Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
What a life! First I defend the speech rights of pro-Palestinian student who may well favor the elimination of Israel, and now I’m back again at Vanderbilt University, where, according to both the student newspaper and the Jewish paper The Algemeiner, students have rejected precisely one out of 11 student groups that applied to joint the school’s Multicultural Leadership Council (MLC): Students Supporting Israel. Wouldn’t you know it!? (One other group, Vanderbilt United Mission for Relief and Development, is awaiting a vote.)
There are two articles that say largely the same thing, so I’ll quote from the shorter Algemeiner piece. But let us not forget that Vanderbilt become an “Our Hero” school when its Chancellor, Daniel Diermeier (Chicago’s former Provost) had students removed and arrested after occupying the administration building for nearly a whole day, protesting Vandy’s supposed complicity in supporting Israel against Gaza. Many of the students were also given interim suspensions, and there’s no sign that those suspensions will be lifted. It was not free speech that Diermeier was opposing, for he’s a big advocate of such speech (after all, he’s from the University of Chicago). He was enforcing “time and place” regulations for protest, and it’s simply against Vandy’s rules to sit inside the administration building.
According to these two articles, the rejection of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) was a decision of Vanderbilt students, not the administration, and I guess they just don’t like Israel. After all, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, both hate-filled groups favoring the elimination of Israel, are already members of the MLC (so is a subgroup from Hillel, but I bet it’s been a member forever).
Click below to see the piece from the Vanderbilt Hustler, the student newspaper:
Click below to go to the Algemeiner piece:
I’ll quote from The Algemeiner, but you can check the other piece, too:
According to The Vanderbilt Hustler, [Students Supporting Israel] is the only one to be rejected from this year’s applicant pool, an outcome that SSI president Ryan Bauman said is evidence of febrile opposition to dialogue and coexistence among some segments of the student body. The only Jewish group to be admitted, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), is a fringe anti-Israel organization that did not condemn Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel and has long celebrated terrorism against Israelis.
Among the nine groups to be admitted to the MLC this year were the Taiwanese American Student Association, Vanderbilt Pride Serve, the Vanderbilt Association for South Asian Cuisine, and the Vanderbilt Iranian Student Association. One of the 11 total organizations that applied, Vanderbilt United Mission for Relief and Development, is still awaiting an upcoming vote.
As a requirement of its application, SSI was told to deliver a presentation to the MLC but given only a few minutes to do so. Afterward, the group was cross-examined by the MLC — of which Students for Justice in Palestine is a member organization — about their opinions regarding “genocide” and “apartheid,” an apparent attempt to use the proceeding as a soapbox for anti-Zionist propaganda.
“We told them that we didn’t show up to discuss politics,” Bauman told The Algemeiner during an interview on Tuesday. “We told them we were there to celebrate Israeli culture and further the pro-Israel movement and invited them to have other dialogues at another time. We were then told to leave, and they held a closed session. And as you can see, it resulted in us being rejected by a wide margin.”
Is there any reason besides antisemitism or anti-Zionism that SSI would be the only group to be rejected? If you know Jewish Voice for Peace and especially Students for Justice in Palestine, you’ll know that they’re to a large extent hate groups who favor the abolition of Israel (SJP also celebrated Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel). Is it too much to ask for a group supporting Israel to be added to the mix? Apparently so.
One more note from The Algemeiner:
This is not the first time that Students Supporting Israel has been denied membership in a student organization. In 2021, the president of Duke University’s Student Government vetoed a vote approving recognition of SSI, an incident which set off volleys of criticism and a sharp rebuke from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
“Grant them the same access,” Brandeis Center president Alyza Lewin said at the time, warning of potential civil rights violations. “Treat them no differently than any other student recognized organization. If the university chooses not to intervene and does not make sure that SSI gets equal access and it is understood to be no different than any other organization, there could be potential legal liability for the university.”
That also holds for Vanderbilt, whose reputation for fairness could be besmirched by this act. As I said, I don’t blame the administration, which has been exemplary. Chancellor Diermeier also adopted the position of institutional neutrality as embodied in The University of Chicago’s Kalven report, making Vanderbilt one of only a handful of schools to take this essential position. Pity his efforts are being tarred by a bunch of hypocritical students.
NBC 10 in Philly reports a disturbing case of censorship, and of course it’s Jewish stuff that’s censored. Fortunately, a court stepped in and undid the censorship with a restraining order. Click the headline to read, and you can also find a shorter account on ABC 6 in Philly.
