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.
Yesterday I spent quite a few hours at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, part of a free field trip sponsored by the Biological Sciences Divison (or so I think). It’s the third largest Holocaust Museum in the world, probably after Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, which I visited, and (perhaps) the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which I haven’t. This one is very large, and is full of interesting photos, articles, relics, and other memorabilia.
I guess it has so much stuff because Skokie, where the Museum resides, was mostly a Jewish suburb, and there were many Holocaust survivors who contributed items, as well as many Jews who donated money for this very large building.
We had a guided tour, though I had a tendency to wander off by myself to look at stuff. If you’re in Skokie and have an interest in these things, I recommend it highly. First, a few photos (I didn’t remember to take photos until later in the tour), which aren’t great because they were taken with my camera.
The two Nuremberg “Race Laws”, passed in 1935, not only defined as who counted as a Jew or an Aryan, but also forbade “intermingling” of Jews and non-Jews. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor” stipulated this:
The second Nuremberg Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, banned marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. It also criminalized sexual relations between them. These relationships were labeled as “race defilement” (Rassenschande).
The law also forbade Jews to employ female German maids under the age of 45, assuming that Jewish men would force such maids into committing race defilement. Thousands of people were convicted or simply disappeared into concentration camps for race defilement.
Here’s a photo of two people who violated that law, and it struck me as particularly noxious. The woman is holding a sign that reads (my translation; note that it rhymes in German) “I am the biggest pig in this place and only associate with Jews.” The guy’s sign reads, “As a Jewish boy, I always take only German girls with me to my room.” The guy’s sign rhymes as well. I have no idea what happened to these people, but the Jewish man was almost certainly taken to the camps, and that almost certainly led to death.
Nazi armbands (real ones). Many of the inhabitants of Skokie were (and some still are) survivors of the Holocaust, and donated things like this to the Museum. The pin in the middle is, as you can see from the placard, a Hitler Youth Membership pin.
Below is a (genuine) postcard celebrating the “Anschluß“, when Germany annexed Austria on March 11-13 of 1938, claiming that the country was ethnically German. Later in the year, the UK, France, and Italy agreed that it was okay as well for Hitler to annex the part of Czechoslovakia also containing “ethnic” Germans, an area called the Sudetenland. This “Munich Agreement,” did not involve any Czechoslovakian participation. Hitler promised to leave the rest of the country alone and that he had no more territorial ambitions (he was lying, of course). Britain’s PM, Neville Chamberlain, returned to England with great approbation, declaring that he’d achieved “Peace for our time.” He was dead wrong, of course, and his loss of face when Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 led to Chamberlain’s ouster in 1940 (he died the same year).
I digress: this card is about the Anschluß, and reads: “13 March, 1938. One people, one country, one leader.”
Below is a very fancy hand-done document, labeled “Declaration of the State of Israel created by Arthur Szyk, 1948. On loan from Cipora Fox Katz.” It’s lovely, and Szyk, a Polish-American artist, has his own Wikipedia page, which says this:
Arthur Szyk was granted American citizenship on May 22, 1948, but he reportedly experienced the happiest day in his life eight days earlier: on May 14, the day of the announcement of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Arthur Szyk commemorated that event by creating the richly decorated illumination of the Hebrew text of the declaration.
And, sure enough, here it is. Click photo to enlarge it and see its beauty:
I stopped by the gift shop on my way out, and among the many interesting thing was this “Bag of Plagues”: toys for kids commemorating the plagues visited on Egypt because Pharaoh wouldn’t let the Jews go:
Finally, one of the best parts of the Museum is a hologram of a Holocaust survivor, one of several created by the Shoah Foundation. When the survivors were alive, they spoke for about a week to the interviewers, and their answers were recorded. Their accounts were combined with modern technology and AI to enable the audience to ask questions of the hologram, and there is so much data recorded for each person that the holograms can answer almost any question (see the video at bottom for more details). Here’s a short recording I did of one survivor named Eva. Eva lived in Amsterdam as a child, where she was friends with Anne Frank. After the war, when Eva had lost her father and brother and Anne Frank her own sister and mother, Eva’s mother married Anne Frank’s father, Otto.
Here’s she’s answering an audience question about what her typical day at Auschwitz was like:
Here’s Leslie Stahl interviewing holograms of Holocaust survivors who had died before the interview. Yes, they are interviews with people who weren’t alive! This is an absolutely fantastic way to keep not just the accounts alive, but also the survivors themselves.
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.
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.”
Everybody now knows about the issues at Columbia University, and that the NYPD has cleared the occupied building of protestors and arrested them, with the administration threatening to expel those who were arrested. As I predicted, violence is beginning to erupt around the encampments, but now in some places it’s spread from the pro-Palestinian side (which has already enacted violence by invading buildings, injuring workers, and so on) to the pro-Israeli side, and I can’t abide violence coming from the ideological side I identify with. More below:
A shocking video of a woman allegedly venting her anger against the Israel government in front of a Jewish woman has gone viral. In the insensitive video an old white woman, holding a Palestine flag walks up to girl and shouts on her face saying, “Jewish women are too ugly to be raped…maybe with a condom.” It’s then that she is pulled by other women and taken away.
