College administrator fired over 'anti-gay' column

You can say a lot of things as a tenured faculty member that you could not say as a service worker or administrator -- positions that are not tenured. Case in point: Crystal Dixon was fired as the associate vp of human resources at the University of Toledo after she wrote a column criticizing comparisons between the drive for legalizing same-sex unions and the civil rights movement.

I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a Black woman. I am genetically and biologically a Black woman and very pleased to be so as my Creator intended. Daily, thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle evidenced by the growing population of PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex Gays) and Exodus International just to name a few. Frequently, the individuals report that the impetus to their change of heart and lifestyle was a transformative experience with God; a realization that their choice of same-sex practices wreaked havoc in their psychological and physical lives.

Dixon has sought the help of the conservative ACLU, the Thomas More Law Center.

Creator's note: I've been trying to publish this post and another on "Jews and Power" all day. However, I have been unable due to some irregular blogging issues that should be resolved soon.

Torture, Jews and Finkelstein's 'fact-finding'

It's hard to not set aside your mental faculties when sitting down for a lecture from Norman Finkelstein.

Probably American Jews' least favorite American Jew, Finkelstein first made his name with "The Holocaust Industry," in which he accused Jews of exploiting memories of the Holocaust for financial and political gain, and for Israel's sake; it was well-reviewed by a few, such as Noam Chomsky and Raul Hilberg, and panned by the guy Finkelstein said inspired it, Peter Novick, who said it made "egregious misrepresentations" and "absurd claims."

Last year, Finkelstein re-entered the spotlight with a beautiful pissing match with Alan Dershowitz of Harvard. With a little assistance from campus activists like StandWithUs, Dershowitz helped push DePaul University into denying its infamous academic tenure.

When I last heard Finkelstein speak, at Cal State Northridge in February, he was booed and hissed for about an hour by leaders of the Jewish Defense League (a group that, to be fair, might be able to make an anti-Semite out of Abe Foxman). His audience last night at UC Irvine was quite a bit more receptive. Having been invited by the Muslim Student Union, whose members have called for the destruction of Israel, Finkelstein kicked off Palestinian awareness week, which this year carries the theme, "Never Again? The Palestinian Holocaust."

"Is Criticism of Israel Anti-Semitic" was the title of Finkelstein's speech, but he didn't get to that topic until minute 83 of his 101-minute address. Instead, he spent most of the time talking about the controversy surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he said is "contrived, fabricated" to "deflect attention from, and sown confusion about, the documentary record" -- one that he claims indicts Israel on just about every human-rights account.

Listening to Finkelstein, you get the impression that Jews really do run the world, and that, as Kevin MacDonald argues, anti-Semitism is just what they had coming. Of course, Finkelstein repeatedly reminded the audience that Jews like he were cast off like chaff for challenging the establishment.

I was drifting in and out, thankful to have a tape recorder, when he said something that caught my attention. On the topic of civilian casualties, Finkelstein indulged a criticism of a familiar target.

There is this journalist writing for The New Yorker magazine, now he writes for The Atlantic magazine; his name is Jeffrey Goldberg. And recently he came out with a book called "Prisoners," and it was his account of his life in Ansar Three prison camp during the First Intifada. He was a guard in the camp. He also tortured Palestinians, which is to say he is the perfect expert for The New Yorker on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Finkelstein went on to discuss a scene from the book in which Goldberg snaps at a Hamas official that at least Israeli soldiers don't try to kill children. (You can hear more of the audio here.) Finkelstein claimed that, in fact, they do. But that is not the point I want to discuss.

I read "Prisoners." In fact, I really enjoyed "Prisoners," which I discussed here last summer. Though a mission of hope, the book is, in the end, a lamentation of Israel's unresolved future and of Goldberg's time at Ketziot (AKA Ansar Three), where he served as a guard after making aliyah and living on a liberal kibbutz. What I couldn't recall in his penance was any discussion of torturing Palestinian prisoners.

A good two hours later, as Finkelstein was being hurried from the podium to a book signing for his fellow travelers, I asked him where he had discovered this information. His answer: In Goldberg's book.

"He said he sent people to the zinzana; he sent people to the refrigerator," Finkelstein said. "That is an accessory to, or a, torture."

Such deduction says a little something about Finkelstein's insights into human-rights reports. Previously, Finkelstein had claimed that Goldberg was at least aware of the torturing that must have gone on at the prison camp.

Although admitting that he personally sent prisoners to the zinzana, and although liberal in his outrage at the "cruelty" of the tortures Palestinians inflicted on each other, Golderg rejects (albeit indirectly) the insinuation that he himself might be an accessory to torture, if not a torturer himself. When the guards needed "someone to go solitary" for a minor infraction of prison rules, Goldberg recalls at one point , "twenty Arabs immediately volunteered." He processes this not as a demonstration of their solidarity and courage but rather as vindication that the "Arabs want to be our victim" and "the Geneva Convention said nothing about prisoners who asked to be punished."

But this was a new indictment.

The zinzana, for that matter, was not described as a room where Palestinians were waterboarded. Translated in rough Arabic, the word means solitary confinement -- something you would find at most any prison in the world.

Finkelstein's scholarship has been discredited before; here are criticisms from the London Review of Books and the right-wing pro-Israel, some would say hawkish, groups CAMERA and StandWithUs. So I e-mailed Goldberg with the subject, "Finkelstein accuses you of torturing Palestinians," and he immediately called my cell.

"That is just ridiculous. I never laid a hand on anybody," Goldberg told me. "One of my principle roles there was making sure the prisoners had fresh fruit.

"Norman Finkelstein is a ridiculous figure and he is lying and purposely misreading my book. The dishonesty is stunning, but we've come to expect it. He is a malignant fantasist. I'd expect nothing less from Hezbollah's foremost Jewish American spokesman."

