SPME
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…
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Last December, the membership of the American Studies Association voted to endorse a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Has the boycott effectively challenged the Israeli state’s discrimination and violence against Palestinians? Or has it only further isolated voices of dissent…
read moreMESA appears to be the most important body in the American academia. That’s where the media take experts from to explain the Israeli-Arab conflict. That’s the place which breeds students who will go on to become commentators and researchers. If…
read moreOver the coming days, I’ll be attending the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) annual conference in Washington. It’s time for me to catch up on the zeitgeist in my field, and there’s no better place to do that than at…
read moreI never imagined that a day would come when some of the world’s leading corporations would fund calls for Israel’s destruction, let alone at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. But that is exactly what happened last week at…
read moreThe global demonization of Israel and the Jewish people is gathering terrifying pace and ferocity, not least on university campuses. During last summer’s war in Gaza, the Western media uncritically promulgated as truth the inflammatory Hamas lie that Israel was…
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With summer behind us, students are returning to campuses across North America, and a new wave of student activism is taking up positions on both sides of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The two camps may look similar in terms of funding…
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Anti-Israel protesters at a Boston rally held during this summer’s Operation Protective Edge (photo credit: Elan Kawesch) BOSTON – Two national student organizations’ gatherings were held on Boston university campuses this month to expose what they call the “intersectionality” of Zionism with…
read moreBoycotts and divestments appeal to ideals of citizenship. Vote with your money. Make perpetrators of injustice pay a price. Raise the stakes so that, when they get their calculating minds around a cost-benefit analysis, they decide the cost is too…
read moreAs yet more evidence that academics are regularly able to engage in what George Orwell sardonically referred to as “doublethink,” “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them,” this month 40 professors…
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