Here’s the video of that. And yes, this is about the sexual violence on October 7, which some people still deny.
That’s bad enough, but this is worse. The same article reports that a Jewish woman at UCLA was beaten up by “pro-Hamas students”:
In another video a young Jewish woman was beaten unconscious by pro-Hamas students at the UCLA campus in California today.
Video of her bleeding head after being hit has gone viral. She was hospitalized with a concussion after being ganged up on by at least five student protesters.
Here’s the tweet. There’s a shot of her bloody head at the end:
A young Jewish woman was beaten unconscious by pro-Hamas students at the UCLA campus in California today.
Will mainstream media tell their viewers and readers about it? Or do we have to do all the work here on X?
Perhaps in response, the Jewish students at UCLA attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment, and that is not something I favor at all. Even someone getting beaten up like this should not promote a delayed and violent response. The attack on the Jewish woman, which was reprehensible, should have been reported to both the cops and the university, and UCLA should expel or sanction the perpetrators and consider removing the illegal encampment if it’s promoting violence. But attack it or its residents? No.
Here’s a Twitter video of Jewish students attacking the protestors. I didn’t see anybody getting physically assaulted, but the report below implies that that happened later.
The group of around 100 young Californian Jews and their allies continues to tear down the encampment at UCLA.
The arrived on campus after a young Jewish girl was beaten unconscious by the pro-Hamas students and activists occupying campus grounds pic.twitter.com/2vxOJFA2iC
I’m afraid this kind of violence is going to happen on our campus as well. So far things have been relatively peaceful, but I fear that the demonstrators will get increasingly restive if their demands aren’t meant. Here I’m not worried about the Jewish students, whom I know; and I’ve not seen a sign of violence in them. Their actions have been peaceful.
Dueling groups of protesters clashed Wednesday at the University of California, Los Angeles, grappling in fistfights and shoving, kicking and using sticks to beat one another.
The clashes at UCLA took place around a tent encampment built by pro-Palestinian protesters, who erected barricades and plywood for protection — while counter-protesters tried to pull them down. Video showed fireworks exploding over and in the encampment. People threw chairs and at one point a group piled on a person who lay on the ground, kicking and beating them with sticks until others pulled them out of the scrum.
After a couple of hours of scuffles, police wearing helmets and face shields formed lines and slowly separated the groups. That appeared to quell the violence. Officers from the California Highway Patrol also appeared to be there. The university said it had requested help.
UCLA campus police and medical personnel had showed up briefly at the scene before retreating, Nexstar’s KTLA reported.
The Jewish students also lobbed fireworks into the encampment; again, a terrible move. As my friend Rosemary said, “Jewish students need to find creative and non-violent ways to end the encampment.” My view is that Jewish students should use violence only when it’s necessary to defend themselves against violence from others.
This is what happens when you let people occupy public spaces with no consequence: the occupation attracts agitators from both sides, tensions reach a breaking point, and violence erupts.
Anyone lobbing fireworks at protestors should be arrested and expelled, of course. https://t.co/UGas7Cx6Ci
Apparently the clashes continued until the police arrived:
LAPD riot police arrive UCLA where clashes have been taking place for hours between hundreds of young Californian Jews & their allies on one side side and the pro-Hamas activists occupying campus.
I can’t advise the protestors in illegal encampment on campus, but I would advise Jewish or pro-Israeli people to respond as Jews have responded historically to confrontation: use words all you want to defend yourself, but violence must be reserved only for when you are attacked by others. The parallel with the Gaza/Hamas war is obvious.
The campus climate of hate and divisiveness is not limited to MIT, Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia; it’s now metastasized to the University of Chicago. It’s largely promoted by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP), who are constantly demonstrating on campus and have had its members arrested for trespassing in the admissions office. They also confront groups of prospective students and their parents touring the campus, telling them that the University they’re considering is complicit in the genocide of Palestinians (the administration has deemed these confrontations to be okay so long as they do not interfere with “university activities”) . In contrast, demonstrations of Jewish students are few, legal, not raucous, and don’t violate campus regulations.
While a lot of the demonstrations constitute legal free speech, something I defend, some are not, like demonstrating without a permit, blocking university entrances, sitting-in in university buildings, and disturbing classes with loud chants through a megaphone.
Regardless of the legality issue, the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, is being dominated by letters from the SJP, news reports on the SJP written by a member of that organization, and other reportage about anti-Jewish and anti-Israel activities. Since the Jewish students at Chicago are largely fearful and intimidated, I thought I’d give some brief pushback here about the SJP’s self-promotion in the student newspaper. Curiously, the paper, the Chicago Maroon, publishes very long SJP op-eds, and “news articles” by SJP members, running to thousands of words—lengths that regular news article don’t get. One might almost think that the newspaper itself is promoting the kind of hatred and divisiveness purveyed by SJP.
