Shades of Harvard’s Larry Summers! Columbia’s President, Lee Bollinger, has just come under faculty-fire for having mistreated Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, and in so doing, having “sullied the reputation of the University with (his) strident tone.” Bollinger has also been castigated by seventy faculty members for having “allied the University with the Bush administration’s war in Iraq” and for taking “partisan political positions concerning the politics of the Middle East.”

This is no parody. This is a seventy-gun opening salvo and the unmistakable sound of a bloody drumroll; the French Revolution has returned to Columbia’s campus.

I did not think that Columbia should have invited President Ahmadinejad to speak or that President Bollinger was honor-bound to either introduce–or insult him. I wrote about this HERE and HERE.

I am not familiar with the work of all seventy faculty signatories but seven names jumped out at me: Professors Nadia Abu El Haj (an American-born anthropologist of Christian and Palestinian origin who just received tenure after much controversy); Lila Abu-Lughod (an American-born Muslim-Jewish Palestinian anthropologist); Hamid Dabashi (a Muslim Iranian, who founded the Palestinian Film Project which is dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema); Mahmood Mamdani (a South Asian Ugandan anthropologist and political scientist); Rashid Khalidi (an American-born academic of Palestinian origin, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, the head of Columbia’s Middle East Institute, former President of the Task Force on Palestine and current editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies); Alice Kessler-Harris (an American-born historian who specializes in gender and labor issues); and Bengali-born Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak.

Is absolutely everything about Palestine? Just asking, a merely rhetorical quibble. And yet, this is not a minor quibble. About six or seven years ago, nearly every feminist and left academic listserv group from whom I received email, began systematically dumping propaganda about Palestine and against America and Israel into the ongoing conversation about psychotherapy, the nature of trauma, contemporary struggles for women’s rights. Anyone who did not salute this particular flag was no longer welcome online or was reduced to silence.

Now, these kinds of academics are staking a more public claim to their campus. For now, let me briefly focus on the work of two of these Columbia signatories.

Bengali feminist and postcolonial academic Chakravarti Spivak writes in a way that renders whatever she is saying fairly incomprehensible. Such aggressive, postmodern obtuseness is often confused with both brilliance and courage. Spivak has nevertheless been lionized for her attack upon the (potential) western feminist critique of non-western cultures as just another kind of imperialism. Spivak has been widely acclaimed for viewing (such imaginary) western feminists as similar to white men who are saving brown women from brown men. She views doing so as both racist and sexist.

Got that? In other words, if (white) westerners dare to save a brown-skinned woman from being genitally mutilated, honor-murdered, or hacked or stoned to death–doing so is a racist, sexist act.

Lila Abu-Lughod is a bit easier to understand and presents complex arguments. She argues the case for hijab and polygamy or rather; she tries to explain the various non-western meanings that such customs may have. She reminds us that while many British colonials may indeed have saved and tried to emancipate colonized women, but they did so “as a way of weakening local culture; at the same time, these same men were opposing female suffrage back home in England.”

Got that? In other words, if western colonial intentions were one whit less than pure and if the colonizer was not himself absolutely consistent then it does not matter if he actually saved a woman from having to throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre or won an impoverished, lower-caste girl the right to a minimal education.

Abu-Lughod also suggests that polygamy may allow women sisterly companionship and respite from the isolation that often plagues women in western-style nuclear monogamous marriages. And yet, every Memoir I have ever read about polygamy, every interview I have ever done–my own long-ago experience in Kabul, Afghanistan, all document that co-wives also suffer profoundly because of polygamy–as do their children who become rivals for both paternal attention and inheritance.

Actually, both Abu-Lughod and Chakravarti Spivak are quintessential western-style feminists. No matter one’s country of origin or religion at birth, all feminists with a perch in today’s western academy think alike. They are all multi-cultural relativists and reject universal standards of human rights. This puts women, especially “brown” women, in grave danger.

Abu-Lughod and Chakravarti Spivak view a western-style fight for women’s rights in the Muslim and Arab world as a dangerous diversion. Abu-Lughod recommends that we continue to focus mainly on “the colonial enterprise.” Why? Perhaps as a way of reminding western thinkers –heirs to the colonial enterprise–that, given their ancestors ‘ past crimes, they dare not feel “superior” to the Islamic world and above all, dare not intervene to free Muslim or Arab prisoners from Muslim or Arab jailors, or African slaves and female sex slaves from their Muslim and Arab tormenters.