Long Beach professor justifies anti-Semitism

I do not think Jews are living in 1938 Germany. But it really has seemed lately liked I've transitioned to the anti-Semitism beat. Besides posting several items on the topic during the past few days, I spent last night at UC Irvine, listening to a speech from Norman Finkelstein, who has certainly been called an anti-Semite, and that followed two weeks of researching and writing a profile of Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at Cal State Long Beach whose books have been compared to "Mein Kampf."

In the above video, which is 41 minutes long, MacDonald appears on the TV program "Current Issues," hosted by Palestinian American Hesham Tillawi. The focus of their conversation is the negative influence and clannish behavior of Jews. At the 17-minute mark, MacDonald describes his opinions, detailed in a three-volume series and subsequent essays that can be found at kevinmacdonald.net, as "rational" anti-Semitism.

MacDonald once served as an expert witness for Holocaust-denier David Irving, and many of his theories of Judaism as a "group evolutionary strategy" are controversial. The least palatable are that Judaism has a built in eugenics program -- the study of Talmud, which, he claims, stemmed the reproduction of dumber members of the Tribe -- and that anti-Semitism, even Nazism, were gentile responses to Jewish success.

He's been on the faculty of Cal State Long Beach 23 years now, having achieved full tenure in 1994. But the university is under increasing pressure from some of MacDonald's colleagues and outside organizations to denounce his writings, which, obviously, have very little to do with child psychology and, to his credit, have been kept out of the classroom.

Under the headline, "The Professor Anti-Semites Love," MacDonald carries this week's cover for The Jewish Journal. It's a long profile -- from his childhood in Oshkosh to the origins of his research to the contents of his books and the battle against him -- so I'll just mention now the biggest problem MacDonald has had: his anti-Semitic admirers.

As a warning, there will be some very vulgar language from someone who would like to see the fulfillment of the Final Solution:

In the second of two recent interviews, MacDonald said he is not a fan of anti-Semitism. But he also described his opinions on a Palestinian American TV news program in 2005 as "rational anti-Semitism" and has joked that being branded a Jew hater was a "badge of honor," the knee-jerk reaction of a scared Jewish establishment.

The chief concern over MacDonald's writings about Jews is directed at his fan base: white supremacists like Stormfront.org and Vanguard News Network -- whose motto is "No Jews. Just Right." The members of these online communities have become his loudest defenders, often in language that is as offensive as possible.

"So the goddam Kikes are getting their way yet again, putting the thumbscrews to a White scholar whose ass they are not worthy to lick.... At least this oppression proves that Prof. MacDonald's great work is hitting the scum hard," a Vanguard commenter wrote in February below a republished story about MacDonald from CSULB's student paper.

"How much more of this humiliation is our race going to take? How long before this motherf---ing plague of repulsive, hook-snouted ticks is given a real Zyklon fumigation, as opposed to the fairy tale one?"

MacDonald repudiated such rhetoric as "crazy stuff" but said he supports the ideology behind it.

"White people have legitimate ethnic interests. To the extent that that is all they believe, then we are on the same page," he said. "I don't like to use words like white supremacists. You could say that Koreans in Korea are Korean supremacists if they want to maintain their culture. It is kind of a loaded word; it is a politically charged word of the left, basically, to pathologize any sense of having an ethnicity and culture by people like me. I reject that."

"I certainly reject the tactics and the rhetoric of these people. It's very crude," MacDonald added. "But to the extent that David Duke is trying to advance a white ethnic interest and so on, I don't have any problem with that."

I'll post later about the basis for MacDonald's research, which rests on an assumption of "Jewish Genius."

Wheaton professor fired over divorce

Wheaton College is an evangelical school outside of Chicago. Like many colleges cut from conservative Protestant cloth, its students and faculty must uphold a stricter standard of conduct than they would at, say, Florida State. One of those rules for married faculty is remaining so. Divorce is grounds for dismissal unless your circumstances fit the biblical exemption, which generally is limited to an unfaithful spouse.

The problem for Kent Gramm is he doesn't want to talk with Wheaton administrators about why he and his wife are separating. So they're letting him go.

For him, he says, it didn’t seem appropriate “to subject your personal life to the judgment of the college administrators.” However, he told his students of his reasons for leaving – first reported in Wheaton’s student newspaper, The Wheaton Record – to offer them an alternative model of Christian living. Gramm, who teaches literature, fiction and nonfiction writing, has his master of divinity degree in addition to his M.A. and Ph.D.

“I think the students can be given a false picture of what the proper Christian life should be,” Gramm says. “Whereas many of these students come from households that have been broken by divorce, and if they conform to the overall population, half of them themselves will be going through divorce. And if they are shown that God doesn’t abandon you if you are divorced and they’re shown that this is a part of life and that sometimes it can possibly be the right thing or the best thing, not necessarily the desirable thing, to do, then I think that might help them in their future lives.”

Jews, power and the Palestinian refugee crisis

At the Hillel Summit in Washington last month, I listened to Ruth R. Wisse, a Harvard professor of Yiddish and author of "Jews and Power," deliver a passionate 40-minute lecture on why American Jews should stand up for that imperiled sliver of Mediterranean coast we have been fortunate enough, for almost 60 years now, to call Israel.

You can listen to the lecture here.

