Whose Speech is Free at Hillel?

It struck me as surprising in light of the professed tone of even-handedness in the Hillel-sponsored forum that Rabbi Herzfeld’s pro-Israel and anti-hate message should have been squelched by Hillel, and that he should have been man-handled away from the microphone. Certainly in a Jewish context, his message, that it is unacceptable to permit hate-filled anti-Semitic speech (and actions) on a university campus — as Chancellor Drake apparently allows, is one that is unexceptional. The question therefore is why Hillel didn’t allow him to pose it. Plainly, the issue is alive, but it is puzzling why a rabbi, and the representative of a Jewish group active on campuses, would be muzzled when he tried to point out the fundamental discrepancy in First Amendment rights between allowing Arab-American groups to equate Israel with Nazi Germany and not allow Jewish groups to challenge that position. The principles of free speech and advocacy, both on our campuses, and sadly at the Hillel forum, have strayed far from the constitutional standard required in the rest of our society.

Paul R. Taskier, at 8:45 am EDT on March 25, 2008

An Anti-Semitic Polemic is Not a Response

Grover Furr’s hate-filled polemic against Jews and Israel demonstrates precisely why Rabbi Herzfeld’s comments were needed at the Hillel forum, and why the presence of pro-Jewish and pro-Israel groups on college campuses are desirable as an educative tool for balance. It is surprising that this site’s moderators would permit so blatantly hate-filled a tirade as a comment. It is not civil discourse. However, other than dismissing it as the ravings of an obvious bigot who has unquestioningly swallowed the most perverse pro-Arab and anti-Israel propaganda, and feels compelled to vomit it into a public forum, it bears some measured response.Furr’s (if that is his real name) rejection of the existence of the Jewish community (an unassailable fact), his denial of many Jews as being Jewish (with what support?), his absurd articulation that “many, many” Jews oppose Zionism (other than the tiny splinter Neturei Karta which are ostracized, and politically radical Jews who take up the Palestinian cause, there are few if any), his explicit assertion that Zionism is racist and “gutter racism” like Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa and the old Jim Crow South, his outrageous assertion that Jews were allied with Hitler and the Nazis, and his call that there should be no Zionist state all clearly show that he is an anti-Semite of the new order.

He tries to distinguish “Jews” from Zionist, racist, Nazi “Israel” in order to condemn Israel (and its Jews) to destruction. This is identical to the propaganda campaign that has been, and is being, waged by Hamas and Hezbollah to poison the Arab world, and now the Western World, into a new version of Jew-hatred, disguised as Israel-hatred. The new pervasiveness of these canards and lies is precisely why education and balance in the press, in society and on university campuses is critical. Filth and lies like those being spouted by Grover Furr must be recognized for what they are: Arab anti-Semitism that considers Jews sub-human, Israel a state worthy only of destruction and its people only of slaughter.

Paul R. Taskier, at 9:40 am EDT on March 25, 2008

Questions for Paul

Paul, I don’t understand why you think identifying what sounds like segregation equals hatred towards Jews. Isn’t that like saying anyone who openly discusses racism in the United States is fostering hatred towards Americans? If we do NOT talk about it, then racism WILL grow because obviously, “no one is looking” and everyone is afraid to say the “dirty word.”

Perhaps you can define “Zionism” for those of us who don’t understand the various interpretations of that word. Anyone else, feel free to chime in with a definition as well.

kgotthardt, at 12:20 pm EDT on March 25, 2008

My word, Gentlemen!

It is hardly edifying to those of us made to endure the vitriol that laces your arguments. Unfortunately, academia has little defense against these partisan exchanges, having—at least since the late 1960s—found excuses for privileging admitted partisanship as legitimate academic endeavor.

But if I may, I would like to frame the problem from the point of view of an interested political scientist.

Ever since the close of World War II, the future of the modern nation-state as the ultimate historical player for humankind has seemed problematic. If the “sovereign state” is primarily responsible for its own viability and, concommitantly, the welfare of its own citizens, then what are we to make of the demonstrated fact that the modern state is capable of effectively unlimited power? By means of sheer slaughter, the Allies defeated the Axis powers. And, emerging from the ensuing Cold War, one nation alone has the power to destroy any other nation-state on earth.

That legacy, uncomfortably borne by the US, is one end of the modern state’s “definitional continuum,” so to speak. The other end is “nationality.”

It may not be an accident that the world’s most powerful state is not—because it cannot be—nationalistic in the ordinary, historical sense. The US started out nationalistically enough, from its English colonies origin, but even then the flood of European immigrants, plus the unwilling slaves from Africa, had started a process of assimilating nationalities to an extent that overwhelms any primary national identity (ethnicity, language, culture). But, just to make things tough, I guess, the US is joined at the hip with Israel, which is explicitly a claim upon nationalism as a basis for sovereign statehood in the world. I don’t think anyone needs to go all apoplectic over that assertion: Israel claims for itself a nationalistic identity and privileges those who fit the criteria of Jewish nationality.

So there’s the problem, in my view: It just _is_ a problem for our times, “it” being the future of the modern state, a la Max Weber. Will China assume the mantle of the next super-power state? She has the nearly unique means to do so (big enough to grow a world-sized economy within its, very broadly speaking, nation), but maybe the era of the modern state is past, and no state, not even China, can achieve 1st world economic levels without global interdependency. And what of nationalist claims to sovereignty? England, France, and Germany, at least, are struggling to accommodate a broader, extra-national definition of citizenship, and of course the EU bids fair to establish multi-nationalism in European states by economic default. In the US, rather sadly in a way, irresponsible charges against the government are now commonplace (again, since the late 60s), but then, it’s hard to take it too personally, so pluralistic is our identity. I think Israel will have to find a way to negotiate that unpleasant boundary, also, if she wants to continue into the foreseeable future as a sovereign state, because the halcyon days of “our kind of people” vs “their kind of people” are over, it would appear. People may hate a state——the state’s own citizens may be vocal among the haters, but it’s not genocidal hatred. That charge, in the 21st century, can be made in a civil war, perhaps, or against a brutal dictator, perhaps, but sovereign states should be multi-national to the core.

Rod Bell, Adjunct Professor at College of DuPage, at 12:30 pm EDT on March 25, 2008