The most odious instance of this is the 2453-word op-ed below, a new reprint of a piece written by UChicago’s SJP on October 11 (there’s an update at the end which is just as biased and hateful as the article iteself). Click to read:
The article begins with the usual accusations of Israel for defending itself, but also includes a justificaiton of Hamas’s butchery of October 7. Here are the first two paragraphs, with my emphasis in bold (there’s a postscript of more recent events that doesn’t correct any of the article’s lies and misstatements):
The events of the past week have been historic and unprecedented by all measures. Last Saturday, for the first time in history, Palestinian resistance groups broke out of Gaza, reclaimed land from the Israeli occupation, and seized control of numerous Israeli military posts. Scrambling to recover from this humiliation and collectively punish Palestine’s population for the accompanying violence inflicted on Israeli soldiers, settlers, and civilians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has—predictably—resorted to openly genocidal tactics. In addition to bombing Gaza’s population centers with white phosphorus and systematically targeting its hospitals and shelters, Israel has announced a “total blockade” on the besieged enclave, endeavoring to starve the 2.3 million Palestinians held captive within it into submission—or worse. Israel’s war minister made the occupation’s exterminationist aims explicit yesterday, declaring that “there will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. We are fighting against human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
In the face of these alarming developments—not to mention the escalating involvement of the U.S. military and the wholly inadequate and unacceptable statement issued this week by the University—it is necessary to underscore a number of crucial facts that have been consistently and deliberately obscured by mainstream media coverage and Zionist propaganda. These forces continually attempt to frame the conversation around condemnation of individual atrocities while ignoring the structural causes of violence. It will not be possible to address the root causes of this situation or bring a just peace to the land until these basic realities are acknowledged, confronted, and addressed directly.
This is simply shameful justification of barbarism as a simple “breaking out of Gaza and “reclaiming land from the Israeli occupation”. There is no mention that the land wasn’t reclaimed, but hundreds of innocent Israelis were killed, raped, and tortured. The SJP doesn’t mention this. There were also about 240 hostages taken, a huge war crime that also isn’t mentioned in the SJP’s letter. The white phosphorus claims have been rejected by the IDF (there’s no good evidence for them) and of course hospitals and shelters are targeted by the IDF because Hamas uses them as command and weapons centers. Note that the only allusion to the horrific attack of Hamas on October 7 is a mention of “individual atrocities” that are outshined by “structural causes of violence.”
The tenor is that the Israelis brought this attack on themselves, an inversion of morality that completely discredits the SJP—as if it needed discrediting.
The rest of the article is full of the usual lies and exaggerations, and I’ll give one example. Readers should be savvy enough to see through this, as I’ve discussed these claims before:
First, Gaza is a concentration camp. This is not hyperbole. The Israeli occupation has herded millions of Palestinians into a strip of land just 25 miles long and six miles wide. More than two-thirds of these Palestinian hostages are refugees, more than half of them children. Since 2007, Israel has subjected Gaza to a merciless blockade by air, sea, and land, deliberately denying its inhabitants access to food, water, electricity, and life-saving medical treatment. On top of these structural violences, Israel has subjected Gaza to a series of massacres and military assaults over the last two decades in an effort to “punish, humiliate, and terrorize” its captive civilian population into submission.
They don’t mention terrorist attacks by Hamas and other Palestinians on Israel over the years, the thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilians from Gaza (another war crime) or the fact that Gaza was given to the Palestinians by Israel in 2005, that Hamas takes huge amounts of money meant as aid for Palestinian civilians, and that tghe “merciless blockade” is used only to prevent weapons and other aid to terrorism from entering Israel.
One of the biggest deceptions in the article is the display of the top half of the map below, with a caption saying, ” The apt historical analogy here would not be the war between Russia and Ukraine, in other words, but the project of Westward Expansion and Native Genocide perpetrated by Western powers on Turtle Island.”
Anybody who knows anything about the history of Israel and the claims about “Palestinian land” can see right through this map, but rather than go through it, I’ve put a video below showing why every panel in the upper map is a lie (I can’t speak to the lower map, but it’s certainly true that Native Americans were displaced by white settlers from Europe and other places. )
Here’s an explanation of why the top part of the map is bogus; the narrator is Kiki Hausdorff, Assistant Parliamentary Counsel at City of London Corporation.
If you want to see another explanation of why the top row of maps are misleading, go here. The fact is that this representation of the shrinking of “Palestine” is grossly wrong, but has been embraced by many people ignorant of what the green and white areas really represent. The Maroon op-ed of course ignores the repeated Palestinian rejections of Israeli offers of peace. This confected map is in fact an up-to-date version of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion“, a forgery written by Tsarists to show a fictional plan for Jews to take over the world. The “Protocols” are mentioned prominently Hamas’s founding document, its Covenant of 1988. Hamas, it seems, will swallow and perpetuate every lie that furthers its aims, which is the erasure of Israel followed by further Islamism meant to swallow the world.
