Talia Elkin is one of the students active in the UChicago Maroons for Israel, a peaceful group that nevertheless tried to counteract the Encampment this year by putting up approved banners and Israeli flags nearby. (The banners and flags were invariably destroyed or removed each night by the Encampers, and then the Maroons for Israel would replace them.) Over the last two years I’ve had some interactions with Talia, and that includes putting up the letter that she and Eliza Ross wrote to our administration complaining about their event being deplatformed by the Students for Justice in Palestine. (The SJP got a meaningless slap on the wrist for this disruption.)
At any rate, Talia is one of eight Jewish students from various schools asked by Tablet magazine to briefly describe how the Hamas/Israel war affected their college experience in the last year. It’s a sad litany of anti-Semitic woe, and although the students are resolute, they’re also shaken and upset.
I’ll reproduce two essays, including Talia’s “cat litter” scenario (Talia will in fact be interning for Tablet this summer.)
Click the headline below read all eight. First, Tablet‘s intro:
For Jewish American college students, last fall began with optimism: finding old friends on campus, new books stacked on dorm-room desks, curiosity about the semester to come.
But what followed the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 crushed that optimistic spirit: Zionists are not welcome. Go back to Poland. Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists. Jewish students across the country were targeted and vilified; they lost friends; in some cases they were told by administrators that their safety could not be ensured.
To mark the end of a year like no other, we have collected short reflections from college students across the country. These are not stories about Israel but about America; they are not about the war in Gaza but the one at home.
Talia Elkin
University of Chicago
Talia Elkin is from Teaneck, New Jersey, and is currently a student at the University of Chicago.
My peers at the University of Chicago are some of the nation’s best and brightest young minds. They’re also shitting in tents.
The beige pop-up tent, which served as my classmates’ makeshift commode, consisted of a bucket and some kitty litter. Somehow it was hardly remarkable in situ, surrounded by a hodgepodge of other tents, tables, and banners. Nearby was the medical tent, which, according to an Instagram post, was trying to provide essential supplies like tourniquets, ChapStick, condoms, and HIV tests. After all, as Karl Marx famously said, the revolutionaries “have nothing to lose but their chains and their virginity.”
Thirty years from now, my friends’ firsthand accounts of rabid university antisemitism will be my kids’ history lesson in school. My kids will ask me about it over dinner: Were college campuses really that scary? I will say yes, because it’s true. And I will tell them how a sea of my educated classmates cheered for an intifada, justifying Oct. 7 again and again.
But I also know that when I reflect on my junior year of college, sitting at the kitchen table with my kids, I’ll end up shaking with laughter. Because sometimes Jewish history can feel like an endless loop of suffering. Our people have faced so many enemies and hardships, have come close to extinction, and have known suffocating and unrelenting fear. The Poop Tent, though; this is something new.
. . and one more story without any levity:
Mimi Gewirtz
New York University
Mimi grew up in Minneapolis. She is graduating from NYU’s Gallatin School.
On Sunday, Oct. 8, I found out that Hersh Goldberg-Polin was abducted by Hamas. Though he lost half his left arm to a grenade while protecting a bomb shelter packed with other civilians, there was some evidence he was being kept alive in the tunnels beneath Gaza.
Hersh was my classmate for the two years I attended school in Jerusalem during my parents’ sabbatical. Hersh had moved to Israel with his family from Virginia around a year before I met him. On Oct. 9, I posted Hersh’s picture, asking for information, on my Instagram Story along with a picture of his bedroom with a “Jerusalem for All” poster plastered on his wall. Within a few hours, I had lost 50 followers. Posters of Hersh and the other hostages started to appear on campus walls and windows. A week later they were being torn down.
