JustASC

I’ve seen folks on Facebook post this story, apparently approvingly, about a Purdue University Calumet prof asserting his right to ridicule Islam and Mohammad on Facebook. Professor Maurice Eisenstein, an associate professor of political science, says he asked on Facebook, “Where were the moderate Muslims? They must be listening to that idiot Mohammad.” The school launched an investigation of his remarks, and in response, Eisenstein is suing the school. He said the investigation was a violation of his First Amendment rights to free speech.

According to  the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is defending him:

The PUC Muslim Student Association and several students and faculty members had filed harassment complaints against professor Maurice Eisenstein after he criticized moderate Muslims who he believed had not condemned “radical Muslim” terrorism in Nigeria. Two faculty members had also filed retaliation complaints against Eisenstein, who came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

“This is not the first time and it won’t be the last time we will see a university punish a student or professor for constitutionally protected speech on Facebook,” said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. “Professors at public universities should not have to go to court to defend their free speech rights.”

The irony here, which I am betting will be lost on folks who see Eisenstein as an anti-Muslim hero and free speech martyr, is that FIRE is also defending The Medium, the Rutgers student newspaper that made a Hitler joke at the expense of a campus pro-Israel activist. In that case, the Zionist Organization of America and other Jewish groups are welcoming the university’s probe and urging that the newspaper and its faculty adviser be censured. “While we all respect the First Amendment as the bulwark of a free society, we do not believe the Medium should be allowed to hide behind a First Amendment claim,” state Jewish federations wrote to the Rutgers administration.

At least FIRE is consistent: They want the campus to be a robust marketplace of ideas according to the Constitution. “Eisenstein’s colleagues ganged up on him to punish him for his protected expression,” says FIRE Vice President of Programs Adam Kissel. “The best remedy for ‘bad’ speech is more speech, not this pattern of wild prosecution.”

I wonder if Eisenstein’s fans at FrontPageMag.com and on Facebook would extend that principle to a Muslim professor who attacked Jews, Judaism or Israel. I’m guessing not.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be one of the moderators at a debate featuring candidates for Congress in NJ’s District 10 (Essex and parts of Union County).  It’s an unusual two-in-one primary on June 5:  Voters will be asked to select a candidate to fill the late U.S. Rep. Donald Payne’s unexpired term; and then also to  select a candidate for the full, two-year congressional term for the new District 10.

The debate takes place Weds., May 23 at 8:30 a.m. (as in, first thing in the morning) at the Cooperman JCC in West Orange.

Back blogging after a week in Paris, where I explored the implications of Hollande’s victory on the Eurozone economy and the Iranian question while — no wait, I thought I was Thomas Friedman there for a minute.

Actually, we spent the week eating pain au chocolat and drinking espresso, with occasional breaks for museums.  I was tempted exactly once to do something work-related: I saw that there was an Art Spiegelman exhibit at the Centre Pompidou. We got ice cream instead.

I was 11 when I first saw West Side Story, when it premiered on network television. As Maria tended to the body of the dying Tony, and the ominous bell tolled, I was convinced that I was watching the solution to all the world’s wars and conflicts. Just get people to watch West Side Story, I remember thinking through my (secret) tears, and there’d be no more fighting.

My classmates at Waltoffer Ave. School apparently didn’t agree with me. After the movie was shown, the boys would divide up into Jets and Sharks at lunch hour and “rumble” on the playground (which meant, in our highly risk-averse suburb, a slight variation on the time-honored game of “kill the guy with the ball,” which involved a lot of jumping around and homoerotic “piling on”). I have a distinct memory of Mr. Verde getting on the loudspeaker and calling a stop to the rumbles. I’m guessing some parents complained about the grass stains.

West Side Story no longer moves me in the same way, but it moves me –  when I get teary, it’s over a Bernstein melody, and if I want to imitate anything on stage it is the leaps and splits of the dancers. (I would give anything to be able to do that jump and kick sideways thing the Jets do in the opening number, although perhaps not under the West Side Highway.) The corps in the current production of the musical at Newark’s NJPAC dance the hell out of the show, and Jerome Robbins’ original choreography still has the power to bring an audience to rapture.

NJPAC is presenting the touring version of the 2009 Broadway revival, recreating both Robbins’ choreography and Arthur Laurents’ original direction.  It’s probably best known for giving the Sharks Spanish dialogue and lyrics, which was a nice authentic touch. The cast is uniformly excellent, and the settings are lovely and evocative (and something of a technical marvel, considering this is a travelling show). If I had a quibble, it’s that both gangs are given vulgar gestures — flipping the bird, thrusting their hips, miming masturbation –  that I can’t imagine were in the original show (“Officer Krupke” especially tried to mine laughs from this sort of thing, unsuccessfully). I’m not a prude, but the lewdness of the gestures seemed somehow to make the show seem even more quaint. In 1957, Sondheim and Laurents had to work hard to convey the grittiness of the setting while staying just this side of the standards (and obscenity laws) of the era. Sondheim tells the story that “Krupke” originally ended with the gang shouting “fuck you,” until he was told by Columbia Records that the cast album would never be allowed to be shipped over state lines. (And besides, he writes, “Krup you!” — Bernstein’s suggestion — “may be the best lyric line in the show.”) Audiences bought into the sanitized slang the same way that they bought into the idea of gang members doing splits and plies and breaking into song. If Riff is giving a guy the finger, why is he saying “mother-lovin’” and “Krup you”?

Otherwise, a great production of a great show. And that dancing!  (Performances continue today at 1:30 and 7:30 p.m.; Friday at 8; Saturday at 2 and 8 and Sunday at 3.  See www.njpac.org.)

This apparently is not an Onion headline:

Giant black hole is seen gobbling up a star

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 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.