JustASC

Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the Rutgers/Medium incident and more generally on Title VI, the federal statute that allows groups like the ZOA to sue universities like Rutgers if they don’t feel the school is doing enough to protect students from anti-Semitism.

The article probes a number of questions, not all succesfully: Can Title VI be used too indiscriminately, and tag as anti-Semitic behavior or statements that are merely anti-Israel? Will its use backfire on Jewish students, and cause them to be portrayed as enemies of academic freedom? 

A couple of things stand out in the article’s treatment of Rutgers and New Jersey. The article reports on the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which “plans at its annual assembly next month to vote on a resolution stating that complaints of anti-Semitism should not be filed hastily with the Education Department, even if they are a valuable tool.” According to the article:

 Although the public-affairs council’s resolution is expected to pass easily, its language warning against the overuse of discrimination complaints is strongly opposed by the Jewish Federation in Detroit and two local federations in New Jersey. Another group, the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, has offered a substitute resolution arguing that Title VI enforcement poses no threat to free speech.

Which two federations (although I am guessing Northern NJ is one of them)? We’re trying to find out.

The article also discusses whether Rutgers is being uinfairly portrayed as a hotbed of anti-Semitism. The article notes, without quite dwelling on the fact, that a lot of the complaints about anti-Semitism seem to circle back to Aaron Marcus, both the target of  The Medium satire and the subject of the bulk of the ZOA’s Title VI complaint agaisnt the school. The article quotes Gregory S. Blimling, the university’s vice president for student affairs, saying “what he hears is not anti-Semitism but disagreement over Israel’s policies. ‘There are people on both sides of that debate,” he says, ‘who would like to have the other side of that argument not have the same freedoms they do.’”

And later:

Mr. Blimling, the university’s vice president for student affairs, says two lawyers and other university personnel have spent “hundreds of man-hours” providing the civil-rights office with requested documents and testimony. “It is noteworthy,” he says, “that we have 6,000 Jewish students on campus, and we have had one student issue a complaint.”

But the last word goes to students and administrators at Hillel, who offer contrasting, if not conflicting, accounts of the campus climate:

As students gathered at the university’s Hillel House this month for dinner during Passover most described the campus environment as extremely supportive of Jewish students, and few said they had experienced any anti-Semitism except for a recent protest outside the house by pro-Palestinian students.

Mr. [Andrew] Getraer, executive director of the Hillel chapter, says that while the vast majority of Jewish students do not experience anti-Semitism at Rutgers, “for a number of students who are very active in the pro-Israel community, it has become hostile.” Most, he says, are afraid to complain.

He blames the recent article in The Medium, falsely depicting Aaron Marcus as praising Hitler—an article that top officials on the campus have denounced as distasteful and deeply offensive, and which the Zionist Organization of America may try to incorporate into its federal complaint—on the university’s administration. “It became open season” on the student when his earlier concerns about anti-Semitism went unheeded, Mr. Getraer says.

“When things happen to Jewish students and there are no repercussions whatsoever,” he says, “it creates an atmosphere that just escalates.”

Ami Eden Ben Sales addresses a question that has always bedeviled us at the NJJN: If a newspaper photograph contains the four-letter Hebrew word for God, must the paper only be disposed of in a a genizah, a special storage space for such holy discards? (Or, as Ami puts it, “Throwing God’s name in the trash is a no-no.”)

The Wall Street Journal ran a photograph of a Torah scroll last week (“and if you look closely at the blurry text, you can make out God’s name”). Ami asks two rabbis, an Orthodox and a Reform, for their opinion:

“It was not put there for any purpose of kedusha, of holiness,” said Rabbi Allen Schwartz of New York’s Orthodox Congregation Ohab Zedek. Schwartz explained that in order to require placement in a genizah, God’s name “has to be four clear letters” –meaning that blurriness disqualifies the Journal picture. He added that variations on the four-letter Tetragrammaton such as a single hey or yod also don’t require burial.

In a rare case of Jewish interdenominational agreement, Rabbi Kenneth Kanter, the director of the rabbinical school at the Reform Hebrew Union College, seconded Schwartz’s opinion.

“We see pages of Torah or other sacred books reproduced in so many ways on TV or in the print media,” he said. “Jewish law would urge us to treat Torah scrolls with respect. Sometimes they are reproduced upside-down, which is certainly for me a bigger problem.”