I strongly suggest that these signatories read a book that has just been published by Ibn Warraq. It is titled Defending the West. A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Ibn Warraq and I recently spoke at Columbia PRESS HERE. It is a pity that none of these signatories came to hear what we had to say. I invite them to do so. Just name the time and the place. It can be a private meeting. (For a review of Ibn Warraq’s book PRESS HERE.)

Actually, I invite President Bollinger to read my most recent book about Islamic gender and religious Apartheid (The Death of Feminism. What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom). He will need to arm himself with just such ideas in the battle that has now been thrust upon him.

NEWSFLASH: I have just been told that, as of yesterday, the anti-Bollinger petition had ninety signatures and that, (how could I have doubted it for an instant!), an alternate petition is being circulated at Columbia which boasts about ninety signatures. I have been advised that at least half the professors who are currently castigating President Bollinger also signed the petition to divest in Israel.

This Amazon warrior has become something of a schoolmarm, a veritable Ms Manners of the raging Cultural Wars. Thus, say I, “I don’t like delivering savage soundbites nor does debate as a blood sport turn me on.” Primly, I say: “Ideological opponents should engage in civilized exchanges and they should keep talking rather than retreating into dangerous silences or into overt warfare.

Oh what fine and pretty words–but what about those moments in history in which we must either act or we become collaborators in the death of others?

Either we rescue the child trafficked into sexual slavery or she dies, both slowly and soon enough, while she is still young. Either we rescue the victims of genocide or they die. There are no second chances. Memorial plaques and Truth and Reconciliation Committees do not resurrect the dead.

And acting always means risking everything: safety, happiness, health, our own lives, and perhaps the lives of our intimates. But, at certain moments in history, heroism is our only alternative. At least if we are heroes.

Some people pride themselves on non-stop talking; they never act. Instead, they consider “talking to the enemy” a moral virtue. But if talking substitutes for and glorifies non-action, then let me suggest that talking may be better suited for safe, not perilous times.

These thoughts lead me back to a film I saw at the Israeli Film Festival. “The Darien Dilemma” is a haunting and powerful drama made by a father and filmmaker son: Erez and Nahum Laufer.

In 1941, 1000 Viennese Jews were stranded on the frozen Danube awaiting rescue or certain death. The “Darien” was the name of the ship that the nascent Mossad (Israeli Secret Service) had purchased in order to transport these Jews to safety in Palestine. The “Dilemma” concerns how a small group of Palestinian Jewish heroes handled a direct order to abandon these Jews to their deaths–simply because the ship was needed as part of a larger political deal the Mossad had just forged with the British; the ship was to be used to help sabotage German oil supply lines.

What does it mean to disobey an immoral order or an order with which one disagrees? Is preserving the future of the Jewish state a greater good than that of saving imperiled Jewish lives? What kind of monsters can make such decisions? What kind of monsters can refuse to do so?

In this instance, and to their enormous credit, the Mossad members debated this decision for one full month. They reluctantly voted to obey the direct military order–and then they changed their minds and decided to disobey it. However, it was too late for the Darien refugees. There was no ship for them. Except for 200 teenagers whom the Mossad spirited away to join another Palestine-bound ship, all eight hundred refugees were shot to death by Austrian troops whom Hitler had impressed into service.

The film operates on several tracks at once. The historical moment is captured, not only with archival footage but by an Israeli theatre troupe whom we see in rehearsal and then as they re-enact a spell-binding dramatization of the events in Istanbul, Vienna, Bucharest, Tel Aviv, Belgrade, and Bratislava. More: Some of the living survivors of the Darien, now in their eighties, are interviewed on camera. It all works, as a dream does, and we do not know what is “real” from what is “acted.” All disbelief is suspended.

The hero of the film is a woman–Ruth Klieger. She was also a member of the same Zionist Youth movement that I joined in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a mere seven years after the Darien drama took place. Klieger was born in Kiev, Ukraine. She was fluent in nine languages, had received a law degree in Vienna, and was very beautiful (a fact she used to save other Jews, not merely to take care of Number #1).

