SPME
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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Early this year my colleague Gabriel Brahm and I approached a series of academics with an unusual request. Higher education was facing an increasing number of struggles over the pressure to boycott Israeli universities. Academic freedom had long supported the…
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Stephen Norwood has given us a book that catalogues and documents the far left’s anti- Semitism in America. He leads us through the details, the varieties, the changes, and the exceptions. He elucidates the far left’s American manifestations and traces…
read moreStudying anything having to do with Jews is at once conventional and sedate and potentially perilous. In 2010, a project at Yale University gathered experts from a number of different countries and disciplines to examine the peculiarly modern forms taken by…
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With the recent breakdown of another iteration of attempts to “make forward progress” in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, many have remarked on the basic intractability of the issues that divide the two. Among these, the disposition of the Palestinian refugees remains a…
read moreWhat is one to make of a volume of specialised essays in contemporary philosophy – a compilation including some of today’s most prominent leaders in the field – that wants to be both a highbrow offering of intellectually sophisticated, refined,…
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In 2012, the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise published “Israel and the Campus,” a study noting 674 anti-Israel events at 108 United States and Canadian universities during the 2011-12 academic year. It remains undetermined how many of these events led to the…
read moreIn the first half of the 20th century, most Jews failed to find their way to a successful strategy for dealing with the threat of antisemitism. Some individuals emigrated, for example to Britain, the United States or Palestine. Some found…
read moreAnti-Judaism: The Western Tradition By David Nirenberg Norton, 610 pp., $35.00 In 1844, Karl Marx published his essay “On the Jewish Question.” This wasn’t an engagement with Judaism, or with Jewish history, or even with the sociology of German Jews.…
read moreThe cultural theorist Judith Butler has written what she intends as a critique of Zionism derived from Jewish sources. Her argument: the diasporic experience was Good and Jewish, while sovereignty in Palestine has been Bad and Non-Jewish. Her political conclusion:…
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