I don’t find either of these answers satisfying. Is it the intent or blurriness that decides the case? Does Rabbi Kanter (a delightful name, by the way) come to any conclusion at all?

State Jewish leaders weighed in on The Medium matter, in which a Rutgers satirical weekly published a column mocking Aaron Marcus, a vocal pro-Israel activist, by publishing a parody column, in his name, praising Hitler.

The New Jersey State Association of Jewish Federations wrote to Rutgers President Richard McCormick, praising him for “making a quick decision to investigate the matter as a bias incident under the university’s anti-bias policies.”  There wasn’t much more they could ask for, so the Association essentially expresses its outrage at the incident and adds:

The actions we have asked Rutgers to take, such as swiftly and thoroughly conducting the investigation and publicly releasing findings, ensuring that The Medium is run with proper oversight and sensitivity, securing an apology from the journal and its faculty advisor will send a strong message to the university staff and students that there is zero tolerance for such blatant acts of disrespect,” [Mark Levenson, State Association President Elect] said.

I’m not sure how a university can “secure an apology” from a student organization, but that’s up to the lawyers, I suppose. 

The letter is also critical of Ronald Miskoff, the journalism lecturer who serves as The Medium‘s advisor. In an interview with The Jewish Week, Miskoff was all over the map, first saying the parody “was the kind of thing the Medium does all the time” but adding that he would have pulled the column had he seen it. He also said the paper would have crossed the line had McCormick been the target of a similar Hitler parody — an indefensible distinction, if you ask me. He then went on to implicate Marcus somehow, saying, “My grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, but I don’t go wearing it on my lapel. [Marcus] is someone who is out there, a public person, and we have a campus publication that takes on those who feel too big for their britches.”

According to the Association’s news release,

 The lack of oversight on content by The Medium faculty advisor Professor Ronald Miskoff was cited as a concern. “Not only did Miskoff admit that he did not read the article until after it was printed, but his later remarks were insensitive to Marcus and others who have lost loved ones in the Holocaust,” stated Jacob Toporek, State Association Executive Director.

“As a son of Holocaust survivors, I strongly endorse the letter when it states that the Holocaust may be nothing more than a shame to Miskoff, but crediting Hitler for Israel’s minimizes the fate of the millions of innocents killed in cold blood and any legitimate right for Israel to exist,” [Association executive director Jac] Toporek added.

The Association’s full release follows the jump:

(more…)

In a bit he recently repeated on The Daily Show, British comedian Ricky Gervais jokes that the Nazis must have been incompetent if it took them two years to find Anne Frank’s hiding place.

Dan Bloom, who calls himself the Taiwan bureau chief for the San Diego Jewish World, is trying to make hay out of this. Writing for Britain’s Jewish Chronicle, he calls the joke “genteel British antisemitic snark” and asks Gervais to “leave Anne Frank out of your comedy routines.” 

Ricky Gervais has a sensible response in the JC. He says his routine about Anne Frank would be “highly offensive” if taken at face value. Instead, the routine is really “about the misunderstanding and ignorance of what is clearly a tragic and horrific situation. My comic persona is that of a man who speaks with great arrogance and authority but who along the way reveals his immense stupidity.” 

I saw the bit and clearly the joke is on people whose emphatically stated opinions are worthless. If anything, it is a joke about historical ignorance, and, how banal stupidity, and not just revisionism, threatens to erase Holocaust memory.

I hope Dan Bloom doesn’t read Shalom Auslander’s new novel, in which a foul-mouthed Anne Frank ends up surviving and living in an attic in upstate New York. His head will explode.

UPDATE: I have just figured out how to increase traffic to this site: Mention Dan Bloom. See comments.

Today is Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) and while there are a lot of ways to celebrate, I was taken with an exercise at iEngage, an effort of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem to strengthen the dialogue between Israel and world Jewry.

 To mark Israel’s 64th birthday they asked their contributors to describe what they are celebrating on Yom Ha’atzmaut 5772. Their answers display the range of achievements in Israel, and provided a counterpoint to messages of anxiety and even dread that are too often part of the Jewish conversation.

Former Israeli diplomat Tal Becker is celebrating the people of Israel — anti-authoritarian, contrary, improvisational. They can be infuriating, he writes, but it makes for “a vibrant, passionate, feisty society where my children grow up believing, with a real measure of legitimacy, that they can be agents of change in this world.”

