Cornel West to speak at UCLA Despite Protests

Cornel West Image by Getty Images

By JTA April 22, 2015

Cornel West Image by Getty Images

(JTA) — Academic and author Cornel West, an outspoken critic of Israel, will remain as a speaker at a UCLA conference honoring the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, despite protests from the campus Jewish community.

The May 3 conference, titled “Moral Grandeur & Spiritual Audacity,” is organized by the UCLA Jewish studies department. Among the other speakers and panelists are David Myers, a UCLA professor; Heschel’s daughter, Susannah Heschel, a professor at Dartmouth College; and Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum. West’s participation was first reported by the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles.

“It is with dismay that we have been confronted by the outrageous pronouncements of Cornel West, a keynote speaker at the Heschel Conference,” the leadership of Hillel at UCLA said in a statement released Tuesday. The statement called West’s recent statements concerning Israel “an affront to Rabbi Heschel’s pursuit of truth.”

In recent months, West has spoken publicly in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. During Israel’s operation in Gaza last summer, the former Harvard professor called what he said was the Israeli “massacre” of Palestinians in Gaza “a crime against humanity.”

Todd Presner, director of UCLA’s Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, told the Jewish Journal on Tuesday that he does not plan to rescind the invitation, saying that West was asked to talk about Heschel and his relationship to the civil rights movement, not Israel. He pointed out that there are 25 other speakers coming to the symposium.

In an open letter to West published in the Jewish Journal, in which he referred to recent interviews in which West has slammed Israel, Judea Pearl, a UCLA professor and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, called on West to “excuse yourself from delivering this lecture.”

“No matter how eloquent your speech and how crafty your words, the audience you will face at UCLA will not be able to take them too seriously in light of your recent decision to become a leading propagandist for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement,” Pearl wrote.

Last month, Presner canceled a prestigious lecture he was to deliver at the University of Illinois over its withdrawal of a job offer to Steven Salaita, a harsh critic of Israel.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO