SPME
Jonathan Rynhold’s The Arab-Israeli Conflict in American Political Culture is a welcome and important scholarly corrective to what passes for serious commentary on how Americans see Israel. Consider one specimen of that commentary. This May, Haaretz published a piece…
read moreLast year, the British scholar Alan Johnson spoke up against a resolution to boycott Israel at the National University of Ireland, Galway. As he recounts the experience, “Anti-Israel student activists tried to break up the meeting by banging on the…
read moreLate last year, Germany was captivated by a mesmerizing, almost absurdist video at the heart of something eventually dubbed Toiletgate. In it, anti-Zionist activists Max Blumenthal and David Sheen chase Gregor Gysi, the chairman of die Linke, Germany’s left-wing opposition…
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BOSTON — As more student governments take up votes to divest from Israel, the BDS movement’s roots in American academia are probed in a newly published essay compilation, “The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.” The 32-essay collection takes particular aim…
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For most of his career Menachem Begin was maligned as a terrorist, first when he commanded the Irgun (Etzel in Hebrew), the military arm of the Revisionists, troops committed to removing Great Britain from Palestine, and later when David Ben-Gurion…
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Joshua Muravchik has written an insightful and well-researched book on the important question of how and why Israel has gone from being an admired underdog to a despised pariah among the nations. Before the Six-Day War of 1967, it…
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At the end of last year, the American Studies Association earned more press attention than it has in its entire history by voting to boycott Israeli academic institutions. The effect of the boycott has been devastating—not to Israel, where apparently its sole…
read moreOn 16 December 2013, a pre-eminent academic disciplinary body, the American Studies Association (ASA), used the occasion of its annual conference to push through a boycott of Israeli universities. This unprecedented attack on academic freedom came on the back of…
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In my favorite essay in the superb Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel, Emily Budick speaks to the failure of many academics caught up in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement to live up to two requirements of “moral thinking…
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The editors deserve major kudos for having compiled an impressive anthology featuring contributions in opposition to the deeply sordid, yet potentially potent, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Underlining the pervasive presence in the contemporary discourse of academic life in…
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