For sociologist Steven M. Cohen, it’s about Jewish nationality and seeing “Jews worldwide and throughout history as an extended family, one that extends backward and forward in time, and embraces even those with whom one profoundly disagrees.”

Yossi Klein Halevi, a keen analyst of Israeli politics, offers a surprising tribute to Israel’s music, perhaps “the great cultural achievement of the Hebrew renaissance.” Once dominated by Ashkenazi artists, Israel’s music scene “now reflects the country’s ingathering of cultural traditions.”

Law professor Suzanne Last Stone and historian Gil Troy both write of a physical connection to Israel, its sights, smells, tastes, and sounds. And Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Hartman Institute of North America, celebrates, above all, the ability of today’s Jews to be part of “Jewish history in the making.” Say what you want about the ongoing argument that is Israel and Zionism — Left vs. Right, religious vs. secular, dove vs. hawk — each of us has the blessing and opportunity to take part in a “conversation about what Jewishness should mean inside and outside a sovereign framework, and one that is not just about aspirations and ideals but is tested on a daily basis, a conversation about ideals with implications for realities.”

However you celebrate, here’s wishing Israel a glorious 64th year, and many, many more.

The Medium, the Rutgers satire paper that took a stupid shot at a campus pro-Israel activist (they published a column in his name praising Hitler), issues a statement on the incident:

As everyone on the Rutgers campus knows, The Medium follows the American tradition of parody, satire, and caricature. Virtually every article that appears within our pages and online is designed to entertain and, if we are successful, to satirize the people or events that the article targets. In last week’s edition, a parody edition of Aaron Marcus’ Targum column followed this approach and perhaps because the parody cut a little close for Marcus’ taste, he made statements critical of The Medium and implied that The Medium is part of an anti-Semitic movement on campus. We assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. The article was simply another example of the humor that has made The Medium a Rutgers tradition and upholds the heritage of amusement and farce that has made The Medium the great institution that it is.

Ah, to be young, carefree, and arrogant. I suppose writing humor means never having to say you’re sorry, but better they had said nothing than to respond so disingenuously. “Perhaps because the parody cut a little close for Marcus’ taste”! Yes, Marcus wasn’t pissed because they portrayed them as a Nazi-lover, but because the satire was too good.

There’s a  fallacy among humor writers that anything can be excused or dismissed under the banner of “satire.” In many ways, the law agrees with them. Hell, I agree with them — once  a week I get a good laugh from some watchdog group that demands an apology from Stewart, Doonesbury, Gervais, etc. But even as I might defend the right of these kids to push the envelope, I wish there were someone to give them a few lessons in proportion. It’s not that you can never play the Nazi card – for example, I cherish Mollie Ivins’ famous quip that a Pat Buchanan speech “probably sounded better in the original German.” But remember, she was referring to a speech given at the Republican National Convention, by a major player in national politics, who had a huge stage to broadcast his views on race, religion, and immigration. By contrast, Marcus writes the occasional column for a campus newspaper. Yes, he’s at  the center of an inquiry into Rutger’s handling of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel allegations. But he is no villain, and he is a fellow student. Lashing him to a Hitler joke seems wildly out of proportion.

And again, I am not saying this as a defender of the Jews. I am saying this as a defender of comedy. The Medium piece died on the page because they hadn’t matched the weapon to the target, among other reasons. The whole incident reminds me of Michael Richards’ racist rant at the night club — he was trying for something funny and edgy, but lost control of the joke … and his career. I don’t think Richards was a closet racist, any more than I think The Medium folk are anti-Semitic. The Marcus parody was an ugly miscalculation, and too bad they don’t have the courage — or mentschlichkeit – to say so.

Headline for an A.P. story at Valley News Live (Fargo, Grand Forks):

NJ woman charged with neglecting mother-in-law

 

Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine tees off on the Rutgers adminstration, saying their investigation of a nasty article satirizing a Jewish kid reeks of political correctness. He quotes Aaron Marcus, the target of the satire, who complained that the authors of the satire used his real name and photo. Responds Mulshine:

Didn’t this little knucklehead ever watch “Saturday Night Live?”
That’s how satire works. You pretend to be the person satirized.