Klieger left Palestine to re-enter a dangerous Europe. She personally commanded “The Tiger Hill,” the last ship to arrive in Palestine before Word War Two began and “The Hilda,” which arrived in Palestine in 1940 with 726 refugees. Ruth worked with the Hagana and the Mossad in Bulgaria, Istanbul, and Cairo. She discovered a Nazi-Egyptian plot and helped put Anwar Sadat into jail. Klieger also worked with the “Free French Forces” in Cairo.

Klieger was the first Mossad agent to enter liberated Europe. She conducted the first Passover seder for the survivors of Bergen-Belsen. Klieger was also part of the delegation at Lake Success when the United Nations declared Israel a state.

Yes, it has been rumored that Klieger and Ben-Gurion were more than just comrades and friends but whether that was true or not, Klieger still refused her final commission: According to some, Klieger had never been accepted as an equal by her mainly male comrades. She entered the private sector in Israel where she also excelled.

What a story! What a hero! In this lucky instance, heroism not only paid off–Klieger herself died in her bed, so to speak, and not in a Nazi interrogation cell, in Tel Aviv, in 1979.

Friends: Run, don’t walk to your local bookstore. I am told that Klieger was once the subject of a best selling biography by Peggy Mann. Read it–I’m certainly going to do so. But also, try to rent this wonderful movie as well–it will haunt and inspire you and you will never, ever forget it.

May we, in Klieger’s merit, acquit ourselves as nobly.

Norman Mailer, one Tough Jew, is dead. Mailer was the whitest Black man of his time. Long before Bill Clinton became the first “Black” American President, there was Mailer the literary Jew as lover, pugilist, philanderer, political wannabe, drunk, filmmaker wannabe, wife-stabber, murderer-lover, and murder-enabler. (Remember that he sponsored Jack Abbott for parole and that Abbott tragically killed again within weeks). Mailer was a hardboiled-over City Guy with a huge ego but with talent and energy to spare.

In the 1960s, I was there on the periphery of his circle when so many of his male friends rushed to defend him after he stabbed his wife Adele–and I subsequently met Adele, a very attractive woman. Actually, I also once lunched with his last wife, Norris Church, who was as attractive (but in a different way) and who was also a painter and writer. I was there when Mailer could not believe his eyes at Town Hall when the feminists (Germaine Greer but especially Jill Johnston, who kissed another woman long and hard on the stage, among others) “acted out” as if he, and all men, simply did not count. This, he could not believe and never really “got.” It may have been the only time Mailer was at a loss for words–at least for a little while.

Mailer represented the best the macho literary world had to offer and he was dead wrong: About madness, about murder, and about women. Being wrong only attracted more women, more publishers, more guy-groupies. Thus, it was a clean fight, so to speak, between Mailer and the Feminists. Neither his talent nor his power diminished his misogyny. And his type ruled the roost.

Shades of a falling-down-drunken Dylan Thomas at the White Horse Inn, Mailer was adored for being outrageous (and smart too, of course). His drunken womanizing proved that he was “not gay”–maybe even “not too Jewish.”

My son went to school with Norris and Norman’s son in Brooklyn Heights and I have always found it touching that the Great Ego chose to remain in Brooklyn and that he also kept the faith with Cape Cod, which he continued to visit rather religiously.

In the early 1970s, Norman Mailer attacked Kate Millett in an article; I was always going to rebut him and defend her honor but then I never did. He was in the wrong, and piggish about it too but his views on this subject no longer counted.

I have always found it touching that my dear friend, Kate Millett, also continued to visit the Cape as well–as if these two embattled spirits both recognized the place as a shrine to rebel bohemia in America.

May he rest in peace and may those who mourn him be comforted.

Friends: I have just received the following information:

An Arab-American Muslim woman has recently filed for divorce in Massachussetts because the imam at the Islamic Center of New England allowed her husband to marry three other American Muslim women. The aggrieved woman, Jane Doe, has informed the imam that Muslims are required to abide by the American law, not shari’a law, and has vowed to expose this practice in order that other Muslim women and children are not similarly “victimized.”

I have no way of knowing whether this has actually happened. I have told my informant to have the woman contact me if she so wishes. One wishes to understand why American Muslim women are willing to be second, third, or even fourth wives.

If anyone reading this has further information about this subject, please write to me. Is polygamy flourishing under the radar in America, not only in Massachusetts but elsewhere? What do you think about polygamy? (This is an academic question because the practice is illegal, no matter what we think about it).