What happened is summarized by the bullet points in the report above:
The decision sparked outrage and a protest from local Jewish groups as well as a court order requested by the Israeli Film Festival, according to a lawyer representing the festival. The lawyer accused BMFI of breaching its contract by pulling the film. BMFI later confirmed they would screen the film following the court order.
What’s bizarre about all this is that while the pro-Palestinian groups wanted to cancel the entire showing, the BMFI decided to pull just one of the movies, and one that had absolutely nothing to do with the war, or anything related to it.
Guy Brodetzki, an Israeli man who currently resides in Lower Merion, also organized a grassroots group of concerned citizens called the Hope for Israel Alliance – Philadelphia. Brodetzki told NBC10 “The Child Within Me” has nothing to do with the Israel-Hamas War.
“Very famous singer. The movie is about him. And he’s very special,” Brodetzki said. “He was gay when it wasn’t that easy to be gay. He’s the son of Holocaust survivors. Many of his songs are about being a child of Holocaust survivors. This is the movie. There’s no mentioning of the Arab-Israeli conflict at all. There’s no mentioning of the war. There’s no mentioning of Palestinians. Nothing. It’s all about him. It’s about Jewish-Israeli culture. So why on earth would you want to cancel the showing of this kind of movie?”
Before lawyers got involved, BMFI issued a pathetic excuse for canceling the movie. Get a load of this dissimulation!:
“Bryn Mawr Film Institute is not a political organization. We don’t endorse or oppose any causes. In past years, we have not regarded hosting a screening from the Israeli Film Festival as a political partnership or taking a stance on any issues,” a BMFI spokesperson wrote. “This was our feeling when we arranged the 2024 screening many months ago. However, as the situation in Israel and Gaza has developed, it has become clear that our showing this movie is being widely taken among individuals and institutions in our community as an endorsement of Israel’s recent and ongoing actions. This is not a statement we intended or wish to make. For this reason, BMFI is canceling the sole screening of the music documentary, The Child Within Me.”
That’s pathetic, showing a complete lack of backbone and principle. It’s like a library pulling a book from the shelves because it offends some of the public. If they’re not political, then they shouldn’t worry about looking as if they endorsed a film. Does a library endorse Mein Kampf, for crying out loud? As ABC 6 reported, “Film Institute Executive Director Samuel Scott said the issue was not the film itself but concerns over heated political protests regarding the film’s screening.
And then the law stepped in:
Brodetzki’s group planned a protest outside the Bryn Mawr Film Institute on Tuesday. After the protest was planned, Lori Lowenthal Marcus, an attorney representing the Israeli Film Festival, told NBC10 the movie would still be screened at BMFI Tuesday evening following a court order. Marcus accused BMFI of breaching its contract when they attempted to pull the film from the festival.
Here’s the restraining order forcing the BMFI to show the movies. It’s short and sweet:
That’s all it took, and the film festival caved, saying that they were “flawed human being” making “bad calls” (see below). Their intention was surely not to hurt and offend Jews, but it was certainly to avoid Palestinian ire. It is due to fear of Palestinian action against the film that the BMFI took action. I wonder if they would bow to pressure from any other group about non-Israeli films.
So here’s the apology, which, as Shania Twain said, “don’t impress me much.”
There’s a new 38-minute movie out, “Man of Steele”, made by filmmaker Eli Steele about diversity, the attempted removal of AP classes, and antisemitism in a ritzy California school district. The movie, however, was was apparently removed from both YouTube and Vimeo—just for two seconds of video that someone claimed constituted “copyright infringement”. It appears to be fair usage, which isn’t really infringement, but fortunately you can still watch the movie. As Steele notes in the second headline below (click on each one to read):
The complainant was Menlo-Atherton High School’s newspaper, M-A Chronicle, and they objected to the inclusion of a two-second clip in the Killing America trailer. I checked the trailer’s YouTube page and, indeed, it had been removed.
Here’s are three Substack sites that explain the situation (the links to the movie are below, or you can click on the first headline).