Mulshine says the authors are clearly protected under the First Amendment:

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education was set up to combat this sort of thing. I speak quite often to its founders. They’re Jewish, but they belong to the open-minded tradition of their religion. They would be the last people on Earth to support this kid’s claim that his religious status is an excuse for trying to shut up the people who satirized him.

FIRE, which promotes first amendment rights on campus,  was founded by Alan Charles Kors, a professorat theUniversityof Pennsylvania, and Harvey A. Silverglate, a civil-liberties lawyer in Cambridge.

When I wrote about the Marcus satire, I called the piece toxic, adding that “nothing Marcus has written or said deserved an attack as lazy, heavy-handed, and culturally tone-deaf as this.” I also think the authors should be protected by the First Amendment.

But at what point does freedom of the press protect assholes from the kinds of things that would get them suspended or censured if they were to do them, say, face to face or in a chat room? If a kid calls another kid a ”Jewish Hitler lover”  in the lunchroom, or pastes it on his dorm room door, that would lead to disciplinary action. But because The Medium does it under the guise of satire and publishes it by the thousands, that makes it okay?

To put it another way, Dahrun Ravi was convicted of bias intimidation as a hate crime for having secretly streamed his gay roommate’s romantic interlude over the Internet. But had he published a leering anti-gay “satire” naming Tyler Clementi in The Medium, he’d have been untouchable?

One man’s “p.c” is another’s civility. Has the university no recourse when one group of kids violates written or even unwritten codes of civility?

UPDATE: I put this question to Will Creeley, director of legal and public advocacy at FIRE. He directed me to the Supreme Court’s definition of “peer-on-peer harassment”: discriminatory behavior that is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.”

The university would have a hard time classifying The Medium piece – clearly labeled as satire — as harassment under this definition, said Creeley, even under the university’s Code of Student Conduct..

“Context counts here,” said Creeley. “Insofar as we are talking about a satirical April Fools post, I don’t think that [amounts to] the kind of fighting words instance that you are describing.”

Creeley referred me to The Onion, a satirical newspaper that often depicts Vice President Joe Biden as a hard-drinking, womanizing redneck. “The Joe Biden we see in the pages of The Onion does ridiculous things, but folks understand it is artificial and clearly not Joe Biden,” said Creeley. “We give satirists a wide berth to do those kinds of statements. Really, context counts here.”

After selling the financially strapped Baltimore Jewish Times, former publisher and editor Andy Buerger has a new business: selling Icelandic-style yogurt:

Called B’More Organic, the business just got a big break when Wegman’s agreed to carry it in 50 of its supermarkets.

“It took a long time to accept the fact that I was not going to die in that [Baltimore Jewish Times] chair,” Buerger said Monday. “But when I did, I was content with it.”

Borrowing a page (a leaf, maybe?) from JNF’s playbook, American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (AABGU) is asking donors to “honor or dedicate an olive tree” to support BGU’s desert agriculture research.

The gifts will support an olive tree forest in Wadi Mashash (above), an agricultural research farm located about 20 miles south of Beer-Sheva, Israel.

Last month, I visited the grove, after being driven along a stretch of desert road nearly indistinguishable from the scrubby hummocks and wadis on either side.  The trees are planted in a soccer-field sized bed that floods in the rainy season and manages to nourish the trees the other, oh, 364 days a year.  Prof. Pedro Berliner (left), director of BGU’s Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, explained the process and the versatility of the plants, like the nearby grove of Australian acacias, that take advantage of the meager conditions offered them. An aide let us taste the olive oil harvested from the trees.

BGU explains:

Wadi Mashash is the only site in Israel where agricultural production is entirely based on the collection and use of the desert’s rare flood waters. The techniques developed at Wadi Mashash are used to combat desertification worldwide and facilitate sustainable development of drylands. Already, much of the knowledge gained by past experiments, such as an acacia tree forest, is helping many countries in Africa grow trees for food, fodder and firewood without depleting all their resources.

…Agroforestry technology called the “intercrop system” will be used in the new olive grove. In between each row of olive trees, a grain (the intercrop) will be planted. The commercial “opportunity” crop will provide food for both animals and people. The fruit of the olive trees will be used to produce high quality olive oil.

 To learn more about the Seed Desert Research initiative, or to plant an olive tree, go to www.aabgu.org/olivetrees.