I have family and friends in Israel. Some have spent most of the past seven months on reserve duty. As a progressive, I am someone who believes in the fundamental right of Israel to exist but opposes the actions of its current government; someone who is desperate to see the darkest period in the history of Israelis (Jews and Arabs) and Palestinians end. For me and people like me, opportunities for dialogue on campus have gone from fraught to virtually nonexistent. I want to be able to mourn the loss of lives and call for a cease-fire together with those protesting, if at the same time I could openly carry a “free the hostages now” poster. I want to express my empathy for the loss of life in Gaza, but not if I have to stand next to a banner that says that Oct. 7, the abduction of Hersh, was resistance.
While the most aggressive protesters defend themselves on free speech grounds, our ability to engage in real dialogue is continuously shrinking amid the fear of giving offense. I have always been cautious about who I can talk to about these issues. But since Oct. 7, that circle has shrunk to a vanishing dot. College was sold to me as a “marketplace of ideas.” On my campus, however, nuance was the first casualty in a war of slogans and intimidation, and I have come to live in a tiny bubble, not unlike the days of COVID.
I am thankful for non-Jewish friends who understand my fears. They are my eyes and ears. One warned me to avoid the library after seeing a group angrily cheering for an “intifada.” Another said she herself was leaving a class after the professor promised the students he would never give them anything to read that was written by “settler-colonialists.”
It was a painful irony that I recently found myself watching a group of faculty protesters occupying the campus library, a supposed bastion of contemplation and learning, to loudly denounce Israel and anyone who will not renounce it entirely. I feel lost in the noise. There are no more quiet places where we can hear one another speak.
My own story is short. Although I’m a cultural Jew and disdain all religious beliefs, including Jewish ones, I always considered myself Jewish in some way, perhaps because it gives me a kind of “tribe.” I use Yiddish words, visited Israel last August to see what it was about, and have memorized every Jewish joke I’ve seen. But I haven’t been in shul for decades.
And I never really empathized with religious Jews until I saw what happened on October 7 and what were to me the completely bizarre consequences: about five days of mourning for the butchered Israelis, followed by a growing and now worldwide denigration of Israel, even including its right to exist as a country. Covert antisemitism has become more overt. And so I’ve initiated more contacts with Jewish students this year, trying to support them as best I’m able. I’m not great at that, but I try.
Why? Because of this motto I saw on Facebook: “The more you hate us, the Jewisher we get.”
I don’t have the official quote reference for this on-the-spot – but I’m sure everyone knows it:
The rise of “Islamic fundamentalism” is only a problem because the fundamentals of Islam are a problem.
PROBABLY Sam Harris. Must look up.
+1
Those are moving stories.
And the shit bucket amused me greatly.
Talia Elkin’s writing style is brilliant. I’d read just about anything she wrote. I love the way she thinks and how she slices into things. There are some lines in there that are comedic gems. I don’t know how anyone so close to events that enraging and terrifying can pull that off. She’s a tough cookie.
+1 agree.
These are moving stories; in some of them, there’s an implied “belief” or “sense” that the future will be better, that we’ll look back at these (insane) times with disbelief, humor and repugnance. But will we? The latter will *only* be true if the future is far more enlightened than it is today.
The future will only be brighter if we decide (collectively) that America is worth fighting for, if we understand -clearly- that jews are often the canaries in the coal mine, that the vulnerability of jews often signal the first signs of civilizational collapse.
I worry about the future, about our nation and our earth.
It disappoints me greatly how so many progressives — the people who claimed to be in possession of advanced moral superiority — failed so utterly and so completely upon getting their first . little . test. The rainbow mob immediately became like any rally from the far right.
Yes. So easily “bought”. It’s chilling. It depresses me.
And this:
“Christ is King” has now become an antisemitic trope on the far right (think Candace Owens and others). Just as “Allahu Akbar” is on the far left (or woke left). So bizarre, they are the same people – a mirror-reflection of each other.
Yes the old fashioned antisemitism is still alive and well, although not terribly common, fortunately.
But the new leftist version seems to have sprung out of nowhere. The source is seen partly in new condemnations of “settler colonialism.” And the Arab/Muslim influence is there too, with words like “intifada.”
It’s all very depressing to me.