Western middle-class rebel-girls are fashionably anorectic, more concerned with shedding inches from their own bodies than with changing history even by a few inches. (I in no way mean to mock or minimize the real epidemic of eating disorders among girls and women and am focusing here on the epidemic’s larger cultural dimensions).

Western rebel-girls are often drug addicts, alcoholics, self-mutilators, “cutters;” they dabble in “nervous breakdowns” and pen Memoirs about their asylum stays before they are 25. They also “slum” as a way of passing as rebels. Thus, unlike the children of poverty, girls with educations and high-income families, “act out” by becoming strippers, pornography stars, prostitutes. Or, they merely dress as if they had been trafficked into sexual slavery, and wear incredibly tiny skirts and blouses with plunging-necklines right down to their be-jeweled navels. (Yes, this is taking place in the West even as other girls and women are religiously modest, have joined the Armed Forces, or are running corporate entities. All these realities are taking place simultaneously.)

Their female counterparts in the Islamist world are quite different. On the one hand, some of the bravest freedom-fighters in the world today are Muslim and ex-Muslim anti-jihadists. But then, there are Muslim women jihadists, like twenty-three year old Samira Malik, who worked at London’s Heathrow Airport and who has just been convicted as a “lyrical terrorist” under under Britain’s terrorism legislation.

Police found documents in which Malik said she wanted “the opportunity to take part in the blessed, sacred duty of jihad.” She not only stashed manuals about hand-to-hand combat, bomb-making, and rocket-launching, she also wrote poems in which she praised “be-heading.” (”It’s not as messy or as hard as some may think/Its all about the flow of the wrist.”) And, on internet social networking sites, Malik described her favorite television shows as the “be-heading” videos, bin Laden videos, and “videos which show massacres of kaffirs (infidels).”

In America, Malik would be lauded as a warrior of “resistance.” First Amendment groups would protest her having been convicted merely for her words and ideas (or for “thought crimes”). She would become yet another instant hero, find a publisher, perhaps even land a job teaching poetry at an Ivy League university.

I can’t believe that I am actually praising Britain–but in this instance, they have forced my hand.

My good friend and colleague, Dr. Nancy Kobrin, views Malik as a “high functioning” sociopath, similar to the “high functioning serial killer mass murderer jihadi doctors who allegedly fit in on the surface but who lack empathy.”

She has a point. Malik is not using her literary skills to empathize with humanity. Au contraire. Perhaps the only aggression that a Muslim woman is allowed to exhibit is in the service of jihad and religiosity; perhaps this is the only career path to glory for otherwise subordinated Muslim women.

The interviews done with Palestinian women whose suicide killing missions were intercepted by the Israelis (and who have been written about by Dr. Anat Berko, and filmed by both Pierre Rehov and Shaun Beyer), confirm the nature of their culturally empowered hatreds. Yes, perhaps some of these women are “mentally ill” but this is not relevant. Their potentially murderous deeds have full cultural approval and they are treated (and view themselves) as religious heroes with moral agency.

Dr. Kobrin makes one other important point. Such jihadis “subvert” our common social norms. They turn their destructive thoughts into destructive deeds. “Just like flying planes into buildings, they subverted the globally accepted norm that planes are for transportation not to be turned into bombs.” In Samira Malik’s case, “so too do they seek even to destroy and strip language from us, throwing us back into a horrifying world similar to that of an autistic person.”

Thus, on our side , our civilian (not our warrior) icons include Britney Spears, Madonna, Paris Hilton, Courtney Love, and countless western wannabees. On the jihadi civilian team, we have young women who are ready to kill and die for Allah, for bin Laden, and for jihad.

What’s wrong with this picture?

So, here I am, sipping my morning coffee and reading my first twenty (yes, twenty) hardcopy and online newspapers (I read double that amount by the end of the day–doesn’t everyone?) when I read the brief New York Sun editorial titled “Colonizing Barnard”. And HERE is the Columbia Spectator coverage.

Apparently, over the weekend, Barnard quietly (very quietly) granted tenure to Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. There! Take that you Pushy Jews!

