SPME
The new issue of the journal Israel Studies has caused an international controversy, initially in academia, but now stretching well beyond the ivory tower. ‘Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict’ sought to challenge what the editors and contributors considered an often delegitimising language used by often highly political and vehemently ‘anti-Zionist’ scholars to frame academic discussion of Israel and Zionism. The lead…
Mobs are always unseemly, but academic mobs especially so. We expect a certain detachment from the people who wear those medieval robes and funny hats, which seems inconsistent with mobbing. As importantly, we recognize (or should) that the truth with respect to complex scholarly matters is not a democratic phenomenon. As scholars we should each…
The old joke about academia is that the arguments in the faculty lounges are so nasty because the stakes involved are so small. That’s often true about most things that go on in the narrow world of intellectual specialists, who guard their university department fiefdoms with jealous ferocity. They conduct their scholarly wars with publications…
More than 100 professors and students protested a recent journal issue focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the editorial board wasn’t just going to sit there and take it…. Editors of the “Israel Studies” journal are rejecting demands by a confederacy of leftist professors for an apology and for the removal of a special summer…