Yes. To me as well.
The new leftist version was brewing in universities ( academia ) for decades.
Here’s one example of how this happened at Columbia.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/boycott-divest-and-sanction-columbia
It remains unclear to me how we eradicate the hatred from academia. Student visas should be revoked.
I worry too about the future and whilst not of the USA Nation I worry about it as well as I have a lifetime of contacts and friends from and in the US and almost without exception they state that the current climate of antisemitism and anti USA is not the heart of the USA and to be fair the USA is not the only country with these problems. It is an international attack on western values and society and as the Jewish young lady stated “My peers at the University of Chicago are some of the nation’s best and brightest young minds. They’re also shitting in tents” It concisely sums up those individuals and the writer made me laugh which also made my day with her positive outlook.
+1
True. Also, the recent Harvard-Harris poll does render some hope.
It appears that most Americans (though not enough of them) are relatively sane.
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/HHP_May2024_KeyResults.pdf
I think we need to actively speak about the positive aspects of the west (of which there are many). At least that.
I couldn’t agree more about the positive aspects of “western” values, they far outweigh the bad which unfortunately are often all that some seem to selectively remember and are committed to highlight at every opportunity.
It is not perfect and I have worked and lived in many countries, including the middle east and I know where I prefer to be, certainly not the middle east, except for Israel.
+1.
I remember my mother (she is no longer alive, we lost her in 2022) telling me stories about America in a distant and remote village in Sri-Lanka. Stories about men on the moon, the Cuban missile crisis and Dr. King. She got all this from a small short wave radio that featured (VOA) the Voice of America – I’m not sure VOA is -even- active anymore. It (VOA) did play a positive role, despite the (perhaps sometimes accurate) allegation of “propagandizing the world”.
That was before the civil war in Sri-Lanka and before we immigrated to the west, had I stayed in Sri-Lanka, I never would have had (and still do have) the opportunities the west gave me.
Our nation needs us.
In answer to your question about Voice of America, it’s still around. So it Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Thx.
I feel the same way—an atheist Jew defending Jewish identity, culture, and history, and standing up for the only state where Jews are unambiguously welcome: Israel.
I feel for those Jewish students. Those who read this will know that they matter and they are loved. They are tomorrows leaders, the real champions for justice.
+1
Yes +1 Norman. I cannot add anything. Thank you.
I’m not even Jewish but I’ve known since 1967 — the Six Day War was the first foreign event I can recall taking an interest in as a just-barely teenager — Israel needs to do whatever it needs to do to survive and thrive. And here we are 57 years later with the same choice: secular (mostly) civilization or religious barbarism.
No compromising.
I’m not Jewish either but I find the new protests and the old antisemitism (it seems more obvious now) very disturbing. I guess it’s the intolerant, self-righteous attitude. It’s not just Jews they’re after.
Me too. I’m a reformed Catholic but “The more Palestinians hate them, the Jewisher I get.”
+1
This is very much off topic but since i can’t find your email i will bring it up here:
Do you have any comments about this: https://news.mongabay.com/2024/03/male-dominance-isnt-the-default-in-primate-societies-new-study-shows/
It seems like it’s politically motivated research and questionable conclusions.
You can answer me via email if you don’t want to derail this comment section.
I haven’t read the paper so I don’t have anything to say. You shouldn’t assume that I’ll read a paper when a reader points it out, as y time is limited. Sorry!
Response to joNi #6):
I read the linked news summary (but not the research paper discussed).
The data seem legitimate and to me unsurprising: if you look at all extant primates, about 60% exhibit male-dominated societies, with male-dominance correlated with sexual size dimorphism. The other 40% show codominance or female-dominance, and such systems have evidently evolved repeatedly as they show up in every Family (I guess, the article uses “major group” instead, confusingly).
But non-male-dominant social structures in primates is not news, viz. bonobos and lemurs. The paper author’s quoted comments try to spin the novelty angle, but they always do.