The update at the end of the op-ed concentrates on the IDF’s attack on Gaza and civilian deaths, deeming these, falsely, to be a “genocide”. And the University of Chicago is said to be complicit in this genocide:
What is still more disheartening is the fact that neither the U.S. government nor the University of Chicago has been willing to take the most basic of moral stances in the face of this unfolding genocide: divesting from Israel’s military and calling for an immediate ceasefire. Instead, the Biden administration has deployed U.S. troops and shipped U.S. weaponry to the genocide’s perpetrators, while the University has spent weeks refusing even to meet publicly and transparently with its students about its investments in Israeli arms suppliers. We encourage students to follow UChicago United for Palestine’s ongoing campaigns against the University’s complicity in this atrocity and to follow news outlets that report on Palestine with the factual credibility and moral consistency so often lacking in corporatized U.S. media. We particularly recommend Middle East Eye, The Intercept, Electronic Intifada, Jewish Currents, Mondoweiss, Peoples Dispatch, Al-Jazeera, +972 Magazine, and Al-Mayadeen.
No, the most basic moral stance here is to condemn the Hamas slaughter of civilians on October 7, an attack that started the war by leading Israel to decide that Hamas could no longer be allowed to exist. In fact, our University cannot take a stand on the war because doing that would violate our Kalven principles of institutional neutrality. (And we do not make political or ideological decisions about investing.) Students for Justice in Palestine, by supporting the terrorism of October 7, has not only lost moral standing, but has given material support to terrorists. While this position may be considered free speech, it might also be considered giving moral support to terrorists, which may be illegal under U.S. law (see point 3 here).
The article below, published in the Grey City section, “The Maroon’s features and investigative journalism section”, is largely pro-Hamas propaganda. Click the headling to read. It’s 4126 words long, and the “investigation” is only the regurgitation of SJP’s lies by a reporter who is in fact part of SJP. So much for objectivity!
‘
The “objective” reporter:
I’m not going through it in detail (it’s a day-to-day report on the activities of SJP), except to recount a few of many lies (this was written on November 28):
As chants continue during the next passing time, around 12:30 p.m., a somber moment falls over the crowd. An SJP organizer’s voice chokes up as he announces the bombing of Al-Ahli hospital, where many displaced Gazans were seeking refuge and medical treatment from Israeli bombardment. According to Palestinian officials, the strike killed close to 500. Organizers call for a moment of silence. Grief-stricken, several protesters begin crying. Many embrace each other for comfort. Others don’t seem to know what to do with their hands. Some begin to channel their grief and outrage into chalking. One message on the sidewalk reads: “Never forget Oct. 17: Israel killed 500 in a Gaza hospital.”
The source of the strike is still contested. The Gaza Health Ministry blames an Israeli strike. US intelligence forces and the Israeli military blame a misfired rocket from militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which has denied these claims. Israeli airstrikes have targeted several Gazan hospitals since October 17. The Israeli military says it is targeting Hamas in tunnels under these hospitals.
No, the strike’s source is not contested by those who have investigated it: it was, as the evidence shows, caused by a rocket launched towards Israel by the terrorist group Islamic Jihad, a rocket that landed in the hospital’s parking lot and killed far fewer than 500 people (see here, here, here, and here). And of course the IDF has now issued proof of the existence of both Hamas tunnels under hospitals and weapons in them. That’s not mentioned, either.
But the fact that the Maroon‘s investigative unit used a “reporter” who was part of the SJP’s protests discredits the narrative completely. The paper promises an upcoming piece written by a Jewish student, and we’ll see if it appears.
Finally, the third piece of SJP news in this week’s Maroon describes members of the organization putting up “art installation” on the quad that were removed every night by the university. That’s because those installations violate university regulations for where protests can take place, not because they violate our free expression laws. Click to read:
At least the paper notes that the “installations,” one of which is pictured below, were violations of University regulations. This is civil disobedience, but not of the type that is going to change people’s minds—in contrast to the marches of Martin Luther King and his followers. Those who created the installations should be subject to university discipline, but of course they won’t be. At least the University of Chicago administration didn’t buy burritos for the protestors! (That happened at Harvard.)
Nevertheless, instead of admitting that their installation violated university regulations, the SJP complains bitterly that its removal is inhumane:
Art installed by students from UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) during an “emergency art build” on the main quad on Wednesday were removed overnight. The previous installation was removed over Thanksgiving break.
“UCUP condemns this removal of art as both a deeply disturbing act of disrespect against the martyrs in Palestine and a sinister message to Palestinian students everywhere who are increasingly targeted in hate crimes,” read a statement from UCUP to The Maroon.
According to the Student Manual, the installation of any structure on campus must be approved by the Director of the Student Centers or a someone designated by the director. UCUP confirmed that their recent installation was not registered.
Note the use of the word “martyrs”, which can refer to terrorists killed in the act of killing Jews. And of course hate crimes against Jews are far more numerous than those against Palestinians and Muslims, but the article don’t mention that. Doesn’t the paper do fact-checking?
Here is the group beavering away with their installation. Caption from the Maroon:
(From the Maroon): Photo by Feifei Mei. Members of UCUP creating art on Wednesday to replace a previously removed installation. The art installed Wednesday was also removed.