I’ve watched the movie, and you won’t lose much more than half an hour if you do, but I have to say that it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast, as it mixes together diverse subjects (removal of AP classes from a high school, equity, diversity, a school board’s musing over the advanced-placement classes, and the reaction of one parent whose son goes to the Bay Area school at issue). Perhaps I was tired, but I didn’t find it particularly coherent. That said, it’s still worth watching to see the parents battle over whether “tracking” students creates inequities and is unfair, or whether it allows students to reach their full potential. It’s worth it to see the school board dissimulate, and it’s worth it to see the odious, antisemitic and pro-Palestinian lies that some teachers tell to their students. But the film fails explain clearly how equity is connected with anti-Semitism, although one can intuit that the connection is via a DEI mentality, which promotes equity and denigrates Jews at the same time (Jews are seen as white, oppressive colonialists). And the occasional insertion of Russian stuff, like their national anthem, baffles me. Is Steele saying that Marxism is behind some of this? Who knows?
In the end, one doesn’t know what happens in the school district, but perhaps because the school board hasn’t decided what to do.
Here, from one of the posts, is the creator’s explanation of why he wanted to get the movie out (I know him only by the name “Man of Steele”):
That is why I’m releasing the film now — to force the following issues to the forefront:
Free Speech — what are we teaching students at high school newspapers when we tell them to embrace censorship, not free speech, as their weapon of choice?
Artistic Expression — are we going to let documentaries and other art forms be censored by activists, especially those in wealthy, elite neighborhoods?
Hate/Antisemitism — Why has this school and district largely ignored the rising antisemitism on campus? We know if it was blacks who were on the receiving end, the response would be different. This double-standard must end.
Ideological Capture/Lowering of Education Standards — For too long these education activists, many from Stanford University and beyond, have been given free reign to impose their ideologies onto students. As a result, the quality of education has declined significantly.
People often ask why I made Killing America and Diana Blum, the film’s main subject, once said something that summed up my thoughts perfectly: “With this film, I wanted to give parents a voice because they’ve been silenced and ridiculed for so long by the school board, activist teachers, and the school authorities. This film is our way to get around that ideological resistance and be heard for once and for all.”
I don’t have to say it but the irony here is that it is these education ideologues that are trying to take our voice away once again.
To watch the movie, click on the headline below, go here (same place), or watch it on Steele’s tweet below.
Again, I emphasize that you should watch this movie, but realize that it’s not a fully-formed documentary. The fact that the school is trying to censor it on trivial grounds tells you all you need to know.
After enduring a week of unwarranted takedowns of the Killing America trailer on @Youtube and @Vimeo as well as receiving a baseless cease and desist letter that seeks to prevent my documentary from being shown in its original form, I’ve decided to release the full (38 min)… pic.twitter.com/KL6RxeJ3KE
If you want to donate to Steele to support the movie, go here. I also found this on the donation page, which clarifies the film a bit.
THE STORY: In August of 2023, I was contacted by Bay Area parents who recently learned that Sequoia Union High School District had been removing honors classes for the past 8 years. Not only that, they were infusing other classes with liberated ethnic studies curricula. At first, I thought that this was an old story. We saw how Virginia and Manhattan parents fought over the schools for the past three years.
Then October 7 happened.
It quickly became apparent to us how the immediate and unapologetic rise in antisemitism in the Bay Area schools was related to the elimination of honors classes as well as the oppressor-oppressed model that ethnic studies brought into the classroom. We knew then that we had a film here and “Killing America” is the result.
Yes, I know that Harvard University has one big graduation for all undergraduates and grad students (I went to it when I got my Ph.D. in 1978; Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave the commencement address in a famous speech that called out the West for its “spiritual degeneration”). At that time, there was but one “identity” ceremony that included everyone. E pluribus unum! (One small exception: people who got their Ph.D.’s in different fields had separate degree-granting ceremonies.)
I’m not sure when this changed, but now Harvard has many different graduation ceremonies for different identity groups. And, of course, they are organized by the DEI office. Here’s this year’s panoply of “identity ceremonies” listed by the conservative National Review:
Harvard University’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging will once again host “affinity celebrations” at its 2024 commencement, according to documents obtained by National Review.
Harvard plans to hold a “Disability Celebration,” a “Global Indigenous Celebration,” an “Asian American, Pacific Islander, Desi-American (APIDA) Celebration,” a “First Generation-Low Income Celebration,” a “Jewish Celebration,” a “Latinx Celebration,” a “Lavender Celebration” — which refers to LGBT students — a “Black Celebration,” a “Veterans Celebration,” and an “Arab Celebration.” The university will also hold a central commencement ceremony for students of all backgrounds.
