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NU AAUP Executive Committe Responds to Assault on Higher Education
This year I am honored to serve as the president of the Northwestern University chapter of the American Association of University Professors. In that capacity, I worked with my colleagues to draft an op-ed for the Daily Northwestern and a petition opposing Northwestern's support for the Department of Education's controversial definition of antisemitism. We also explained our concerns about NU's quiet obedience to (other) autocrats, including orders to report international students for their exercise of the right to free speech.
Please consider reading, signing, and also circulating. (The petition includes links to government and other documents on the Trump administration's efforts to destroy higher education the student paper would not publish due to hacking concerns.)
Two days after our letter was published, Northwestern's Big Brother emitted its latest directive: Factually accurate criticism of Israel's apartheid policies will be construed as "antisemitic" and a violation of Title VI. "Horrifying!" as one Jewish scholar of the catastrophe wrote after I shared a screenshot from the new mandatory indoctrination module.
Examples on the slide providing so-called examples of antisemitism include: "The Zionists have used the Holocaust as a weapon to deny the rights of the Palestinians and cover up the crimes of Israel." Well, this is just a fact, for which Norman Finkelstein sacrificed his career. Are facts, including those in Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Antisemitism and the Abuse of History (UC Berkeley, 2005) and The Holocaust Industry now antisemitic?
Of course some may disagree with the emphases or certain inferences of Finkelstein and other critics of Israel, but that does not mean positions antagonistic to Israel's domestic and foreign policies toward non-Jews are antisemitic, much less amenable to enforcement under Title VI or any other law compatible with the U.S. Constitution. Northwestern has spent tens of millions on lawsuits and settlements precipitated by greed and poor judgment about financial aid, the football program, and our retirement fund management. Yet when it comes to low fruit First Amendment litigation to defend the core mission of education, Northwestern's legal counsel is nowhere to be found.
I personally have interviewed a survivor whose letter narrating an example of Latvian collaboration with the Einsatzgruppen was rewritten by an outfit in London hired by the Israeli government to collect accounts of war crimes for purposes of obtaining reparations from the German government. When the for-hire organization received accounts that did not have phrases like "I saw with my own eyes..." they rewrote them, embellished the content to make it more grotesque, and submitted them to Israel per the contract, without revealing the fraudulent alterations either to the Israeli partner or the survivors.
(The Latvian survivor had resettled in NYC and responded to an ad in a Yiddish newspaper soliciting accounts of encounters with the Nazis; he was stunned when I shared the version published in a book by former Mossad agents to justify their 1965 assassination of a Latvian war criminal in Uruguay.)
My own assessment: Latvian aviation hero Herbert Cukurs was a war criminal AND the accounts Mossad used to justify his assassination were invented. (Like OJ: Simpson killed Nicole AND the police planted evidence.)
The London inventions ended up in an archive in Yad Vashem later digitized and sold to libraries. When I reviewed with the director of a Yiddish archive the evidence that the testimonies were fake her response was not that of defensive incredulity I anticipated. "We paid $10,000 for access to these," she said, as she shook her head. This was in 2006. I then learned that insiders knowledgeable about the witness testimonies also had questioned the authenticity of this collection, but had not produced the evidence I had.
Here's another statement that our fearless anonymous "administration" says could get one punished: "First and foremost, I condemn the conflation of Zionism a political identity, and Judaism, a religious identity. The state of Israel has attempted to conflate both in order to garner support for its apartheid policies." Leaving aside disputes about how to interpret an Abrahamic religion specific to the Israelites-- no "Jews" in the Hebrew Bible -- First Amendment jurisprudence in the United States does not second-guess disparate interpretations groups and individuals have as to what is and is not content required by religious doctrine, including whether a religion does or does not require allegiance to the notion of a nation-state as integral to the Jewish religion.
By adopting one definition of Jewish identity to the exclusion of others, the Trump administration is violating both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause, not to mention good old fashioned freedom of speech:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I've heard, but cannot document, that the group behind these slides is the Jewish United Fund, supported by "former General Dynamics chair and megadonor Lester Crown," a Northwestern trustee and donor for Northwestern's Israel Innovation Project. The IIP is run by a director appointed without a national searach and who thanks Lester Crown personally for the endeavor.
Also, those who have reviewed the module say it is hugely biased toward antisemitism, which reflects the recent Title VI mandate and disregards the statute's larger purpose, which would require equal time for bias training on all groups that might face discrimination based on national origins, including students from China and Iran, who face huge obstacles to education because of U.S. government policies, some of which are mere rules or regulations that conflict with the Title VI statute, or so it seems.
What does all this mean?
Would Hannah Arendt, who cut short her teaching gig at Northwestern in 1961 to cover the Adolf Eichman trial in Israel for The New Yorker, be charged by administration with bias?
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| click to enlarge, from The Jewish Writings |
In "Zionism Reconsidered" (1946), an essay exploring the nuanced challenges facing Jews in the wake of the catastrophe, and expressing concerns about a Jewish state in a region previously controlled by the Ottoman Empire and then colonized by Britain, Arendt expresses principled and practical objections to the vision of Theodor Herzl. Here and in Eichmann in Jerusalem, she attacks the ressentiment driving the agenda, especially the collaboration with Nazis such as Albert Eichmann, with whom ghetto leaders helped organize the transfer of Jews from Europe to Palestine. (At one point Arendt calls the Zionist vision of an exclusively Jewish nation-state an ambition once viewed by most Jewish intellectuals as an objective of the "feeble-minded.")
Arendt, herself a refugee from Germany and active in some Zionist refugee efforts during WWII, understands Jewish fears and preferences, but anticipates the disastrous political consequences of pursuing a Jewish nation-state, including the apartheid policies that would ensue and the antagonisms this would entail. (That said, Arendt endorses the intergenerational attachments of the nation, a widely held sentimental blind spot to the nation's harms my own work rejects, for Israel and every other state-nation. She and many others want nations without nationalism, which is like wanting to eat only dessert and avoid diabetes.)
When I teach Arendt's essays on Zionism, will administration charge me with antisemitic bias? I guess I'll find out. Meanwhile, please do consider reviewing and supporting our petition. (After hearing from our anxious colleagues, especially those who who are not tenured, we added an option for indicating only your affiliation and not your name.)