I want to emphasize that the hatred and divisiveness on American campuses is fomented not by Jewish students, who by and large engage in peaceful demonstrations, but by terrorist-supporting organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine. Their modus operandi include disrupting of campus events, intimidating Jewish students, yelling at prospective students and their parents, and having sit-ins in University offices and buildings. Some of this is illegal both under the law and under university regulations, so one can see it as civil disobedience. But the difference between this and the disobedience of, say, civil rights activists in the 1960s, is that the latter won over hearts and minds because their cause was just, and those arrested voluntarily took their punishment, including being attacked by police dogs and squirted with hoses. They did not beef about being arrested. In contrast, Students for Justice in Palestine is not changing hearts and minds because it abandoned the moral high ground. As you saw above, the group is morally bereft, having justified the deliberate killing of Israeli civilians on October 7. The group is reprehensible. And although some of its activities are both legal and consonant with campus regulations, SJP and UCUP have created an atmosphere here in which Jewish students have become fearful and intimidated. It is an atmosphere inimical to learning.
Solving this problem while adhering to our Principles of Free Expression is a very hard task for the administration. I have no solutions save that SJP stop purveying lies and disrupting campus. But this won’t happen. And the problem is all over America, as we saw from last week’s House hearings (I object to how they were conducted, but they did highlight the hypocrisy of universities when dealing with free-speech issues). Since up to now Jewish students here have been largely in the background (but see here), I’ve written this to give them support and to show that their opponents are morally bankrupt.
SJP proudly supports the Hamas butchery of October 7. That’s all you need to know about the organization.
This speaks for itself; see details in the YouTube description. This video of the Gat Brothers was taken by Jay Tanzman last night in central Jerusalem. And yes, they’re genuine Hasids, not fakers tricked out to look like Orthodox Jews.
But shouldn’t they be studying the Talmud instead of wailing on the axe?
I paid particular attention to this piece because it was published in Tablet, which has a decent history of accurate reporting. That doesn’t mean I believe the claim that one of history’s greatest painters was Jewish, but they do cite a Leonardo da Vinci authority who came to the conclusion, despite his leanings to the contrary, that this was indeed the case. If he’s right, and Leonardo was a landsmann, then perhaps we should change his name to Lenny da Vinci.
This isn’t a joke, though; click on the article below to see the facts, which are suggestive but not strong enough to convince me of Leonardo’s semitism with a high probability
I’ll have to quote a bit to show you the evidence. Here’s the new theory:
In all likelihood, Leonardo da Vinci was only half Italian. His mother, Caterina, was a Circassian Jew born somewhere in the Caucasus, abducted as a teenager and sold as a sex slave several times in Russia, Constantinople, and Venice before finally being freed in Florence at age 15. This, at least, is the conclusion reached in the new book Il sorriso di Caterina, la madre di Leonardo, by the historian Carlo Vecce, one of the most distinguished specialists on Leonardo da Vinci.
And the conventional wisdom as adumbrated in the 2019 article below (click screenshot) from the Jerusalem Post (quote is from Tablet piece):
The official version of da Vinci’s birth is that it was the fruit of a brief fling between the Florentine solicitor Piero da Vinci and a young peasant from Tuscany called Caterina, of whom almost nothing was known. Yet there had long been a seemingly unfounded theory that Leonardo had foreign origins and that Caterina was an Arab slave. Six years ago, professor Vecce decided to kill the rumor for good. “I simply found it impossible to believe that the mother of the greatest Italian genius would be a non-Italian slave,” he told me. “Now, not only do I believe it, but the most probable hypothesis, given what I found, is that Caterina was Jewish.”
The new evidence (my emphasis):
Vecce was the right man for the job—he published an anthology of da Vinci’s writings and a biography, Leonardo, translated into several languages, and he collaborated on the exhibition of da Vinci’s drawings and manuscripts at the Louvre and Metropolitan Museum in 2003. He embarked on the research for his latest book during the reconstruction of da Vinci’s library, which is where he found the document that changed everything. Dated Nov. 2, 1452, seven months after Leonardo’s birth, and signed by Piero da Vinci [Leonardo’s father] in his professional capacity, it is an emancipation act regarding “the daughter of a certain Jacob, originating from the Caucasian mountains,” and named Caterina. According to the document, Catarina’s owner appears to have been the wife of rich merchant Donato di Filippo, who lived near the San Michele Visdomini church in Florence, and whose usual solicitor for business was Piero da Vinci. The date on the document is underlined several times, as if da Vinci’s hand was shaking as he proceeds to the liberation of the woman who just gave him a child.
Leonardo’s mom Caterina, instead of being Italian, is hypothesized as coming from Russia, and brought to Italy to be the property of Leonardo’s father, who made her work and also impregnated her several times. Vecce argues that Caterina was brought to Italy through Constantinople to Venice and then to Florence, where she became pregnant by Piero:
From there, we can follow Caterina to Venice, and then to Florence where she was brought by her new master, Donato di Filippo, who put her to work both in his clothing workshop and at the service of his wife. That she was a sex slave is attested by the fact that she already had several children by Filippo when, at 15, she met da Vinci, Filippo’s solicitor, who at first “borrowed” her as a nanny for his daughter Marie and then fell so much in love with her that he freed her from slavery after Leonardo’s birth. “Da Vinci himself was no stranger to the Jews,” says professor Vecce. “His main customers were among the Jewish community of Florence.”