. . . . The only publicly available mention of affinity celebrations on any Harvard website is published on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ page. The note does not mention the specific events or groups recognized, simply describing them as “student-led, staff-supported events that recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of graduates from marginalized and underrepresented communities.”
“Desi-American” means people whose ancestry is Pacific Islander, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani or other Asians, identity groups that may not be so fond of each other! Is there any oppressed group missing here? The “First Generation-Low Income Celebration” puzzles me, as the two features don’t necessarily go together, and of course immediately upon leaving the ceremony the graduates have abandoned that identity.
There was one notable group missing at Harvard last year, and you can guess which one it was. That’s right—the Jews! But now, facing a federal Title VI civil rights investigation for a campus climate of antisemitism, and the fracas around the “Jewish genocide” hearing in Congress that in the end brought down Harvard and Penn’s Presidents, the school decided it had better do something to effect some climate change, though not in the way that the antisemitic Greta Thunberg would favor.
Frankly, I think these separate graduations are ludicrous and, in the end, purely performative. Do they move society forward? No. Are they divisive? Probably, in that they continue the obsessive academic focus on identity. “Identity politics” isn’t inherently bad—after all, it was the impetus behind the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties. But these days, fostered and promoted by DEI offices, it has gone way too far, making someone’s identity, based on features they can’t control, the most important aspect of their persona. This is why Steve Pinker, who’s at Harvard and laid out in the Boston Globe a five-point plan for fixing Harvard that includes this recommendation:
Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.
An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.
Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.
It is, as I said, Harvard’s DEI office that creates these identity-based graduations, reinforcing the malign atmosphere Steve describes in his first paragraph. Am I happy that Harvard, under the gun for antisemitism, now includes a Jewish ceremony? No, of course not: it’s disgusting—pandering to both Jews and DEI in general. It is, after all, DEI that, by fostering a climate that sees Jews as white oppressor colonialists, fosters antisemitism.
This conclusion isn’t rocket science. One Jewish student is quoted in the National Review about the issue:
For some, like Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos Kestenbaum — who spoke about the situation on the ground at his school during a House Education and Workforce Committee roundtable in late February — the addition of a separate celebration for Jewish students simply perpetuates the underlying dynamics driving antisemitism at Harvard.
“Rather than acknowledge the harmful ways in which Harvard DEI has contributed to campus antisemitism, the university further marginalizes individuals into groups of race, ethnicity, and religion,” Kestenbaum told National Review. “Harvard DEI is simply out of control.”
One way to stop this, as Steve suggests, is simply to disempower DEI. Perhaps colleges can keep on staff a few individuals to whom one can bring complaints of bigotry, but there should be none of the training, propaganda, and divisivenesss that DEI sows on campus. Even at the “free speech” University of Chicago, our climate is permeated by DEI, which sends me announcements of events on a nearly daily basis.
Giving a lecture at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York City is a high honor, and Bari Weiss, former NYT writer and now editor of The Free Press, was chosen for it, giving a lecture in a decades-long series on the state of world Jewry. You can either read or hear the talk below (click headline or video). I read it, for I have little patience for long videos. However, since the whole talk is given in transcript, the only thing I missed was the visuals. See below for my take on what she said.
Here is Weiss’s message as I understood it, with the main points put in bold. All the text below is mine except for quotes from the transcript, which are indented.
1.) Jews are endangered because of loss of freedom.
This loss of freedom involves, among other things, the denigration of Jews by DEI (which paints us as white oppressors and engages in racial equity that in effect discriminates against Jews. It was even instantiated in this lecture! The bit below is from Bari’s introduction and isn’t in the talk.
But for a sense of the state of Jewish life in America these days, you need only to have walked by the building that night. You would’ve found that police had cordoned off the entire block—and for good reason. Anti-Israel protesters, many wearing masks, gathered to intimidate those who came to the lecture. On the way in, you would’ve been screamed at—told you were a “baby killer” and “genocide supporter” among other choice phrases. You might have even glimpsed Jerry Seinfeld being heckled and called “Nazi scum” on his way out of the talk. (Classy.)
I am beyond grateful to the NYPD, and the entire staff of the 92nd Street Y, for making sure that everyone who attended the talk was able to do so safely. But everyone must ask themselves: Do we want to live in a country in which simply giving a speech about a Jewish subject requires serious police protection? What does that reality say about the state of our country and our freedoms?
