators at Texas Christian University, an institution in Forth Worth affiliated with the Disciples of Christ denomination, needed some advice last year on starting a Jewish studies program, which is now in the planning stages. A small program that had begun under the auspices of the school’s Brite Divinity School offered only a few courses a year to prospective members of the clergy; TCU administrators wanted to establish a larger Jewish studies program for the entire university.

Instead of contacting the leaders of decades-old, better-known Jewish Studies programs like those of Columbia University or Ohio State University, they called Matthias Henze, founding director of The Program in Jewish Studies at Rice. That program was founded in 2009 at Rice University, a prestigious private institution in Houston.

Henze, who knew members of the TCU administration from earlier academic meetings, said they had reached out to him because they knew he had started the Rice program from scratch. “They wanted to know how I built the program,” says Henze, associate professor of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and holder of the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Chair in Biblical Studies.

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“Gaza = Auschwitz”

Holocaust inversion—the claim that Israelis are the new Nazis and Palestinians the new Jews—has come to the American university campus.

By Martin Kramer in Mosaic Magazine

Five years ago, during an earlier Israeli operation in Gaza, the British novelist Howard Jacobson explained why “call[ing] the Israelis Nazis and liken[ing] Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto” goes far beyond mere “criticism” of Israel:

Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity, as though pity is negotiable or has a sell-by date, is the latest species of Holocaust denial. . . . Instead of saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, the modern sophisticated denier accepts the event in all its terrible enormity, only to accuse the Jews of trying to profit from it, either in the form of moral blackmail or downright territorial theft. According to this thinking, the Jews have betrayed the Holocaust and become unworthy of it, the true heirs to their suffering being the Palestinians.

Experts call this Holocaust inversion. Based in the claim that Israel now behaves toward the Palestinians as Nazi Germany behaved toward the Jews, it originated in post-World War II Soviet propaganda, and from there spread to the Soviets’ Arab clients. It is now fully embedded in the Arab-Muslim world, where it grows and mutates in symbiosis with outright denial that the Holocaust occurred or a radical reduction of its genocidal scale, ferocity, and number of victims. Holocaust inversion has a graphic omnipresence in cartoons all over the Arab and Iranian press, where Israelis are regularly portrayed in Nazi regalia. Elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond, it has surfaced in the rhetoric of populist demagogues and the media. In Turkey’s new president and long-time prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it now has a champion in a head of state. In Europe, Holocaust inversion is busy spreading beyond its original locus of infection and finding a home among intellectuals and activists, especially on the Left.

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