Wisse's talk was moving, and I had wanted to read her book, so I picked a copy up on the way out and worked through it on my flight back. (It's 184 pages and a very quick read.) In "Jews and Power," Wisse makes a point that she repeated during her speech -- that Arab countries, not Israel, are responsible for the Palestinian refugee crisis. From pages 140-141:

Palestinian Arabs are to be pitied with the tens of millions of refugees of the twentieth century. But Palestinians are doubly unfortunate because theirs is the only such displacement that is prolonged for political advantage. Originally, the Palestinians who fled from their homes in 1948 were a relatively small and easily assimilable group, moving often no more than several miles among people who spoke their language and shared their religion and culture. Leaving aside the refugees of the two world wars, as well as Jews driven from Arab lands in numbers equal to the Arabs who fled from Israel, the two massive conflicts that framed Israel's War of Independence -- India's war over the creation of Pakistan in 1947 and the Korean War of 1950-53 -- produced more than 20 million refugees between them, yet most of those refugees were reabsorbed within a generation. Only in the Arab case did a coalition of rulers, with millions of square miles and great wealth at their disposal, foster and cultivate the state of emergency as a means of sustaining a casus belli.

Look no further for an example of such politicking than the life and times of Yasser Arafat, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and common crook. The consequences, of course, have been significant and seemingly incessant.

Less than a week after I returned, I came across this article, and this image, in the New York Times:

GAZA — In the Katib Wilayat mosque one recent Friday, the imam was discussing the wiliness of the Jew.

“Jews are a people who cannot be trusted,” Imam Yousif al-Zahar of Hamas told the faithful. “They have been traitors to all agreements — go back to history. Their fate is their vanishing. Look what they are doing to us.”

At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the “Crusaders,” or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as “the brothers of apes and pigs,” while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war until Palestine is free of Jewish control.

Its videos praise fighters and rocket-launching teams; its broadcasts insult the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for talking to Israel and the United States; its children’s programs praise “martyrdom,” teach what it calls the perfidy of the Jews and the need to end Israeli occupation over Palestinian land, meaning any part of the state of Israel.

Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 “road map” peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.

Hardly an eye-opener -- in fact, a bit surprising in its gee-whiz tone -- this article reiterated what we already know. But it made me think of Ruth Wisse, whose latest book, without question controversial with the Jewish left, begins its final chapter (page 173) by discussing the contradictions of Jewish power:

Just as no Jewish initiative could have solved the German problem that culminated in Nazism, no Israeli initiative could correct "what went wrong" in Arab societies. Jews could only hope to enhance their own security through the avoidance of fatal mistakes and nudge the Arab world to greater maturity by making it clear that Israel was in the region to stay.

The second -- internal -- problem that could not be alleviated by the creation of Israel alone was the relation of Jews to political power. Zionist thinkers had expected sovereignty to result in political normalization without being able to anticipate the role that a tiny Jewish state might play in the international struggle for power. In trying to withstand the Arab assualt, Israelis, Jews, and concerned third parties tripped again and again over the same issue of power that had impeded the development of Jewish political history to begin with. If historians once mistook the absence of sovereignty to mean that Jews stood outside politics, modern students of the problem too often assumed that the resumption of sovereignty guaranteed political parity between Israel and the nations. Jews were said to have reversed their political fortunes once they began governing themselves and an Arab minority in a country of their own. Equating "statehood" with "power," the new experts confused Zionism's potential with its achievement, as if the acquired option of Jewish self-defense had erased Arab advantages in numbers, resources, and land.

Friedlander's Pulitzer for Holocaust studies

Saul Friedlånder seems to sit down for a lot of Q&As, but, then again, he deserves the audience. A Holocaust historian at UCLA, Friedlander won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction Monday -- I ordered the two-volume, 1,500-word series "Nazi Germany and the Jews" yesterday -- and The Forward has this interview:

GS: Unlike a number of your colleagues in the field, you put great stock in survivor diaries. What do such sources offer, and what are their potential pitfalls?

SF: You don’t go to diaries for historical exactness. You go to them for the attitudes, the reactions, the fears, the hopes — the life of those that were targeted. If you leave that aside, you come to rely uniquely on German documents. You completely shunt aside the humanity of the Jewish communities that are the face of the story. I wouldn’t turn to the diaries to learn about German policies, but I need to read them to be informed of daily life in the ghettoes. Now, you may tell me that these sources are unreliable, but not more unreliable than Eichmann’s depositions in Jerusalem or the memoirs of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, which are used everywhere. One must, of course, consider Jewish diaries with extreme care and with a totally open critical mind, as one would any other source.

GS: In a review of “The Years of Extermination” that recently appeared in The Washington Post, historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of the 1996 book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” wrote that your book “may prove to be the last major general history of the Holocaust produced by a leading scholar who lived under the Nazis.” This is, of course, interesting at the level of biography, but when it comes to the scholarship itself, is there a tangible difference between Holocaust historians who lived through the experience and those who did not?

SF: There shouldn’t be, but there is. The person who has lived through the events is familiar with nuances that cannot be gotten from administrative documents. The things that are between the lines are more vivid among those who remember. Now, it has been argued that the survivor-historian is more subjective and less scientific, but we are all subjective with regard to this period. So you say where it is you are coming from and do your best, if you are an honest person, to try to restrain your subjectivity.

(skip)

GS: You take your book’s epigraph from the diary of one Stefan Ernest, a Jew hiding in “Aryan” Warsaw in 1943. “[People] will ask,” you quote him as saying, “is this the only truth? I reply in advance: No, this is not the truth, this is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth…. Even the mightiest pen could not depict the whole, real, essential truth.” It seems here that you are trying to sound a note of humility. But am I wrong in sensing a hint of bravado here, too? Do you see yourself as wielding “the mightiest pen”?

SF: I don’t want to underestimate my work. It would, in a way, be grotesque to write and then say, “This is worthless.” But I meant the epigraph very simply and directly: Don’t let us have any illusions. We try, and we have to try, but this is not even a fragment of a fragment of the truth.