From the text:
Because freedom isn’t only under siege in Russia and Iran and Hong Kong. It is also under siege here at home.
By leftists who glorify terrorists. . . and by rightists who glorify tyrants. By technology companies that revise history and tell us it’s justice. By demagogues who point to the grocery stores and the subway system in Putin’s Russia and insist that they are symbols of human flourishing. And by an elite culture that has so lost all sense of right and wrong, good and bad, or has so cunningly transformed those categories, that it can call a massacre “resistance.” A genocidal chant, a call for “freedom.” And a just war of self-defense “genocide.”
. . .There are now whole realms of American life where you cannot be free as a Jew.
Ask the terrified Jewish schoolteacher in Queens who hid in a locked room in her school as a mob of hundreds of “radicalized” kids rampaged through the halls—for almost two hours—after they discovered she had attended a pro-Israel rally.
Ask Matisyahu, who announced that two of his concerts were canceled by venues after anti-Israel activists planned protests. Or the actor Brett Gelman, whose book signings faced the same fate.
Ask Princeton University student journalist Alexandra Orbuch. When pro-Palestinian students didn’t like the questions Orbuch asked, they got the school to issue a no-contact order against her, which effectively prevented her from reporting on them.
Go apply for a job as a curator at MOMA and mention that you’re a Zionist or have the word Israel on your résumé. See what happens.
2.) Jews are the “canary in the coal mine”: in periods of despotism, authoritarianism, and xenophobia, we are among the first to lose our freedom but not the last.
Where liberty thrives, Jews thrive. Where difference is celebrated, Jews are celebrated. Where freedom of thought and faith and speech are protected, Jews are safest. And when such virtues are regarded as threats, Jews will be regarded as the same.
In other words: when people turn against freedom, they turn against us.
Some of the indignities suffered by Jews are mentioned above. Here are other signs of the dissolution of freedom in America (I am giving her take, not necessarily mine).
And it’s time to go to war for our values.
When Apple’s diversity chief—a black woman—was forced to step down for saying that being a minority or a woman are not the only criteria for diversity, did you take her side?
When Asian Americans were discriminated against, did you see their cause as being essential to our own?
When American doctors were censored for questioning the efficacy of lockdowns, were you as outraged about this as you were about people who refused to wear masks in March 2020?
When, just across town, a statue of Teddy Roosevelt was removed from outside the American Museum of Natural History, did you protest?
We glance at these things, feel a twinge of discomfort, and then decide to move on—giving ourselves one excuse after another. But these are the moments for action, because they are wrong. They are bad for America, and because they are bad for America, they are bad for Jews.
I thought for sure that although we saw yesterday that Jews are by far the religious minority that suffers the most per capita from victimization by hate crimes, black people would surely have a higher rate. But the FBI statistics for 2022 (below) seem to show that Jews suffer more from hate crimes per capita than any other group. Using the data below on number of victims, combined with the number of blacks (about 50 million) and Jews in America (about 7.6 million), it seems that an individual Jew in America is 2.7 times as likely to be the victim of a hate crime than is a black person. I’m not sure what that means except that Jews are under siege.
3.) Jews have fallen for the false god of materialism. Weiss notes this by recounting the Biblical story of Aaron and the golden calf—a false idol that Jews worshiped when Moses was slow in coming down the mountain with the tablets. Weiss says that our false idols are STUFF instead of ideas:
We modern Israelites have also been worshipping false gods.
Our American idols are prestige, power, social acceptance, popularity, elite opinion, and the Ivy League—but I repeat myself. Our idols are the coveted board seat. The best tables. Relationships with the pretty people.
We put truth on the altar, as if it were a tithable commodity, to remain insiders, to have bragging rights.
We have been willing to sacrifice what is most precious to us—including our own children—for the sake of it.
Why are we doing this?
We are doing it because we are a tiny minority, and because we feel vulnerable and scared and alone. And because fitting in feels safer than standing apart.
. . . We are doing it because we also live in a culture of idolatry, only this time the materials are pixels and diplomas, adherence to a particular ideology and an emergent social credit system based on likes and retweets.
. . . What is being asked of us is to give up what feels central to our lives—but isn’t. To stop caring so much where your kid goes to college; to give up that museum board seat; to stop funding schools that treat Israel as a pariah and thus Jews who support it as the same; to detach from the friend or institution that has made clear that, to them, you are a second-class citizen.