Abu El-Haj is the professor who allegedly claims that Jews and therefore Israel have no or little historical or archaeological ties to the land of Israel or to the Temple Mount. I am not familiar with her work. Perhaps she does not make this claim. Perhaps this false claim constitutes only a teensy weensy part of her work which members of the all-powerful Jewish Lobby have seized upon to defame an ideologically true daughter of the late but very far from great Professor Edward Said, also Columbia’s own.

Look: Professor Abu El-Haj is an anthropologist. According to recent studies, that discipline is by far the most politicized of them all. Their anti-Zionism is an article of anthropological faith. Anthropologists have taught us all to support the rights of each and every indigenous culture, the more cannibalistic the better–save one. The rights of the Jews are a mote in their eye, an offense. They live to pluck it out.

Funny, but the New York Times does not mention that Columbia affirmed Barnard’s decision to grant her tenure in their hardcopy edition. (But I have just learned the hard way that one must also pore over their online edition to see where they bury certain items the better to cover their asses.)

Aha! The news of Abu El-Haj’s ascent may indeed be found in their online edition on Saturday, November 3, 2007 in a 197 word article. (Press here.) Strange, on September 10th, when her tenure was first challenged, the New York Times ran a story titled “Fracas Erupts Over Book on Mideast by a Barnard Professor Seeking Tenure.” The word count was 1,288. (Press here.) And, Abu El-Haj’s bona fides were carefully spelled out: Duke, Harvard, Princeton. How in God’s name could anyone who studied in these august venues be anything but a truth-teller, above reproach?

Look: I am a retired Emerita Professor and truly, I understand that outsiders have no place in tenure decisions. But there is a larger issue here. What is to be done when lies are presented as distinguished truths, replete with footnotes and academic publishers and students are indoctrinated accordingly? When racist hate speech against the Jews is presented as a “politically correct” act of defiance and resistance?

Abu El-Haj may indeed be a serious scholar. But based on what I do know about other “serious” scholars at Barnard and Columbia (their names are legion), the definition of “serious” is often someone who excels in hating America and Israel and who, in their spare time, also dabbles in their area of specialization.

Quo vadis, my friends? Which way are we to go in this fair Republic of Ours when our most noble First Amendment and academic freedoms are concepts now being used against the very freedoms they were meant to guarantee?

Professor Norman Simms was born in 1940 and grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn (my home town). He studied at Machzike Talmud Torah, Styuvesant High School, Alfred University, and received his Ph.D from Washington University in English Literature. He protested the War in Vietnam, moved to Canada to teach at the University of Manitoba, and from there to the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, New Zealand where he has been ever since.

He has increasingly devoted himself to Jewish studies and to the phenomenon of “crypto-Jews” as “secret agents” of rabbinic wisdom. He has published 15 books, including “Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience” (Peter Lang, 2005) and “Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice” (Sussco, 2007) and hundreds of articles. He also edits and publishes the inter-disciplinary journal, Mentalities/Mentalities.

Simms’ own writings are utterly amazing in terms of their intellectual audacity and command of multiple disciplines. His work combines literary, language, historical, midrashic, and psychological skills. Simms moves effortlessly between the centuries in many voices. For example, his wonderful article, “Satanic Midrashim, or The Abuse of History,” in which he discusses contemporary Blood Libel cases (propagated by Israelis Amiel Toaff and Ron Edelist, among others) is typical, in that his sources and footnotes include nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century works in Spanish, French, Italian, Hebrew, and English.

Given our past work together, I knew he would be the ideal person to consult on the most recent episodes of anti-Semitism Down Under.

Q: I’ve just read that you’ve had a spate of Jewish cemetery vandalism (in October of 2007) and that this is the third time in as many years that this has occurred. What begins as Israel-bashing in the media quickly turns to Jew-bashing in terms of smashed and overturned Jewish graves, swastika-and anti-Israel-graffiti. Given how few Jews live in New Zealand (5,000-6000 in a population of just over four million ), is this some kind of bad Jewish joke–Look Ma–Anti-Semitism without any Jews?

A: The key thing to explain is that anti-Semitism is not a popular everyday affair; it is limited to elites, the media and the universities. There may be some old bastards around from the 1940s. Apparently a fair number of Hungarian and Austrian Nazis slipped in while New Zealand was occupying Trieste after the last War. There are also some Dutch and Afrikaans racists, but these are minuscule numbers, though they make the loudest noise when they do something.