I thunk she has cause and effect reversed when she sez that a lack of dimorphism favors evolution of non-male dominance; it’s almost certainly the social system that selects for dimorphism in the first place.
But just counting societies and presenting gross percentages is not the right approach to the question. I hope that the paper itself does a phylogenetic analysis of where and when on the phylogenetic tree societies change evolutionary. Lemurs ought to be a single data point, not one per species.
The conservation angle was interesting though.
Well as the day draws to a close, maybe I do have something more to say in addition to my +1 to Norman and Rosemary above. At first I thought that what we were seeing on campuses was just a couple of hundred out of several thousand who were being humored by a cadre of spineless administrations. Surely the vast majority of students were too busy for this craziness and were carrying on with the ecumenical and democratic beliefs and behaviors that I grew up under. But over the past weeks and months….NO. Listening to the plaints of Jewish students on campus, whether religious, secular, or atheist, and engaging with the writings of Sam Harris, Douglas murray, and some of Bari Weiss’ interviews onsite in Israel, and of course Jerry’s ongoing overage, I have had a total and totally scary about face. What in the hell is wrong with these people. I understand the Palis brought up in their closed UNWRA schools, but Americans? I feel so bad for Talia and the rest of her (my grandchildrens’) generation. How could my generation have fucked up this totally?
Thanks for the very provocative question.
Most of us middle-class Boomers had it very good as children, more so than any previous generation, and so in our bones tended to expect that things can and should be very good. This can lead to complacency that the future will somehow look after itself, especially after we survived the Cuban missile crisis and ‘Nam [1].
In intermediate school I remember one of the Bell Labs science movies which talked about CO₂ induced warming and showed an animated glass-bottom boat tour of a former coastal city. But that was a Disney cartoon about an unimaginably distant (to a 13 year old) future, so no big deal. And now here we are.
So my answer to your question is that we just let things slide. We could have done much better, but didn’t. The road to hell is paved with inattention.
———-
[1] I am not in any way belittling the horrors of a potential nuclear war, or the deaths and injuries of actual “conventional” ones.
Thanks for your thoughts Barbara. I think that we are similar in age. I forgot to note yesterday that in the 50’s, we were still in the penumbra of the shadow of the Holocaust and our parents were part of the greatest generation still recently enough home from the European battlefields and liberation of the camps as well as navy and marine service in the Pacific. The horrors of ground war and the concentration camps were very real to them and told to us first hand. Most of the men in our neighborhood and my friends’ fathers served. We had concentration camp survivors in our small community with the tattoo number on the forearm of a deli owner an always present reminder of the Nazi terror. While I experienced some antisemitism from a few “one per centers, it was just that – an aberration and certainly never a norm.
I agree that we just let things slide. Our children and certainly grandchildren could not experience the visceral knowledge of the holocaust as we did, and while museums were created and some school visits took place, a clear curriculum was never created to pass on this history to all. Moreover as a Jew growing up, my Hebrew and Sunday school education skewed toward Jewish historical facts out of context ending with the triumph of the State of Israel in 1948, but did not address the continuing terror and struggle to keep the existence of Israel. And of course as an adult, even one involved and with some influence of STEM education in our state and community, did nothing to impact civics education. So as you say, “it just slid” and has been backfilled by the Islamists with a vengeance.
So much for “never again”. The Oct 7 pogrom is just the opening shot in a global revival of Islamist religiously mandated ambitions for total world domination. It behooves the majority of all age groups in Western countries who at least agree that Israel has a right to exist and to defend its existence to push back against the rising tide of Jew-hating ignoramuses and ensure that we’re not drifting into another, even more deadly (not just for Jews but for everyone who prefers to live in a secular liberal democracy over some theocratic shit-hole like Iran) replay of the global catastrophe which was the 3rd Reich.