Now throughout the talk there are scattered references to God (including the notion that are rights are given by God), which suggests that Weiss is indeed religious and believes, at least, in a higher power. I of course am not down with that because we don’t need God to give us rights, and, if you espouse a rational approach to life (as Weiss emphasizes), then you shouldn’t believe in gods. But I’m not sure that her mention of “idolatry” above really means “we should be worshiping God, not things.” It could well mean (and I think it does mean) that our “idols” should be freedom and truth:
4.) The solution to the “othering” of Jews is to embrace our state of being “the other”, to strive for freedom for ourselves, and to seek the truth. Below is our task; I love the quote from Dara Horn, who wrote the absorbing book People Love Dead Jews:
So what do we do?
The charge is as simple as it is spiritually difficult. We fulfill our duty and our responsibility to be free.
As my friend, the brilliant Dara Horn, has written: “Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds. The Jews’ continued distinctiveness, despite overwhelming pressure to become like everyone else, demonstrated their enormous effort to cultivate that freedom: devotion to law and story, deep literacy, and an absolute obsessiveness about transmitting those values between generations. The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility—and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all.”
. . . .To be free is to tell the truth even in a world awash with lies.
And what is truth? It is the state of the world determined by observation and confirmed by unanimity:
The sky is blue. Robin DiAngelo might say it’s pink. Candace Owens might say it’s green. But it’s not. It is blue. That is as true as asserting that there are good governments and evil ones. There are societies organized to generate progress and well-being and those organized around terror and debasement. There are better cultures for women and minorities and there are worse ones. There are historical truths, even if they’re inconvenient for people to know about, even if the activists running places like Google are frantically working to disappear the old facts.
Here’s Solzhenitsyn again: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” To be a free person is to refuse to tell lies, to refuse to stand by as they are told. To be a free person is to live in truth.
Some of the best bits of Weiss’s talk are the quotes she uses. And she ends with one more:
One time a few years ago, before the pandemic and the wars and so much else that would reshape our world, these themes were already on my mind. And so when, on a trip to Israel, I met my hero and now my friend, Natan Sharansky, I really only had one question for him. I asked him if it was possible to teach courage. He paused and said this: “No. You can’t teach it. You can only show people how good it feels to be free.”
And that’s what I want to end on. Fighting the lies against us, fighting the lies against history, living in truth—it feels good. It’s relaxing to tell the truth. You’ll laugh more. Not that I’m here selling a new cure for depression, but I promise this is a start.
What a blessing to be free to choose. I know what my choice will be. I am determined to be free.
********
Several readers sent me a link to this talk extolling it as a masterpiece. I can’t go along with that take, but I can say that it’s a very good and inspiring talk. Yes, its lessons seem a bit trite or anodyne, and they really apply not just to Jews, but to everyone. Still, it’s good to hear a Jewish woman stand up and assert that the Jews aren’t “white adjacent” oppressors who have to live with that label, that we must fight against those who would put us in that box, and that we should work constantly to dispel the lies and false rumors spread about Israel in an attempt to erase that state from the map.
I am so bloody sick of the kind of hatred instantiated in this article, where someone gets deplatformed not because of what they were going to say, which is bad enough, but simply because of who they are. From Cycling magazine we get a disgusting tale of a championship cyclist booted out of an International Women’s Day event, with her keynote speech canceled, explicitly because she was an Israeli, and one who fought—as was required for someone her age—for the IDF. Meet the accomplished athlete Leah Goldstein, whose crime was being Israeli:
This will be short and not-so-sweet, reflecting poorly on Canada. The details:
Former pro cyclist Leah Goldstein, who lives in Vernon, B.C, will no longer be the keynote speaker at an International Women’s Day event in Peterborough, On., in March, apparently because of her time spent working for the IDF. In September, she was offered the role and she accepted. However, in January, she was told she was being removed from the role.
Goldstein, 54, was born in Canada to Israeli parents. At 17, she moved to Israel, where she spent several years, and served her mandatory military service. In 1989, she was world bantamweight kickboxing champion. After an injury, she began cycling, riding for teams such as the Canadian squad, Symmetrics Pro Cycling. After her career in road cycling, she then began ultra-endurance cycling. In 2011, Goldstein took the victory in the women’s solo category of the Race Across America. Notably, she attained second place in the women’s group and fifth overall in 2019. However, it was in 2021 that she etched her name in history by winning the overall solo division, beating not just all the women, but men too.
