The British cosmologist Stephen Hawking has pulled out of a prestigious Israeli conference as part of an academic boycott to protest against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands, Cambridge University said on Wednesday. After conflicting explanations were given for Hawking’s decision, a spokesman for the British university confirmed that the wheelchair-bound scientist was snubbing the annual…
A student senate at the University of California, Berkeley narrowly passed a measure calling on the school to divest from three companies with dealings in the West Bank. Following 10 hours of sometimes heated debate, the Associated Students of the University of California senate early Wednesday morning passed the resolution in an 11-9 vote, the…
A report commissioned by Brooklyn College has cleared organizers of the controversial forum on the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement held in February at Brooklyn College of charges that they discriminated against Jews in admitting people to the event. The report faulted the pro-BDS organizers, however, for kicking out four attendees, suggesting that they were…
The largest student association in Canada passed a resolution endorsing the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel. With the passage late last week of the resolution, York University’s student association joins two others in Canada – the University of Toronto and Concordia University graduate student associations – in endorsing the BDS campaign, according…
A motion calling for blanket sanctions against Israel was rejected by the Oxford University Students’ Union. According to the website of Britain’s Union of Jewish Students, the OUSU measure calling for the Oxford student union to boycott Israeli institutions, goods and produce lost by a vote of 69-10, with 15 absentions. “It’s encouraging to see…
As it transpired, the brouhaha surrounding Brooklyn College’s BDS event was a good deal of hullabaloo over not a lot. Roughly 300 people turned up to listen to Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti speak about the need to boycott and divest from Israel, while outside the hall 150 protested either in favour of or against…
When the national director of the Anti-Defamation League takes out a large advertisement in the print edition of The New York Times, you kind of have to take notice. Given the cost of such an ad (surely more than one in the Forward!), the February 7 statement by Abraham Foxman signals that his organization believes…
Brooklyn College launched a probe into allegations that Jewish students were wrongly ejected from an event hosted by the school in support of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Karen Gould, the college’s president, on Wednesday ordered officials to conduct a “thorough independent review” of allegations that four members of the Jewish student group…
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