Hillel opens its doors to non-Jews

This is an interesting story. Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life is no longer for Jews. Not entirely, at least.

At Syracuse University, the election of a non-Jewish student to the Hillel board occasioned some opposition. But while a meeting must sometimes pause to explain a particular Jewish phrase or practice, student leaders mostly say the addition has been positive.

"I think it's been a mutually beneficial experience for not only him and the board, but for also the community at large to see that we've reached beyond the Jewish student, that we've reached beyond what Hillel's stereotype is, and to bring in other types of people, and to really let ourselves realize that Hillel isn't just for one type of person," sophomore Jillian Zarem said. "It's for as many different people as we can reach out to."

At the Jewish University Center of Pittsburgh, a Korean student who regularly attended Shabbat dinners at Hillel managed to recruit his Jewish roommate who previously wouldn't set foot inside the building.

"How did he do it?" asked Aaron Weil, the executive director of the Pitt center. "He said, 'John, I'm a Baptist. I'm Korean. I'm going to Hillel. Don't you think it's a little bit odd that I'm willing to go to Hillel and you're not?' He didn't have a comeback for that, and he came in and saw the open community."

"The benefit to us," Weil continued, "is by making ourself a place that is open to all, Jews are going to feel more comfortable to go there because they're not going to a place that is Jewish only. Jews are looking today, in general, for opportunities to be Jewish but not to be separate."

Now, I'm not one to criticize non-Jews who want to be involved with Jewish life. In fact, as most of you know, I share such an affinity. I'm just hard-pressed to think of a Muslim or Christian or Hindu organization from college that had a Jew among its leaders.

But college is a time of deep spiritual seeking, and maybe Hillel has indirectly stumbled upon an effective form of Jewish outreach. The open-door policy certainly has been appreciated by Rupa Lalchandani, who arrived at UCLA having spent the previous decade attending Bal Vihar, "which is like Sunday School for Hindus."

During her first two quarters, though, the only education she received was on campus. "There was a religious void in my life."

So she began seeking. She found the Hindu Students Council, for which she currently helps plan weekly discussions. She also started attending church each Sunday with a close friend. And she began hanging out at Hillel with Jewish friends. Next year, she says, she wants to visit a monastery.

"Religion centers me. College life is so fast. It is always one thing after another, especially in Los Angeles ... I wanted time to think about what I was doing with my life," the fourth-year psychobiology student says. "Everyone is on a spiritual quest, whether or not we realize it. It's a lifelong process."

'They low-down, they dirty, they some snitches'

I came across this video a few days ago, and it has no religious hook. But it's too funny not to share and it reflects my sentiments for USC.

Understanding the college spiritual journey

Speaking of the Pew Forum, the religious research center's home page features a lengthy Q&A with a leader of UCLA's "Spirituality in Higher Education," which I wrote about for the fall cover of UCLA Magazine.

The study found that nearly three-of-four students who are now juniors agreed that "most people can grow spiritually without being religious." That's up 12 percent from when these students were freshmen.

I think you have to realize that we have, on the one hand, the students' individual faiths and practices, and on the other hand, their viewpoints about students who might follow a different faith or no faith. To us, this is a positive finding in the sense that students display a good deal of tolerance for differing approaches to religion and spirituality on the part of their peers. In other words, they're not imposing their own standards upon their fellow beings.

Does that mean that they're seeing the world in more relative terms and in less absolute terms?

Yes, I would say so, and this is consistent with the finding that their tendency to embrace an ecumenical worldview also increases during college.

This would seem to be bad news for many organized religions, especially the ones making truth claims.

Not necessarily. We have organizations like the National Council of Churches and other worldwide religious organizations that try to think about how to enhance understanding across different religions and faiths. Looking ahead to the condition of the world down the road, one would hope that this kind of understanding and tolerance would increase with time. That, of course, may not fit certain belief systems, but I think, on balance, that it's reassuring to see that the college experience is associated with an increase in this kind of tolerance and understanding of the other.

A Muslim at Hebrew College

It's not often a reader offers you a hat tip on a story you wrote, but thanks Gershon, who sent me an e-mail that said, "Good Muslims are hard to find these days, but it is good to profile them when you do."

He was referring to a story I had in this week's paper about a Muslim scholar teaching at Hebrew Union College. (He was not referring to the other story I had about anti-Israel rhetoric at UC Irvine.) Here's a bit about Ismail Bardhi, who was brought to the attention of HUC's Scholar Rescue Fund by Reuven Firestone, a professor of Islam and Medieval Jewish studies.

Firestone first met Bardhi in Macedonia six years ago, when the latter was helping organize an international conference on religion and peace, the first to bring together the country's Muslim Albanians and Orthodox Christian Slavs.

The conference coincided with a violent build-up between the two ethnic groups -- including shootings, retaliation shootings and torchings of churches and mosques -- that put the young nation on the brink of civil war. But the dialogue that began with Bardhi and his Orthodox Christian counterpart helped dissolve the tension, and the conflict fizzled.

"In Skopje, Mr. Bardhi was the voice of Muslim moderates who greatly promoted in a nonpolitical manner the process of reconciliation between Albanian Muslims and Macedonian Orthodox," Paul Mojzes, organizer of the conference and co-editor of The Journal of Ecumenical Studies, wrote in a letter of recommendation. (Last March, in an essay titled, "Orthodoxy and Islam in the Balkans," Mojzes identified Bardhi as "the best Muslim proponent of inter-religious dialogue in the Balkans.")

The Macedonian peace, however, was short-lived, and two years ago, when Bardhi was nominated to become president of the Islamic Religious Union of Macedonia, he discovered that the problems had bled into his own religious community. After a former student who had become affiliated with the Muslim nationalists smashed Bardhi's face with the butt of a gun, Bardhi spent weeks secluded in his home, withdrew from the political race and eventually lost his job for political reasons, he said.