On Thursday, after the decision began to circulate on social media the organization put out a formal statement saying that she would no longer be involved with the event, amid the Israel/Gaza war.
Look at this weaselly pronouncement!
“Our focus at INSPIRE has been and will always be to create safe spaces to honour, share, and celebrate the remarkable stories of women and non-binary individuals,” the statement read.“In recognition of the current situation and the sensitivity of the conflict in the Middle East, the Board of INSPIRE will be changing our keynote speaker.”
No safe space can be created with an Israeli Jew on the dais!
They don’t dissimulate in their explanation! By the way, Goldstein is also a professional speaker, so she doubtless would have given a good talk. She was of course greatly disappointed, but kept her dignity when reacting to this slight. (She was not, according to what’s below, going to speak about the war.)
It has taken me a while to wrap my head around your decision to remove me as INSPIRE’s International Women’s Day ‘Inspire Inclusion’ keynote speaker. I was hurt. I was angry. But most of all I was heartbroken,” she said. “I’ve been a speaker for nearly 10 years and have told my story in front of real estate agents, business managers, garbage collectors, CEOs, motorbike dealers, government agencies and many diverse women’s groups. Not once has someone (to my face, to the organizers, nor anonymously) ever claimed to have been offended by my presentation. Not once.”
During her speeches as a motivational speaker, Goldstein, frequently recounts how her mental resilience enabled her to triumph over injury, discrimination, and bullying in various arenas, including sports and her service in Israel. She proudly states her distinction as the inaugural female elite commando instructor in the IDF, alongside her tenure as an undercover police officer in Israel. However, she says her presentations are never political.
“I am zero political when I speak,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.“Honestly, there is nothing political about my presentation. I just talk about the crap that I went through and the crap that most women go through, and they still do, and how I handled it.”
Goldstein added she would never have a problem if a Palestinian woman spoke at a similar event.
“As a Jewish woman, I would never be offended if a Palestinian woman were to speak about her obstacles and life journey,” she aded. “I thought that’s what women were supposed to do for each other – listen and support!”
Indeed. Goldstein had one crime: she was a Jew who lived in Israel, even though she was born in Canada. Can this be seen as anything other than anti-semitism?
Leah Goldstein (photo from the article); courtesy of Leah Goldstein @NoLimitsLeah
You’ll remember that Claudine Gay, the ex-President of Harvard, was grilled, along with the Presidents of MIT and Penn, in a House hearing on antisemitism. And all three Presidents were correct in saying that, if they applied the First Amendment on their campuses, calling for the genocide of Jews would often be considered free speech, but in some situations it wouldn’t. (One example of impermissible speech would be shouting “Gas the Jews” in front of a crowd of Jews if it would lead to predictable “imminent lawless action.)
Nevertheless, the professors were damned by the largely Republican panel—mainly because they spoke the truth, but there were two problems. First, the campuses didn’t explicitly have a speech code that comported with the First Amendment (they’re all private schools, too, so they aren’t required to). Further, they applied what speech codes they had unevenly, punishing much less serious offenses. In other words they were guilty of speech hypocrisy.
After the House debacle, Penn President Liz Magill resigned, while Gay, desperate to make amends, issued two statements plus a video explanation and apology. That might have saved her job, but in the end she was brought down by numerous and credible examples of plagiarism in her scholarly work. An interim President, Alan Garber, was appointed to replace Gay, and the search is on for a long-term replacement.
Now, six Jewish students at Harvard have filed a federal Title VI lawsuit against the school, alleging that it was a “bastion of anti-Jewish hatred.” In other words, the school had by its behavior created a climate of antisemitism. The suit will take a while before it works its way through the courts. but Harvard is clearly on notice that it has to do something about its speech hypocrisy. In a Boston Globe op-ed, Steve Pinker suggested five actions that Harvard could take to “save itself,” including adopting institutional neutrality and disempowering DEI.
Unfortunately, Harvard can’t seem to stop disseminating antisemitic tropes, and incidents like this one (click the NY Post linke below to read) will only contribute to finding Harvard culpable in the lawsuit.
An excerpt:
The Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine reposted the cartoon Monday after it was shared by two student groups, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Africa and African American Resistance Organization, according to the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.