So I’ve been conversing for a few weeks with an old friend about the Oct 7. war/conflict (is there a formal name?) I thought this would be the best place (without his permission) to let people read what he says. So much in there and I’m sure millions share the views, and lots of historical ignorance for sure, but please, readers, please respond. I won’t direct directly to this site, but will just give a blurb about WEIT and cut and paste. I feel like I’m passing the buck, but readers here are so better versed in the history, nuance, etc., and I’m simply at my wits end disputing this subject with him, he just gets more dug in. Perhaps I’m framing it wrong; sorry for the length, never a single paragraph explanation to Middle East mayhem. Anyway, to wit:
You can’t take the events of October seventh out of context with the past seventy five years of occupation.
They were warned by the Egyptians and the CIA that something was going to happen.
They call it “riding the wave of hate”, to enforce more territory away from the people living there.
Don’t get me dumb, as I know that the cult of doom tribes do want to convert the world to sharia law through violence. But, both the zionists and the islamists use the phrase “from the river to the sea”. Both are mad and super nutz.
The criminal court seems to be understanding the scene with the warrants of arrest for the leaders of each group. The tweaked that order soldiers to slaughter civilians.
Sure they could have surrendered, but that would not have stopped the continuous push for territory. And, after so many decades of broken agreements, the carter administration, the oslo accords, etc. Just find another way to stoke intolerance, increase illegal settlements.
Thirty three of the members of the U.N. created the situation after WW2. Which created the rampage to remove the citizens from the land, with tanks, and suitcase bombs at train stations, machine gunning people of whole towns. Planting European evergreens over the building remains.
Continuously disobeying U.N. resolutions. ?????
And, to this day, bulldozing homes, stealing them. Bombing schools and hospitals??? Drones tell them how many people are in these apartment buildings, yet it’s figured worth it to kill a hundred to get one. ???
Say there are fifty thousand Hamas fighters in a population of two million. The rest are shop keepers, mothers, mechanics, with the day to day to get through. It’s like saying all of Washington state is gun toting intolerant hicks.
People.
Both sides have hostages. One just calls them prisoners. Walls around communities, with roads that can’t be used, check points all over, “papers!”. Collective punishment is a war crime.
How many babies have to be blown apart for it to be wrong?
The only time the hostages were returned was during a cease fire. Peace, that is the only way out, Negotiations end all wars. The call for a cease fire.
Also, “there is no nothing”. No matter how you look at the universe, there is always something. Energy, vibrations, mixing into, becoming…
I can’t go after all the ignorance of your friend, but I will take up one thing: the stupid notion that Israeli prisoners are “hostages”. The ones with prison sentences have had a trial and been convicted, while Israeli hostages have never been tried, just kidnapped. There are some detainees in Israeli prisons who are deemed too dangerous to let out immediately, but the period of their detention is limited, and they have access to lawyers. Detention is also used in other countries, as in the U.S., where accused criminals can be held without bail until trial.
Why bother to argue with someone so ignorant, though?
I empathize with his discomfort and concern for Palestinian children. One would have to be a monster not to feel compassion for those who suffer. Particularly the innocent, particularly children.
The problem with his (your friend’s) approach is the problem with the approach of so many: the absence of clarity. Moral clarity. Most conceptualize the issue, relegating it to an abstraction along the lines of “good” and “evil”.
Maybe:
* Ask your friend to imagine a loved one (of his) being raped, mutilated and taken hostage – if he’s able to engage in the exercise in good faith, ask him what he would recommend by way of getting his loved one back? What if a baby was burned in its crib and he was related to the infant? How would he both rescue his loved one and also ensure these acts of incomprehensible terror do not happen again, ever? Unlike 911, where the terrorists came from thousands of miles away, the nation of Israel has to live with those hell bent on annihilating it – next door.
* A nation’s first responsibility to its citizens is the duty to ensure their safety. Something Biden seems to have lost track of (I refer to the border, but that is a segue)
* Most westerners (I assume your friend is one) are “clueless” about terror/war — they simply cannot relate, and lack the imagination to understand what terror/war entails, fail to understand the pragmatic implications, fail to *feel* them. Terror/war is an abstract concept to most westerners. It’s something that happens “out there”. 911 seems to have faded from their minds/hearts.