"During the latest elections within the Islamic Religious Union of Macedonia, professor Bardhi has been the most prominent and trusted candidate," Ahmet Sherif, a professor at Macedonia's Institute of National History, wrote in a letter to the Scholar Rescue Fund. "But unfortunately, due to the threatening and sinister actions toward him and his collaborators he chose to withdraw his candidacy as an act of protest."

Bardhi's problem was an unwillingness to politicize his faith. He is, as Firestone described him, an "Islamic humanist," a religious progressive willing to see Islam as "the perfect expression of the divine will," but not alone and superior on the world stage.

"My topic is quranic exegesis and how we have to be more open between the Quran and Torah, to see how they could speak together," said Bardhi, 50. "We have spent too long using religion against each other. This is not good for religion or for human beings."

UC Irvine student: 'Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth'

Fast forward to the 5:40 mark of the above video and you will see a number of Muslim students at UC Irvine interrupt a lecture by Daniel Pipes. After they are escorted out, the crowd marched through the dark, chanting:

"Anti-Israel!" "Anti-Israel!" "Anti-hate!" "Anti-Israel!" "Anti-racism!" "Anti-Israel!" "Anti-occupation!" "Anti-Israel!"

The crowd moved to a plaza and then quieted. After a few moments and a word from one student, another student thanked the protesters, claiming that it would depress the Zionists who witnessed the act.

"They are going to go out and try to make it look like they are powerful," the young man said. "But they're going to go home and go, 'Crap, we are in the middle of America, in Irvine, at a public campus, and everybody hates our guts.' They have no future, and it is just a matter of time before the State of Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth."

The crowd rejoiced and shouted: "Allahu Akbar!"

The scene was captured by Reut Cohen, an Israeli-born student who graduated last fall. It serves as the closing scene of a story I have in this week's Jewish Journal about anti-Israel rhetoric that has become synonymous with the UC Irvine brand. A report last week by a task force that was created by Hillel (and later cut loose) blames the administration for not doing more to prevent speeches by radicals like Muhammad Al-Asi and Amir Abdel Malik Ali; the report encourages Jewish students to attend other colleges. Religion aside, with my beard, curly hair and square, black glasses, I know I would.

How Jewish hawks won the advocacy war

The seminal moment in the transformation of pro-Israel advocacy occurred in the summer of 1993, when the Oslo accords were finalized, and then signed, on the White House lawn.

"The Jewish community essentially had trained itself in one direction and was being asked to turn around immediately," said Michael Berenbaum, an adjunct professor of theology at American Jewish University. "It had advocated that the enemy was the PLO, and the question was, if all of the sudden [the PLO] are friends, they felt betrayed."

It was at this moment that the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) broke a decades-old code and criticized the Israeli government. While most Jewish American organizations got behind the landmark peace agreement, ZOA President Morton A. Klein predicted the accords would not only fail, but that they would empower Yasser Arafat and endanger Israelis.

"They were completely wrong and we were completely right," Klein said last week. "Peace is impossible."

Seven years and 300 murdered Jews after Oslo, the Second Intifada broke out, rupturing the ground beneath American Jewry. Within one more year, 19 Muslim terrorists would hijack four American planes and inflict the worst domestic attack in U.S. history; Jews and the West found a common enemy in the Muslim world, and the crack in the Jewish community severed into two pieces -- hawks and doves, hardliners and peaceniks, right and left.

In Los Angeles, the American Jewish Congress had dissolved its local office in 1998 and reformed the following year as the PJA, a liberal organization concerned mostly with domestic issues related to social justice. But the AJCongress reopened here in 2000, bearing little resemblance to its former self.

"People who believed that we could have peace with the Palestinians were shaken out of their misguided view and realized they had no desire for peace," said Gary P. Ratner, the group's western region executive director. "Their goal was what they stated openly: The destruction of Israel, whether through the violence of groups like Hamas or through negotiations, that will weaken Israel. I think some of us woke up to the fact that Oslo was a disaster and the peace process would only lead to the destruction of Israel."

The Jewish state was under attack with no partner for peace; the old model of resolving conflict through compromise had failed. With climbing anti-Israel rhetoric on American campuses and the perception that international media had joined liberal Christians in taking up the Palestinian cause, the hardliners quickly captured the upper hand among Jewish groups in the debate on what it meant to be pro-Israel.

"It's a painful moment in Jewish life, because there isn't a place for honest and open discourse," Gerald Bubis, founding director of the Irwin Daniels School of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, told this paper in a 2002 article titled "The Silencing of the Left?" "People can have very strong differences of opinion about where to go and how to resolve things, but that discourse does not have a place right now. Rather, there is a vituperative argumentation and excoriation."

Amid this climate, major Jewish organizations slid into the shadows, abdicating their leadership.

"Whatever they said would upset somebody," Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, said. "As a result, Jews who were frustrated, who wanted to defend Israel and didn't really know how or didn't have the ability, they gravitated toward The David Project and its sort of counterpart in StandWithUs."

That is a portion of my cover story for this week's paper, mentioned here and here and here, about the ascendacy of organizations that have redefined what it means to be "pro-Israel," of which I focus on StandWithUs. In seven years, a gathering of 50 L.A. Jews has grown into an international organization with a major presence on college campuses, where they claim pro-Palestinian professors and student groups intimidate and harass Jewish students. The rest of the story is here.

ZOA expands its enemies list

Speaking of the Bintel Blog, they've got an interesting post about a pair of university presidents who have made the Zionist Organization of America's hit list.