It shows a hand with a dollar sign inside a Star of David holding nooses around what appear to be Muhammad Ali and former Egyptian President Gamal Nasser — with “third world” printed around a black arm swinging a machete with the words “liberation movement” on it.
Note that faculty are participating here.
The groups said they shared the poster, which is originally from 1967, to show how “African people have a profound understanding of apartheid and occupation.”
Instead, it added to accusations that the Ivy League school fails to protect Jewish students from hate.
More:
“The cartoon is despicably, inarguably antisemitic,” Rabbi David Wolpe, a Harvard Divinity School scholar who resigned from the school’s antisemitism advisory committee in December, posted to X.
“Is there no limit?”
[Alexander] Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Divinity School student who is suing the university for discrimination, also shared outrage at the offensive poster being reshared.
“Harvard *faculty* just posted an explicitly antisemitic poster depicting a Jewish hand controlling the black mind,” he wrote.
“With professors like these, it’s easy to see why Jewish students don’t feel safe in class.”
So here’s the cartoon at issue, which undeniably uses antisemitic tropes. Look at the Jewish hand (with a $ sign inside the Star of David) being a puppeteer. The cartoon was ultimately withdrawn with apologies by the issuing groups, but it was too late.
Now if you ask me, this is free speech, although of course bigoted and hateful speech. Were this to happen at the University of Chicago, it’s likely that no official statement would have been issued. But, under the gun, Harvard’s interim President issued this statement yesterday; I got it as an alum. There was also a short Harvard Press release condemning the cartoon and its antisemitism.
Dear Members of the Harvard Community,
A few groups purporting to speak on behalf of Harvard affiliates recently circulated a flagrantly antisemitic cartoon in a post on social media channels. The cartoon, included in a longer post, depicted what appeared to be an Arab man and a Black man with nooses around their necks. The nooses are held by a hand imprinted with the Star of David, and a dollar sign appears in the middle of the star. Online condemnation of this trope-filled image was swift, and Harvard promptly issued a statement condemning the posted cartoon. While the groups associated with the posting or sharing of the cartoon have since sought to distance themselves from it in various ways, the damage remains, and our condemnation stands.
Perpetuating vile and hateful antisemitic tropes, or otherwise engaging in inflammatory rhetoric or sharing images that demean people on the basis of their identity, is precisely the opposite of what this moment demands of us. As members of an academic community, we can and we will disagree, sometimes vehemently, on matters of public concern and controversy, including hotly contested issues relating to the war in Israel and Gaza, and the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it is grossly irresponsible and profoundly offensive when that disagreement devolves into forms of expression that demonize individuals because of their religion, race, nationality, or other aspects of their identity.
The members of the Corporation join me in unequivocally condemning the posting and sharing of the cartoon in question. The University will review the situation to better understand who was responsible for the posting and to determine what further steps are warranted.
Reckless provocation draws attention without advancing understanding. Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab members of our community have reported feeling targeted, rejected, and ostracized. The war and its effects on the lives of people directly affected by the conflict demand our profound concern and sympathy. We must approach one another with compassion, open minds, and mutual respect, our discourse grounded in facts and supported by reasoned argument.
Harvard University | Massachusetts Hall | Cambridge, MA 02138
Taking an official stand against this stuff would violate Chicago’s institutional neutrality mandated by the Kalven Report, but Harvard doesn’t adhere to that. Ergo, to save its reputation, the school could hardly have done other than issue such a long screed, though I think the short press release is sufficient.
Note two things about the statement. First, it looks as if Harvard’s going to sniff out the perps with an eye to punishing them. Punishment for free speech! Notice further that besides condemning antisemitism, Harvard also has to condemn bigotry against Muslims, Palestinians, and Arabs. This “both sideism” is somewhat offensive to me: if you’re going to condemn an incident of antisemitism, you don’t have to throw in stuff about the other “side” as well. After all, Harvard isn’t being sued for creating an “Islamophobic atmosphere”. And I, for one, find it difficult to approach loud and aggressive pro-Palestinian demonstrators with “compassion and mutual respect”, so that part of the letter seems patronizing. As for “discourse grounded in facts,” fuggedaboutit!
In my view, Harvard should adopt Pinker’s “Fivefold Way” immediately, or it will be issuing statements like the one above every time there’s an incident involving people’s politics and identities. And you can see that it’s still violating the First Amendment, threatening punishment for flyers like the one above.