The danger is the attitude of the media and the government. Precisely because New Zealand is so small and faraway, it takes up key positions in international bodies–because it seems to be the morally pure, idealistic, utopian land at the bottom of the world; because so many people need to believe in a magical dream of New Zealand invented thirty or forty years ago. The problem–as well as the cause for relief–is the naivete, ignorance and indifference of most students to world affairs. They simply cannot imagine what the real world is like. For example, I just had a second year student write about Chaucer’s Prioress’ Tale; and while she vaguely recognized that Jews were massacred in it and that the Prioress gloated, my student really thought it was a very pious tale and felt it showed how religious Chaucer was. If she knew what she was saying, it might be dangerous.

Q: Can you clarify what kind of anti-Jewish activities are going on over there?

A: Anti-Semitism comes in several forms, some more subtle than others:

First, the explicit desecration of cemeteries that usually comes every three or four years in waves following statements by the press or the government, against property not persons, though it contains threats (Death to the Jews, Israelis will burn for their war crimes, etc.);

Second, anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli smears in the press, radio, and television based on exaggerated and distorted criticisms which might be acceptable if not so extreme and matched with idealization of the poor suffering Palestinians, victims of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, and linked therefore to Maori claims and complaints;

Third, almost unconscious and unintended statements and acts which treat Jews as a bizarre, exotic, and incomprehensible “other”, and can be in a positive form as well as negative (such as, “How wonderful of you to be a Jew, God’s Chosen, one of Jesus’ own people, etc.);

Fourth, government policy of favoring Arab States above Israel, and matching it with a general anti-American discourse, anti-nuclear and anti-globalization policies etc. On the whole, it is all a top down phenomenon, not popular.

Indeed, ordinary kiwis (New Zealanders) are far more sensible and sympathetic than the intellectual, media and government elites. Example: the programme for the forthcoming New Zealand Festival of the Arts seems top-heavy with Bush-bashing (plus Howard, Blair, Sarkozy, etc) “acts”, as though it were an unquestioned truisms that artists like all liberal people must be against Israel, the USA, and Western/Christian traditions.

Q: In 2004, the New Zealand government cancelled President Moshe Katsav’s visit because they claimed that two Israelis, sentenced to six months in jail in New Zealand for alleged “passport forgeries” were in reality, Mossad agents. You yourself have told me that there have been a series of Holocaust Denial mini-scandals at New Zealand universities from the late 1990’s on. Why is anybody so far away with so small a Jewish population bothering to engage in Holocaust Denial and to rail against Israel and the Jews?

A: This is a general tendency throughout the so-called Western world, but here, where intellectual and cultural people are relatively rare on the ground and self-coddled, there is no historical context, no cushioning complexity of society, and where it gets mixed up with what is called “cultural cringe” (kiwis feeling inadequate in the world and in their own eyes because they are such a teeny-tiny country, as well as with picking up trends, fashions and buzz-words that rattle around in people’s heads without any resonance–they are against things that don’t exist here and so tend to reduce them to kiwi size (i.e., Maori political correctness.) Self-righteous, smug and self-defensive, they really believe they are a good people, God’s own (godzone), and the most creative people on earth.

Q: Is this something new or has it happened before?

A: As recent studies have shown (from Australia, of course), New Zealand has been beset by British snobbish anti-Semitism from the beginning (witness the treatment by the Medical Association refusing to allow refugee doctors in before, during and after WWII). The institutionalization of Holocaust Denial through the Kupka Affair, the Hayward Business, etc. shows that universities are incapable of comprehending Holocaust Denial and anti-Semitism, so like the media, they transform it into academic freedom or free speech issues, and then paint themselves into a corner from which they snarl at the nasty Jews (and their allies) for “not being part of the team”.

Considering how many of the academic elite are still ex-pat Brits chaffing in their exile, they react with colonialist arrogance. Most students and staff, like the public, are unaware of what is going on and/or can’t comprehend the real issues, so the “battles” go virtually unnoticed. The trouble is that creeps like David Irving now have properly accredited academic theses to cite in their excremental presentations.

Q: Is anti-Semitism going to go away or will it exist for the foreseeable future in New Zealand?

A On a day by day basis, it is there in the attitude of the press and the government, but not in the general public. Most of the time what happens against Jews here or elsewhere doesn’t get mentioned in the media. The cemetery desecrations this past October made it into the local Wellington papers but nowhere else in the country. It is not something New Zealanders are interested in.