The right-wing group is criticizing Hillel for inviting two university chiefs — Amy Guttman, president of the University of Pennsylvania, and Michael Drake, chancellor of the University of California at Irvine — to speak at a summit that it’s is holding on universities and the Jewish community. According to the JTA, the ZOA is calling for the pair to be disinvited.

Guttman, the ZOA says, is an inappropriate invitee because in 2006 she posed for a picture at a Halloween party with a student dressed as a suicide bomber. The ZOA’s issue with Drake is that U.C. Irvine has been the site of “anti-Semitic speakers and programs” that have caused “Jewish students to feel threatened, harassed and intimidated.”

Never mind that Guttman has said that she didn’t grasp the nature of the student’s costume as the photo was being taken, and that she later called it “clearly offensive.” Even if one is skeptical about her explanation, only an extremely ungenerous person would assume that she’s guilty of anything worse than a momentary lapse of judgment.

In Drake’s case, it is true that the main Muslim student group at U.C. Irvine has repeatedly held viciously anti-Israel events on campus — events where the rhetoric often crosses the line into antisemitism (not to mention anti-Americanism). And some have argued that U.C. Irvine’s administration could be more sympathetic to Jewish concerns on this matter. But ultimately, there’s also a free speech issue in play, so it’s not as if the university can simply prohibit such events.

The irony is that the ZOA wants Hillel to effectively boycott two individuals who have actually weighed in against campaigns to boycott Israeli universities. Guttman and Drake are both signatories to an American Jewish Committee-sponsored statement strongly condemning anti-Israel academic boycotts.

Hillel, for its part, has declined to follow the ZOA’s advice.

I plan on attending the Hillel event. The ZOA letter should make for good conversation with the accused.

Islam, Indy and Da Vinci

A real whopper from GetReligion:

Every now and then, I read a really interesting story and I think to myself, “You know, the minute someone covers that story in the New York Times or it shows up on National Public Radio, then all heckfire is going to break loose.”

That’s what I thought when people started sending me links to the following Asia Times essay by the famous reporter known simply as Spengler. The headline provides only a hint of the content: “Indiana Jones meets the Da Vinci Code.”

Thanks to a reader, here is the link to the Wall Street Journal article that sparked the Spengler piece. And here is some of Spengler’s take on this mysterious stash of Koran manuscripts that may actually exist in Europe:

The Da Vinci Code offered a silly fantasy in which Opus Dei, homicidal monks and twisted billionaires chased after proof that Christianity is a hoax. But the story of the photographic archive of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, now ensconced in a Berlin vault, is a case of life imitating truly dreadful art. It even has Nazis. “I hate those guys!” as Indiana Jones said.

No one is going to produce proof that Jesus Christ did not rise from the grave three days after the Crucifixion, of course. Humankind will choose to believe or not that God revealed Himself in this fashion. But Islam stands at risk of a Da Vinci Code effect, for in Islam, God’s self-revelation took the form not of the Exodus, nor the revelation at Mount Sinai, nor the Resurrection, but rather a book, namely the Koran. The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1982) observes, “The closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Koran in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ.” The Koran alone is the revelatory event in Islam.

What if scholars can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Koran was not dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammad during the 7th century, but rather was redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of extant Christian and Jewish sources? That would be the precise equivalent of proving that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels really was a composite of several individuals.

There are, in fact, “variant copies” of the text of the Koran, evidence that the text evolved over time. If this story is accurate then what the press is sitting on is a bombshell, a giant chance that modern methods of “textual criticism” may be applied to the holy book of Islam (echoing several generations of similiar work on the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament).

The search for biblical history

I read "Walking the Bible" on my flight to and from Israel last summer and thoroughly enjoyed it, and on my short blogroll I link to David Plotz' Blogging the Bible. Last week, I found on Slate that Plotz has returned with "Digging the Bible."

So, it's not exactly the Ark of the Covenant. In fact, it's not exactly much of anything—just a dirty shard of pottery the size of my big toe. But I found it. I had been scraping the floor of this Israeli cave when I spotted its sharp edge. I fished the piece out of the dirt and pushed on it, as instructed, to see if it crumbled. If it did, it was probably just the local limestone, which is as soft as a bar of soap. But my piece firmly resisted, so I brushed off the dirt until I could see smooth pottery, one side black, the other brick red. I'm the raider of the lost pot.

I hand it to my digging partner Ian Stern, the archaeologist in charge of this site. He glances at it and says, "Cooking pot. See the black part? That's where it carbonized. Probably 2,200 years old, time of the Maccabees"—the Jewish heroes of the Hanukkah story. He tosses my shard into a plastic collection bucket. "That's why this place is so great. It has instant gratification. There's a biblical connection. There's a Hanukkah connection. It takes it out of the realm of the abstract and makes it tangible. You can come here and dig up pottery from the time of Judah Maccabee. He fought a battle near here. Now, I'm not saying he ate out of that pot, but you see and hold this pottery, and he is not a fairytale figure anymore. He is real."

I've spent much of the last year blogging the Bible for Slate, writing about reading the Good Book for the first time. Now I've come to Israel to see the Bible, to dig it. I've read the stories. Now I want to see where they happened and to learn if they happened—to experience the Bible through archaeology, history, politics, and faith.

This is a similar premise to "Walking the Bible," which contains quite a few passages where Bruce Feiler is wrestling with the lack of historical evidence for major events like the Flood and the Exodus or whether Moses really existed:

The unusual circumstances of this story -- the fact that Moses gets his name from an Egyptian and is raised in the pharaonic court, the fact that he claims not to speak well -- have led many to speculate that Moses wasn't an Israelite at all. Sigmund Freud, in his influential book "Moses and Monotheism," says that Moses was an Egyptian who learned monotheism from Akhenaten and was inspired to lead a revolt of foreign slaves out of a desire to overthrow his symbolic father. Freud says Moses gave the slaves the idea that they were a chosen people, which in turn led to anti-Semitism. "It was one man, the man Moses who created the Jews. To him his people owes its tenacity in supporting life; to him, however, it also owes much of the hostility which it has met and is meeting still.

