78tiger

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's wife appears to have used the N-word and celebrated Palestinian terrorists in resurfaced social media posts. 🔗 trib.al/LYrmXe7

Jewish faculty at UCLA recently wrote a letter effectively telling the DOJ that there is no antisemitism problem on campus. UCLA is also where I completed my graduate studies and where I experienced firsthand how dissenting views were treated. Members of the Jewish studies faculty criticized and shamed me for what they called my “Zionist activism.” After I wrote a critical piece about UCLA Hillel’s decision to host the Olive Initiative, a Jewish antizionist group that platformed antizionist libels, I lost part of my graduate funding. But what stayed with me most was not the professional consequence. It was the assumption that, because I am a Zionist, I am incapable of critical thought, that my views were dismissed as “hasbara,” shorthand for being incapable of engaging in serious and scholarly thinking. The result was professional isolation. I was effectively disinvited from academic conferences and made to feel unfit to participate in serious research. Looking back, what is most striking is the degree of power faculty can exert over young scholars. There is a kind of intellectual pressure, often intimidation, that enforces a singular worldview and punishes those who deviate from it. Ironically, the same individuals who accused me of “activism” were often themselves engaged in it — a classic case of accusation in the mirror. Many of my peers disagreed privately but chose to remain silent, knowing that their academic futures depended on it. I never managed to do that. Whether that has been a curse or a blessing, I still don’t know. There is, as @EinatWilf writes, "something stomach churning in watching a Jewish person hand over one more pound of flesh, buckling under the pressure to sell out his people as the price of ever temporary 'acceptance.'" @yudapearl @JFrgatUCLA

As you may have seen, the Los Angeles Times recently published an article titled: “UC Jewish community paints disparate pictures of campus antisemitism” latimes.com/california/sto… The article creates the impression that Jewish faculty are sharply divided over the DOJ’s finding that UCLA is “engaging in a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff”: sites.google.com/view/ucla-jewi… The immediate trigger for the article was a letter circulated by a fringe Zionophobic group calling itself “UCLA Jewish Faculty and Staff”, who claim that the DOJ's findings on hostile work environment are non-existent sites.google.com/view/ucla-jewi… In that letter, the group tries to leverage understandable concerns about DOJ lawsuits and funding cuts to justify, perpetuate --—or at least downplay—the antizionist hostility and discriminatory practices we have all been witnessing on campus. To give a sense of how far removed this group is from the mainstream of Jewish faculty on campus: none of its 130 signatories are members of the Faculty Forum that I run, which includes over 400 faculty committed to the preservation of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. At the same time, because we have not issued a collective statement to the DOJ, our own perspective and strength remain largely invisible. This creates a real risk that UCLA leadership—including Chancellor Frenk and UC President Milliken—may come away with a misleading impression of where the broader Jewish faculty community stands. I therefore hope that the UCLA Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFRG) will write a separate public letter to the DOJ, based on the extensive documentation compiled by the UCLA Task Force on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias (2024): jfrg.org/advocacy/uclas… The letter should propose to the DOJ and the UC administration a concrete program that addresses antizionist hostilities on the one hand while respecting academic freedom on the other. @AkaLazarus @JFrgatUCLA @DavidSuissaJJ @LekhtNaya @adam_louis52328 @AndrewPessin