A bipartisan slate of 134 U.S. Congress members wrote a letter to the American Studies Association protesting its decision last month to boycott Israeli universities. “Academic cooperation can be an important tool to help foster peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but you have chosen the unproductive path of isolation,” said the letter dated Friday, initiated…
The literature on Jewish self-hate is vast; not so the literature on Jewish self-love. Max Weber once proposed that oppressed peoples develop a “theodicy of disprivilege,” a way of explaining to themselves (and compensating for) their persecution, and that the most common such theodicies rely on the assertion by the oppressed of their superior moral…
The Modern Language Association’s annual conference here this past weekend was chock full with panels of Jewish interest, including discussions of Philip Roth, Yiddish, Sholem Aleichem, Jonathan Safran Foer, Sephardic film, Jewish monsters, Zionism and Holocaust literature. But the only events of Jewish interest that most people seemed to care about were four sessions that…
Thinkstock I would love to say that powerful argument won the day. I’d like to claim that intellect and facts persuaded the members, and whether the resolution was won or lost, its decisive outcome was a result of profound and significant reflection. The first resolution before the Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly served to censure…
Thinkstock This year’s MLA was supposed to be discussing the crisis of affairs in the Humanities. Only a lucky few of the graduate students on the market with their freshly minted PhDs will find jobs in academia — ever. The increasing corporatization of higher education is driving the scholarly agenda, as funders begin to dictate…
For the second time in less than a month, Israel demanded clarifications from the Netherlands on Dutch firms’ divestment from Israel’s occupation. On Friday, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the ambassador to Israel of the Netherlands, Caspar Veldkamp, to provide clarifications on the decision of PGGM, a large pensions administrator, to divest from five…
The debate over Israel in academia has turned to the Modern Language Association, which hosts a controversial panel on academic boycotts of Israel at its annual convention in Chicago starting today. Jewish groups and some MLA members are mounting a response to the session, which will feature panelists largely sympathetic to the boycott, divestment and…
(JTA) — Until recently, the rule of thumb in the pro-Israel community was that the bigger the academic group, the less likely it was to consider a boycott of Israeli colleagues. But with the 30,000-member Modern Language Association set to host a panel on BDS at its convention this week in Chicago, the rule may…
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