Thanks Jerry, Rosemary and Leslie for your elucidation of some of his refuse. I knew WEIT readers (and, of course, the host) could offer me some enlightened responses. I will parse and send them on, and hopefully he will find it in him to be honest and learn something (I assume he wants to). And Rosemary, yes, he’s an American who has never left the country…though he did live in Hawaii for a spell. He’s also a militant vegan…is there a Venn diagram in there somewhere?
Why bother to argue with someone so ignorant, though?
As a friend, I guess I feel obliged or compelled to “set him straight.” But I’m finding it’s like arguing with a religionist. After this final retort, I will stand down. Jerry, he might become one of those (ex)friends like you had in MA who kicked you out of their house for being a determinist. So it goes.
A lot there….
Funny that planting trees in rubble, and getting them to grow, is considered a sin. But I’ll try for a little realpolitik
“Negotiations end all wars.” Empirically not true.
Germany and Japan surrendered unconditionally. Feelers put out through neutral countries to maybe arrange an armistice then a peace treaty (like in 1918-19) were rebuffed by the Allies, who had committed amongst themselves not to accept anything less than unconditional surrender. No negotiations. When a subdued Hirohito and his team came out to the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, for all they knew MacArthur was going to order them shot where they stood on her quarterdeck once Hirohito had signed the surrender.
And there are other wars where one warring side simply runs away and lets its erstwhile allies face the music alone. No negotiations there, either.
In conflicts where both sides know that one side or the other cannot constitutionally/culturally accept an accord that leaves any of the other side alive, there is again nothing to negotiate. “We want all of you dead and we won’t rest until you are,” is not a opening position conducive to getting to Yes. In those conflicts you enjoy peace only as long as it takes for another generation of jihadists to grow up, and then you have to kill them all over again, yes including their babies used as human shields. Only a country populated by Jews could live this way because only Jews know what the alternative is in other parts of the world they might flee to. This doesn’t by itself make Israel’s moral case — it clearly doesn’t for some people — but it explains why Israel won’t negotiate with the Palestinians.
That both sides more or less hew to “From the River to the Sea” is true. Israel will never let the Pals have a state in what is now Israel proper or in the Disputed Territories of Judea and Samaria. It would be a permanent existential threat to Israel. (See above: “We want all of you dead . . .”) Israel currently holds and rules the territory it does. Since states have the right to defend themselves against foreigners, Israel holds all that land legitimately. It’s the Pals who need to take it by force. Israel’s job is to make sure they never can, and that means killing enough of them from time to time so that they give up for a while.
Presumably your friend doesn’t see this as a conflict between civilization and religious barbarism and doesn’t believe that he’ll be next if Israel falls to the Islamists. He should still recognize that the realities of “What we have we hold” make Israel’s claim to “From the River to the Sea” more valid because that state of affairs is actually true on the ground now. It just doesn’t matter that the Pals think they should have all of Palestine instead. They ain’t gettin’ it. The United Nations can pound sand with its resolutions.
100%
This was a great comment, thanks!
These personal stories are heartbreaking…
You can find more in our recent newsletter:
https://voicesagainstantisemitism.substack.com/p/the-forces-behind-campus-protests
Make sure to also check out a survey by Hillel International on the effect of recent protests on students, which provides a quantitative dimension to these personal accounts.
Thank you.
Thank you Anna for your continuing information here and in your nascent newsletter. It has been extremely helpful here in the hinterlands.
At the risk of “over commenting”, here’s a separate comment featuring an article on Columbia that details how the university turned itself into (essentially) a madrasa over decades.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/boycott-divest-and-sanction-columbia
Quote:
“Columbia has long been a pioneer in the theoretical approaches—postcolonialism, decolonization, and Islamism—that have shaped progressive opinion of Third World and Middle Eastern affairs. These systems of thought apply the basic principle of critical theory—that politics is a conflict between oppressed and oppressor groups—to the colonized populations of geopolitical history. In practice, white Europeans and Jewish Zionists play the oppressor role, while Third World nations, including the Palestinians, play the oppressed. Violence can not only be justified in these ideologies but is also often deemed essential to the process of “liberation.”