So much for that. Leonardo’s dad left Florence for Milan, where Caterina, Leonardo’s putative mom, died in 1493. There’s a bit of unconvincing evidence that Leonardo’s painting “Annunciation” has hints of his mother’s origin, but would he really have known?
I’m not sure if the above convinces you (and I’m on the fence), but it did convince the skeptic Carlo Vecce, who is no tyro when it comes to Leonardo.
For counterevidence, though, read this article from 2019. Note that in all likelihood, the “evidence” that convinced Vecce was not available to author Erol Araf:
At the time there were already several claims that Leonardo was Jewish (under Jewish law, if your mother is a Jew, so are you; Jewishness can be regarded as traveling along with mitochondrial DNA). But here Araf takes issue:
As additional proof that he was ashamed of his mother’s origins as a lowly Jewish slave, the implausible argument has been advanced that he treated her funeral as an embarrassment. This contention is not supported by facts: The burial costs listed in the Codex Foster – under a receipt containing wax and lemon juice – includes expenses for a doctor, sugar, wax for the candles, bier with a cross, four priests and four altar boys, the bells and the gravediggers. It all costs a very tidy sum of 123 soldi; a not-insignificant amount.
So much for that. And the best evidence Araf could adduce at the time is this:
Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of art history at Oxford University and recognized as a leading Leonardo scholar, has researched the origins of Leonardo’s mother hoping it will put an end to “totally implausible myths” that have built up about Leonardo’s life. He analyzed 15th-century tax records kept in Vinci, Florence. In various interviews, preceding the publication of his book Mona Lisa: the People and the Painting, written together with Dr. Giuseppe Pallanti, an economist and art researcher, Kemp argued that the evidence was obtained by meticulously kept real estate taxation declarations.
“In the case of Vinci, “Kemp said, “they verified that Caterina’s father, who seems to be pretty useless, had a rickety house which wasn’t lived in and they couldn’t tax him…. He had disappeared and then apparently died young. So Caterina’s was a real sob story.” The records also showed that Caterina had an infant stepbrother, Papo, and her grandmother died shortly before 1451, leaving them with no assets or support, apart from an uncle with a “half-ruined” house and cattle. In short, she was a poor orphaned peasant girl who fell on hard times and in love with Leonardo’s rakish father.
The crucial question, then, since Leonardo was born in 1452, was whether they could establish that Caterina had a real Italian father whose existence can be established with a paper record. Also, Kemp’s claim that mother Caterina was a “poor orphaned peasant girl who fell on hard times and in love with Leonardo’s rakish father” doesn’t comport with Carlo Vecce’s claim that Caterina was the slave of Leonardo’s father’s solicitor, who impregnated her several times before giving her to Leonardo’s father. And was a child produced while Caterina was under the thumb of Piero da Vinci?
So we have a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Are there any living relatives of Leonardo who could be used to establish whether his mitochondria came from Russia? I don’t know, and can’t be arsed to find out. Only history will adjudicate this one, and Vecce’s book is available, though only yet in Italian. The title means “Catherine’s smile”:
Here we have another example of what I call the “reverse appeal to nature”, except that it’s a “reverse appeal to Judaism”. The former trope goes like this, “What my ideology says is good is what I must find in nature.” That is, if you’re a gender activist, you must argue that since there is no sexual binary in humans (a false assertion, of course), then there is no sexual binary in animals in general (another false assertion).
Here we have a subspecies of that bias evinced by a Jewish rabbi and gender activist, who claims that Judaism has long recognized a whole range of genders—six, to be exact. This is also false, for the “genders” adduced by rabbi Elliot Kukla, a transgender man, are not socially enacted sex roles but what doctors call “disorders of sex development”( DSDs): very rare conditions when the development of sexual characteristics goes wrong (DSDs, despite Anne Fausto-Sterling’s claim, are not “new sexes”). These ancient Jewish categories do not correspond to the kind of genders people recognize today—and Rabbi Kukla admits it. The fallacy here is imposing onto one’s historical religion what what sees as good today: the recognition and approbation of different genders. (Unlike biological sex, which comes in only two forms in humans, genders can be multifarious, as they are social roles or identities assumed by biological males or females.) Somehow the Rabbi thinks it gives succor to the social justice movement to show that Jews recognized people who were victims of sex-trait development gone awry.
The article identifies Kukla as “a rabbi who provides spiritual care to those who are grieving, dying, ill or disabled. He is working on a book about grief in a time of planetary crisis.” Wikipedia also notes that he’s “the first openly transgender person to be ordained by the Reform Jewish seminary Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles.”
Read his op-ed by clicking on the screenshot below, or you can find an archived copy here for free.
