On March 21-22 the Israeli NGO Zochrot held its “Third International Conference on the Return of Palestinian Refugees” in Tel Aviv. The two-day event featured an all-star team of anti-Israeli Israeli speakers from NGOs and academia, all to promote the…
read moreOn the occasion of the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) 2016 convention that was held in early January in Austin, David Palumbo-Liu posted several tweets promoting events and material advocating for an academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Professor Palumbo-Liu is…
read moreIn a move uncharacteristic of U.S. policy as it has been carried out for decades, the Obama administration recently endorsed Europe’s version of a soft Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) campaign targeting Israeli merchandise. In late January, the U.S. Customs…
read moreJews have been accused of harming and murdering non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism, Theobald of Cambridge, mendaciously announced that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover…
read moreAmong the enduring strengths of the Israel boycott movement are its ability to convince certain types of people that the cause is not only just but successful. But with whom are those arguments effective? There is a strong contrast between…
read moreWinston Churchill could have been observing the sorry state of academic free speech today when he observed that “Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is…
read more[In the days just before the Messiah] a man’s enemies will be the members of his household …. —Talmud Tractate Sotah 49b (quoting Micah 7.6) At a recent panel discussion, I mentioned the passage above in response to…
read moreA cornerstone of the US feminist revolution has been women’s rights to their bodies and above all free access to abortion, something that has been at the heart of feminism since the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. But…
read moreWestern civilization has a tendency to look at terrorism as if it’s a B-rated movie: watching explosions and shootings, but paying little attention to the reasons these acts occur. We do not have the patience, nor interest, to understand, follow…
read moreSeeming to give proof to Orwell’s observation that some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals, yet another academic association—this time the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)—has followed the lead of the American Studies…
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