At Columbia, this mindset has become gospel. The university’s academic departments employ some of the world’s most prominent postcolonial scholars. The university press has published dozens of books on the subject, and the course directory lists at least 46 classes offered since Fall 2023 with descriptions including the words “postcolonial” or “postcolonialism.”
Faculty and student adherents of the mindset have long focused on the Middle East. Columbia was the academic home of Edward Said, a founding postcolonial scholar who was among the first to translate Marxism and postmodern principles to the study of the relationships between Western and Islamic societies. Since Said’s death in 2003, the university has built massive programs to continue his work. These have employed increasingly radical figures.
In 2003, for example, the university hired the controversial historian Rashid Khalidi to lead the university’s Middle East Institute. Khalidi once allegedly served as an unofficial spokesman for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which he denies, and has denounced Israel as “apartheid system in creation” and a “racist” state. The historian has long supported the campaign to “boycott, divest, and sanction” Israel and, in 2016, was one of 40 Columbia faculty who signed a BDS petition. Early in his Columbia tenure, Khalidi was dismissed from a New York City teacher training program for allegedly endorsing violence against Israeli soldiers, a charge he also denied.
But Khalidi is only the tip of the spear. In 2010, Columbia launched its Center for Palestine Studies, which it describes as “the first such center in an academic institution in the United States.” The center currently has 26 affiliated faculty members and hosts a score of visiting professors. Their orientation is distinctly anti-Israel. One affiliated professor has claimed that Israeli archaeologists faked or manipulated information to legitimize the State of Israel. Another teaches a class called “Settlers and Natives,” which examines “the question of decolonization” and compares the International Criminal Court’s relationship to the “Israel/Palestine” conflict to that of the Nuremberg Court and the Holocaust.”
This column today (well really yesterday) has been remarkable. I do not think one can over-comment today, Rosemary. I have yet to get to Saturday Hili!
Thanks Jim.
Here’s another “insane” article about the hearing in congress re: Northwestern’s agreement with the pro-hamas encampment (which was disbanded after the President negotiated an agreement with the encampment)
Enter ZE and HIR. (how does one take this stuff seriously? )
https://dailynorthwestern.com/2024/05/24/lateststories/university-president-michael-schill-tried-to-walk-a-thin-line-in-his-remarks-before-congress-he-still-faces-dissatisfaction-from-dueling-camps/
Quote:
++++
“Medill junior Max Sullivan, a media liaison for the NU Divestment Coalition, who uses ze/hir pronouns, said ze watched a portion of Schill’s testimony from Deering Meadow.
Sullivan said the House Committee for Education and the Workforce’s premise for questioning Schill and other University presidents — addressing antisemitism — was not the true purpose of the hearing.
“It was pretty clear… that the concern is not antisemitism, but student protest,” Sullivan said.
In the hearing, Schill emphasized that he gave up very little in negotiations with student protesters, but Sullivan said ze felt this is also false. The University committed to partial disclosure of its investments and the creation of a MENA space on campus, among other concessions.
“Both of those things are tools in the ongoing toolkit of organizers on this campus… that were practically inconceivable six months ago,” Sullivan said. “They have not been on the table for the University to consider, except under the duress that the encampment produced.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
Actually, that should be Zullivan not Sullivan. And I believe Hamas will enthusiastically embrace ZE and HIR.
+100%
Rosemary, All these idiots need to go and live in the society they espouse, they would not survive and who would miss them? Not me that’s for certain. They can only push this rubbish because of the full and free society they enjoy and hate.
+1
They (ze/hir etc.) have an “idea” about life that has little relation to objective reality. It’s a lack of imagination in the right direction and too much of it in the wrong.
We need to stop pandering to insanity.