There are two issues with Kukla’s article, both involving misleading data. The first one involves transgender people have higher rates of suicide due to oppression or misgendering. But none of the data he adduces shows that “oppression” of transgender people, or calling them by the wrong pronoun, actually causes their suicide. Here are a couple of his statements:
Over the past few years there have been countless stories in the news of trans and nonbinary young people’s deaths by suicide. In San Diego, a 14-year-old, Kyler Prescott, died after being repeatedly misgendered by hospital staff members in the psychiatric unit that was supposed to be helping him. Leelah Alcorn, a 16-year-old transgender girl from Ohio, was rejected by her parents after coming out. In her online suicide note she wrote, “The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was.”
More than half of young people in the United States who are transgender and nonbinary seriously considered suicide in the past year, according to a survey conducted by the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization for L.G.B.T.Q. youth. This figure is staggering, but the Trevor Project’s data also points to what can help. The same 2022 survey found that trans and nonbinary youth who report having their pronouns respected by all or most of the people in their life attempted suicide at half the rate of those who didn’t. And a 2019 Trevor Project survey found that transgender and nonbinary young people who live with even one accepting adult were 40 percent less likely to report a suicide attempt in the previous year.
A 2021 study published by The Journal of Adolescent Health found that for people younger than 18, receiving gender-affirming hormone therapy was associated with nearly 40 percent lower odds of having had a suicide attempt in the previous year. It’s not being transgender or nonbinary that kills young people; it’s the shunning, lack of acceptance and transphobia they encounter in the struggle to be who they truly are.
Now it’s certainly true that some transgender people are driven to suicide by ill-treatment from others, but we have to realize that the incidence of mental illness and suicidality among transgender people is sky-high to begin with, and the desire to change genders may be one solution people see to their mental problems. If they’re told they’re in the wrong body, or that’s in the air, then they may feel that a mental illness that precedes transition can actually drive people to transition. It’s important to recognize that changing gender is often deeply associated with mental illness; it’s not the same kind of thing as changing jobs.
As one paper reports, “Data indicate that 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth.” I am not claiming that being transgender is a form of mental illness, but that it may be a way that people resolve their mental illness. And in some cases it works: in general, transgender people report themselves happy that they transitioned. But note that in none of the cases above do they separate confounding variables of desire to transition from mental illness.
People who kill themselves after being misgendered, for example, may be those with more severe mental illness, and thus are more sensitive and more likely to take an extreme action after being misgendered. As far as I know, the relationship between gender-affirming hormone therapy and suicide is controversial, as the most severely ill adolescents may not be given puberty blockers because they’re not deemed stable enough to medically transition yet. (Jesse Singal has bored in on the weakness of studies connecting well being and lowered suicide with “affirmative care”; you can see one of his discussions here.)
And as for the “people who live with even one accepting adult” committing suicide less often, the paper really show that the condition tested was NOT “living with one accepting adult”, but having one adult to whom you disclosed your trans status accepting it.From the cited paper:
Youth were first asked whether they had disclosed their sexual orientation to any of the following adults: parent, family member other than a parent or sibling, teacher or guidance counselor, and doctor or other healthcare provider. As a follow-up, youth were asked to what extent they were accepted by the adult(s) to whom they disclosed their sexual orientation. A variable was created that indicated whether youth felt accepted by one or more of the adults to whom they disclosed or did not feel accepted by any adult(s) to whom they disclosed. Past year suicide attempt was assessed with the question “During the past 12 months, did you actually attempt suicide?,” which was asked of youth who reported having seriously considered suicide in the past 12 months. A logistic regression model was utilized to predict past year suicide attempt based on the presence of an accepting adult while controlling for the impact of youth age, gender identity, and race/ethnicity.
Note that all of these are self-reports, so the data are based on whether the trans adolescent “felt accepted”, not “was accepted”. Nor is there anything about living with the accepting adult. The confounding variable here is the self report: even if trans youth are accepted, more severe mental illness may make them feel unaccepted and more severe mental illness may make them more suicidal. Alternatively, those youth who are stable enough to seek and get help might be less likely to attempt suicide because they have less severe mental illness.
I am not dismissing all this research out of hand, but pointing out three things. First, there are confounding variables when it comes to transgender youth that could make certain factors look like they cause suicide when they don’t (or are not as responsible for suicide as proper data would show). Second, the behaviors said to cause suicide may hide the real causes of suicide: mental illness, or may be correlated with the degree of such illness (like sensitivity to being misgendered).
Since the risk of suicidality is a big reason why gender-affirming activists urge parents and therapists to transition children as quickly as possible, it’s very important to figure out the reasons why transgender youth have such high suicide rates—especially the connection with mental illness independent of “affirming” medical care or misgendering.
Third, the rabbi ignores these confounding factors, though I’m not even sure why half of his article, which is pitched as about “six genders of Jews”, is really about suicide
On to the real topic. Did Judaism historically recognize six genders? The answer is, well, not really, for the “genders” were actually disorders of sexual development (DSDs): conditions wheb external genitalia or other secondary sex characteristic did not align with a person’s biological sex. (As always, I construe biological sex as whether someone has the equipment to produce large, immobile gametes [females] or small, mobile gametes [males)].) These ancient Jewish genders don’t at all correspond to the hundreds of genders that people use in modern society.