Leaving aside Freud's psychological interpretation, many scholars agree with his underlying thesis, that Moses might have been an Egyptian.

First off, lots of scholars have lots of contradictory theories. This is the academic process. But after reading this, I jumped onto my computer and ordered Jonathan Kirsch's book, "Moses: A Life," which I anticipate will add to the discussion (though in half a year I have yet to crack).

The passage reminded me of Rabbi David Wolpe's famous Passover sermon a few years ago, when he let members of Sinai Temple know that most scholars don't believe the Exodus actually occurred. The declaration dropped on LA Jewry like an A-bomb (little hyperbole intended), thanks to the LA Times, which played the story as a Column One:

Wolpe's startling sermon may have seemed blasphemy to some. In fact, however, the rabbi was merely telling his flock what scholars have known for more than a decade. Slowly and often outside wide public purview, archeologists are radically reshaping modern understanding of the Bible. It was time for his people to know about it, Wolpe decided. After a century of excavations trying to prove the ancient accounts true, archeologists say there is no conclusive evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt, were ever enslaved, ever wandered in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years or ever conquered the land of Canaan under Joshua's leadership. To the contrary, the prevailing view is that most of Joshua's fabled military campaigns never occurred--archeologists have uncovered ash layers and other signs of destruction at the relevant time at only one of the many battlegrounds mentioned in the Bible.

Today, the prevailing theory is that Israel probably emerged peacefully out of Canaan--modern-day Lebanon, southern Syria, Jordan and the West Bank of Israel--whose people are portrayed in the Bible as wicked idolators. Under this theory, the Canaanites took on a new identity as Israelites were perhaps joined or led by a small group of Semites from Egypt--explaining a possible source of the Exodus story, scholars say. As they expanded their settlement, they may have begun to clash with neighbors, perhaps providing the historical nuggets for the conflicts recorded in Joshua and Judges.

"Scholars have known these things for a long time, but we've broken the news very gently," said William Dever, a professor of Near Eastern archeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona and one of America's preeminent archeologists. Dever's view is emblematic of a fundamental shift in archeology. Three decades ago as a Christian seminary student, he wrote a paper defending the Exodus and got an A, but "no one would do that today," he says.

The Jewish Journal followed the next week with a cover package dedicated to Exodus-doubting fallout, including conservative columnist Dennis Prager arguing that no Exodus = no Judaism, just as Christians would say that without the resurrection, Christianity is dead. But if Christianity is built upon the Torah, upon the stories of Jewish history, does it also need a literal, factual, historical Exodus?

And if we the faithful are willing to dismiss some historical findings, what is the value of biblical archeology?

Friedlander's Holocaust memories

Saul Friedlånder, whom some have called a genius, has written an acclaimed two-volume tome on the Holocaust. It's a personal story for Friedlander, and one I'm eager to read, whenever I can carve out the time for some 1,360 pages.

Recently honored with Germany's highest literary award, the Holocaust orphan and UCLA professor was interviewed in Frankfurt by the LA Weekly. Not that revealing, but nonetheless:

You went from fighting with the Irgun [a quasi-terrorist Zionist paramilitary group] to joining the Israeli movement Peace Now. Many Germans feel inhibited when discussing Israel’s behavior vis-à-vis the Palestinians, while others believe that embracing Palestinian rights masks a latent anti-Semitism. What’s your take?

What you’re talking about is more pronounced in Great Britain or France than in Germany. Criticism is legitimate. But what bothers me at times is a shrillness that gives you a feeling that it is not only based on an analysis of policy but on some deeper emotions — I don’t want to say hatred — which comes through acceptable political pretext.

What did the fall of the Berlin Wall add to Holocaust research?

A lot. The opening of Soviet archives gave us an enormous amount of new material because they were keeping for themselves a lot of German documents. Of course, it also exposed the tendency to say, “Look, we spoke enough about Nazis, now let’s see about the second barbarian system in the world, communism and communist dictatorship.” They are so concentrated on their own dictatorship experience that the past before that is already ancient history. It is often a kind of unintentional layering of the other past. So the answer is that you have to study this and you have to study that. You can’t replace one with the other.

I hear people say that if fascism ever came back to Germany, it would target the Muslims and not the Jews. Do you agree?

Well, it will not come again to Germany. Of that, I am almost sure. But it’s true there’s a kind of xenophobia and hatred, possibly more in the former East Germany than in the West, of minorities coming in, mainly from Turkey.

Do you think the U.S. is embracing fascism?

No. That’s Philip Roth’s book The Plot Against America, where Lindbergh was a metaphor, I think, for President Bush. I like Roth a lot and I am critical of the U.S. as well, but that’s much too overstated.

For more from the LA Weekly's Holocaust files, there is a story in the paper this week about accusations that famed Los Angeles author Charles Bukowski was a Nazi. Sunday, LA Times book editor David L. Ulin says he was just a bad writer.