During the recent police raids against suspected terrorists, I could see the kaffias being worn, pick out the references to Palestinian support groups, and recognize the usual people who speak out against Israel, but none of the reporters noticed. It is nothing they care about, are trained to see, or told to watch out for by their editors. Maybe if someone were injured or killed, it would break through into consciousness.

When Jews started to kick up a storm about the Holocaust Deniers a few years back, the press did sit up: but then we were the news more than the Neo-Nazis. It was that we spoke about anti-Semitism that was the news.

Also unnoticed by the press, during the Kupka Affair (a Holocaust Denial scandal which took place at Professor Simms’s own university in which he became involved and about which I write in “The Death of Feminism”), were instances of anti-Semitism that oozed pass the verbal and symbolic to include blackmail, intimidation, and firebombs, along with false accusations of Jews painting bloody swastikas on buildings, etc. These issues have never been resolved and remain smoldering underground. But who knows and cares except the Jews? or the others who lost their jobs, retired early, or moved away in disgust?

Q: What is your own experience of this?

A: My own experience has been to feel the effects of the frustration and rage that comes in the face of these incidents. I have close friends who are Holocaust Survivors, and they have felt the pains and the return of awful old memories. Some members of the German Department at the university put their jobs on the line to expose the calumnies-and they were knocked back for it. A few went away, others could not for family reasons, and their careers have been blighted. It is not a pleasant thing to watch.

Thankfully, for what it is worth, my experience of anti-Semitism has been a matter of omission more than commission, innuendo rather than open slander–and just the way people walk away when you sit at a table or turn in the other direction when you approach. How could this be proved?

By indirect reports, I have learned–but can never prove–that my promotion was blocked for 30 years because I was called a medieval grotesque, a pilpul pedant, an intrusive hebraist. (That’s a word taken from Matthew Arnold and is a polite way of saying I am a Jew. My scholarly and literary work was always mocked and scorned, but most of the time the charges were so grotesque in themselves the documents had to be withdrawn, and then, with no letters of recommendation, there could be no promotion. I know other people pushed aside because even after twenty or thirty years at the university they could never “think like a kiwi” (or “us”). An interview in a national magazine was once canceled at the last moment because my photo “made me look like a dentist”.

Q: After nearly 25 years of trying to develop a Jewish community in Hamilton, you have found yourself ostracized by the very community you helped create because of your increasingly outspoken stands against Holocaust denial and anti-Israelism. By the way, this kind of ostracism has happened to other proud Jews as well, in Canada, Europe, the United States, and Israel during the last seven years. Can you talk about this?

A: I now see it as a mixture of old fashioned ghetto nervousness and modern dhimmitude. Yes, when it comes down to it, the biggest hurt was in losing so many friends and acquaintances. So add to the isolation of being down here at the end of the world the added burden of alienation. Givalt, givalt, givalt, as my Grandpa Dave would say.

Q: Are you worried about the immediate future?

A: No, I am not afraid in an existential way. But because of the apathy and indifference, we are safe.

Q: Where do you see the Jews of New Zealand in the next 10 years? 20 years?

A: That is a “big ask,” as they say around here. I am no longer part of the community here in Hamilton or elsewhere in New Zealand. A few remnants of the old group–three families–meet for a sort of imitation celebration of holidays.

Back to your question. My guess is that nothing will have changed. The Jewish community will still be the same size numerically, and so will continue to shrink proportionately. As such a tiny community, the marriage pool will determine the same things it has for the past 180 years: every family will have branches in Australia, Israel, and more and more in America; families will expand and shrink to follow life-cycles, with young people going overseas to find employment, partners, and to start families, then either returning to be with grandparents or grandparents going overseas to be with off-spring and further progeny; and the whole therefore staying steady; less than replacement levels of population, late and small birth-rates, fewer grandchildren in all, and a tiny trickle of newcomers through immigration.

The unknowns are the politics of overall demographics: will New Zealand tip over towards a non-Christian (worse than post-Christian and secular) society, further into the orbit of Asian social and cultural institutions, and continue the slide into third-world economic stature through opposition to technological industry, merit based education and rationality itself (superstitious ideologies, as among the Greenies)? I suspect everything will be just about the same for most people, if perhaps a little worse for the Jews…. As they always are.