Rabbi Kukla tells us what those genders were:
In my own tradition, Judaism, our most sacred texts reflect a multiplicity of gender. This part of Judaism has mostly been obscured by the modern binary world until very recently.
There are four genders beyond male or female that appear in ancient Jewish holy texts hundreds of times. They are considered during discussions about childbirth, marriage, inheritance, holidays, ritual leadership and much more. We were always hiding in plain sight, but recently the research of Jewish studies scholars like Max Strassfeld has demonstrated how nonbinary gender is central to understanding Jewish law and literature as a whole.
When a child was born in the ancient Jewish world it could be designated as a boy, a girl, a “tumtum” (who is neither clearly male nor female), or an “androgynos” (who has both male and female characteristics) based on physical features. There are two more gender designations that form later in life. The “aylonit” is considered female at birth, but develops in an atypical direction. The “saris” is designated male at birth, but later becomes a eunuch.
There is not an exact equivalence between these ancient categories and modern gender identities. Some of these designations are based on biology, some on a person’s role in society. But they show us that people who are more than binary have always been recognized by my religion. We are not a fad.
When you look up these four other “genders,” you find that they’re disorders of sex development, and, contrary to the rabbis’s claim, are indeed all based on biology. You can, for example, see a list here that gives the same genders described by the rabbi:
“Zachar”, This term is derived from the word for memory and refers to the belief that the man carried the name and identity of the family. It is usually translated as “male” in English.
“Nekeivah”, This term is derived from the word for a crevice and probably refers to a vaginal opening. It is usually translated as “female” in English
“Ay’lonit”, is a female who does not develop at puberty and is infertile.
“Saris“, is a male who does not develop at puberty and/or subsequently has their sexual organs removed. A saris can be “naturally” a saris (saris hamah), or become one through human intervention (saris adam).
“Androgynos“, someone who has both male and female sexual characteristics. This would refer to certain intersex conditions, but in terms of gender in the modern day it is closest to androgyne or bigender.
“Tumtum” A person whose sexual characteristics are indeterminate or obscured.
The first two are “genders” that correspond to behaving according to your biological sex: man and woman. The other individuals, except for true hermaphrodites for gametic tissue, (perhaps “androgynos” would be one of those), are indeed male or female in the biological sense (e.g. “saris” is male, and “ay’lonit” is female). These may have been “genders” among Jews in the sense that if your sex was indeterminate, you would have to decide which, if any, sex role to play: male, female, or something else. But they are not genders in the modern sense, nor do they have anything to say about adopting sex roles when you don’t have a DSD.
But these conditions are rare: as I say in an upcoming co-authored paper:
Developmental variants are very rare, constituting only about one in 5600 people (0.018%), and also don’t represent “other sexes”. (We know of only two cases of true human hermaphrodites that were fertile, but one individual was fertile only as a male, and the other only as a female.)
There are certainly more than 1 in 5600 people today who claim they’re of a “non-male or non-female gender”: a Pew study shows that 5% of young American adults say their gender does not correspond to their biological sex. These individuals are nearly 300 times more common than the Jewish “genders” noted by Rabbi Kukla.
That’s pretty much all I have to say. These kinds of disorders would probably have been about as rare in ancient Jews as they are today, and so we can say with some confidence that the four DSD “genders” of Judaism do not at all correspond to modern genders that people assume. Even the good Rabbi himself admits that when he says:
There is not an exact equivalence between these ancient categories and modern gender identities.
And he misrepresents the genders, which are all based on biology, that is, on development going awry.
I needn’t say more except that some orthodox Jews have refuted Rabbi Kukla’s contention in a piece at the Jewish News Syndicate, but since they include Ben Shapiro, whose very name is often used to reject an argument, I’ll let you read them for yourself.
This crazy article is a prime esxample of a someone exaggerating or misrepresenting nearly all the data he adduces with the aim of showing people that the ancients accepted a diversity of genders. He fails to show that those genders aren’t the same as modern genders, though that’s really his aim: to validate the latter by citing the former. He also fails to fairly assess the meaning of high suicidality in transgender youth.
I’ll add one more bit of confirmation bias from the rabbi:
In fact, Judaism sees us as so ancient that according to one fifth-century interpretation of the Bible, the very first human being, Adam, was actually an androgynos. This explains why Genesis says, “And God created humankind in the divine image, creating it in the image of God,” referring to Adam, the first person, with a singular pronoun. But then, the very same verse says: “creating them male and female.” (1:27). “Them,” in this ancient interpretation, also refers to Adam: a single person who is both male and female. In other words, in this reading of the creation story, the first human being is described with a singular “they” pronoun to express the multiplicity of their gender.
All I’ll say here that this is “according to one fifth-century representation of the Bible.” Way to cherry-pick, Rabbi Kukla! What about all those other theologians who see Adam and Eve as separate people in the story: a man and a woman created by God?