What's in a name? More than you think

This one is from the Freakonomics School of Unconventional Studies:

The title of the paper, to appear in next month's edition of the journal Psychological Science, is entitled "Moniker maladies, when names sabotage success." Here's the abstract:

In five studies, we found that people like their names enough to unconsciously pursue consciously avoided outcomes that resemble their names. Baseball players avoid strikeouts, but players whose names begin with the strikeout-signifying letter K strike out more than others (Study 1). All students want As, but students whose names begin with letters associated with poorer performance (C and D) achieve lower grade point averages (GPAs) than do students whose names begin with A and B (Study 2), especially if they like their initials (Study 3). Because lower GPAs lead to lesser graduate schools, students whose names begin with the letters C and D attend lower-ranked law schools than students whose names begin with A and B (Study 4). Finally, in an experimental study, we manipulated congruence between participants' initials and the labels of prizes and found that participants solve fewer anagrams when a consolation prize shares their first initial than when it does not (Study 5). These findings provide striking evidence that unconsciously desiring negative name-resembling performance outcomes can insidiously undermine the more conscious pursuit of positive outcomes.

The last chapter of Freakonomics argued that people given "super-black" names, like the father who called his two sons Winner and Loser, or the girl named Shithead (pronounced "Shah-teed"), don't do worse because of their names but often because of life circumstances. But this study looks at a much odder phenomenon of name association.

So what does this imply for people named Moses or Jesus?

The New Nostradamus predicts the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Imagine you could predict the future. With precision. And all you were doing was using a beefed up version of John Nash's game theory formula. Well, GOOD magazine (whose founder I profiled for an article in next week's JJ) has a cover story on a guy who can.

His name is a mouthful -- Bruce Bueno de Mesquita -- and he's being hailed as the New Nostradamus, making this lead quote oh-so fitting: "Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is,” says one colleague. “Others think he’s a quack."

The chairman of NYU's department of politics, Bueno de Mesquita (mmm, I'm hungry) has been more accurate in his predictions than the CIA.

“We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”

His method is more psychology than foreign policy. He determines the motivations of the players involved in a specific issue, applies those to a "rational-choice" model, which uses game theory as its backbone, and arrives at an expected outcome. He's had a lot of amazing gets, but this was my favorite mentioned in the article:

His model predicted that upon Khomeini’s death, an ayatollah named Hojatolislam Khamenei and an obscure junior cleric named Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would emerge to lead the country together. At the time, Rafsanjani was so little known that his name had yet to appear in the New York Times. Even more improbably, Khomeini had already designated his successor, and it was neither Ayatollah Khamenei nor Rafsanjani. Khomeini’s stature among Iran’s ruling clerics made it inconceivable that they would defy their leader’s choice. At the APSA meeting subsequent to the article’s publication, Bueno de Mesquita was roundly denounced as a quack by the Iran experts—a charlatan peddling voodoo mathematics. “They said I was an idiot, basically. They said my work was evil, offensive, that it should be suppressed,” he recalls. “It was a very difficult time in my career.” Five years later, when Khomeini died, lo and behold, Iran’s fractious ruling clerics chose Ayatollah Khamenei and Hashemi Rafsanjani to jointly lead the country.

Anyway, with the much-anticipated peace forum at Annapolis coming up between Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, New Nostradamus offered this model for achieving piece in the most contested -- and holiest -- strip of land in the Middle East.

“In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. “Land for peace is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future, after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made a good step, it’s a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you were giving me more than this. I can’t give you peace just for this, it’s not enough.’ Conversely, if we have peace for land—you disarm, put down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then give you the land—the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow through. Once you’ve laid down your weapons, you have no threat.”

Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”

Wycliffe Hall under attack

Britain's leading evangelical college is at a breaking point.

Wycliffe Hall, a private seminary that matriculates its own students through Oxford, has seen the resignation of eight of it's 13 faculty members since a new principal took over last year and allegedly began narrowing the school's focus to a more conservative theological approach.

Adding to the pain, a review by the University of Oxford published this fall found that Wycliffe and the six other private halls were not providing an education in line with Oxford's liberal ethos. What happens next, God only knows. But I've got a short news piece about it in this month's Christianity Today.

"If the turbulence that is currently going on does settle down ... [then] this may be seen as a turning point at which Wycliffe went from one approach of evangelicalism to another approach that is just as well," said Justin Thacker, head of theology for the U.K.'s Evangelical Alliance. "When Paul and Barnabas split over the issue of John Mark … there were two missions instead of just one. There have been divisions -- and they have been painful divisions -- but I hope that at the end of the day, each group that splits off goes to do so in the service of Jesus Christ."

'HATE MUSLIMS? SO DO WE!!!'

Posters appeared all over the George Washington University campus yesterday morning blaring the message: "HATE MUSLIMS? SO DO WE!!!"

Campus police moved quickly to remove the fliers, university leaders began investigating how they got there and student groups met last night to deplore the posters, which had a photo of an Arab and description of "typical Muslim" features such as "suicide vest," "hidden AK-47" and "peg-leg for smuggling children and heroin."

The posters managed to upset just about everyone on campus: Muslim students, other religious groups and conservatives who are hosting "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" later this month. Some questioned whether they were mocking the conservatives, pointing to fine print at the bottom -- "Brought to you by Students for Conservativo-Fascism Awareness" -- and a postscript recommending a BBC video on the politics of fear.

Any subtleties were lost under the gigantic headline, though.

"I was just really shocked that this sort of hatred exists on our campus," said Najah El Bash, a sophomore from New York who is one of the leaders of the GWU Muslim Students Association. "You never think this would come so close to home, from people you're in classes with. . . . It's scary." It had to be well-planned, she said, for so many posters to go up so quickly.

This story from the Washington Post has been getting some good global play. The article reports that the posters were likely put up to mock the Young America's Foundation, which is hosting the upcoming Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week at GWU, a national campaign getting a lot of attention. Jihad Watch is reporting that IslamOnline is using this story as proof that Americans hate Islam:

University campuses across the United States are becoming the stage for an anti-Islam campaign that includes hate posters and a series of activities to rally students against the alleged threat Islam poses to the US and the world.