Q: How might my readers acquire your work?

A: Special Editions, including The Phyllis Chesler Special of Mentalities/Mentalités Vol. 21:1 may be purchased in two ways : (a) directly from Outrigger Publishers, PO Box 1198, Hamilton, NZ; or (b) through amazon.com.

Q: Thank you so much for your time.

Why-oh-why does the mainstream media keep tacking on “The Israeli-Palestinian crisis” where it does not belong? This has become a mindless mantra meant to inflame not inform people and more important, meant to affirm the “goodness” and “fairness” of the journalists who espouse precisely such rank propaganda.

Today, the New York Times included the above phrase in their editorial titled “Selling America.” The editors believe that they know how to–and how not to–”sell” America. In their view, President Bush’s “waging preventive war in Iraq, redefining torture, repudiating the Geneva Conventions, establishing illegal detention camps, and refusing to grapple with the Israeli-Palestinian crisis” has created “new enemies every minute” and has “soured allies.”

What universe do their editors inhabit? My universe is one in which Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, is already perceived to be leaning on Israel to give more in return for less at the Annapolis conference. Diplomatically, Israel is already expected to do all the heavy lifting for Arab and Muslim states (such as Jordan and Turkey) who are gravely concerned with the Iranian threat. Israel, not Jordan, and not even America, flew that wisely secret mission into Syria which some people are now saying might have helped “avert World War Three.”

According to political expert, Dan Diker, (a very passionate speaker) who works with Ambassador Dore Gold in Jerusalem, Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah are not even asking for the Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, but, Oslo-style, Israeli politicians and pundits are offering them as sacrifical lambs nevertheless.

In his experience, dealing with the Fatah leadership is like dealing with a “vacuum;” other than some strong and honorable individuals, “there is no there there.” The Palestinian Authority consists of “warring clans, families, and warlords” and they are threatened by a well funded Hamas. In Diker’s view, the main reason that fewer suicide bombings have taken place is due to the “security barrier” and to Israeli intelligence gathering.

But still, the Kassam rockets continue to rain down on Sderot and the international community barely notices it. The mainstream media mainly note when Israel does something–anything, to defend itself from this non-stop onslaught and when it contemplates reducing electricity and fuel to its hostile, parasitic dependent in Hamas’s Gaza. (Why don’t the wealthy Arab states finally pick up the slack here to avoid the impending humanitarian crisis?)

Diker shared an important anecdote. It seems that when he goes to Ramallah, which he does every few weeks, he hides his kippa (skullcap). His host, a religious Muslim and a “good man” stops their ongoing negotiations to pray, in full view of the Israelis. Diker finally decided that it was time for him to do likewise. He donned a kippa and asked his host to point him in the direction of The Western Wall for his afternoon prayers. His host immediately and respectfully did so.

“From now on” Diker quietly vowed, “I will not hide my religion or fail to pray” simply because Jews (and all non-Muslims) are endangered in Arab and Muslim territories.

Afterwards, Diker told me privately that “Israel behaves like a battered woman. She keeps coming back for more mistreatment.” Said I: “But when battered women kill in self-defense in America they receive life sentences, often with no parole.” We both stood together in momentary silence.

Do the editors of the mainstream media, ever stand in silence before tragic and complicated realities? Do they ever entertain the possibility that Israel is being falsely blamed in order to serve the cause of Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian imperialism? Do they ever contemplate the possibility that “anti-Americanism” might not be caused by American failure or even by American crimes but by American virtues and strengths?

Perhaps America, too, (at least its media elite) have begun to behave like a “battered woman,” and have grown to “enjoy” being demeaned and mistreated.

Israel has a vibrant and sophisticated film industry. The Israeli Film Festival, which is still “on the (celluloid) boards” in New York City, is now in its twenty second year. It features a diversity of films which both celebrate and criticize Israel as well as life itself.

Saudi Arabia and other Arab Muslim states have nothing that compares.

In the mid-seventies, I was the moderator at the very first Middle East Film Festival which took place at the Bleecker Street Cinema with some discussions spilling over to New York University. That was an ambitious enterprise which, for the first time, showcased the work of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Arabs; of course, the God-blessed Jews were also fierce critics of the Jewish state.

I want to focus on two films only. “Till We Have Built Jerusalem” (or “There is a King in Jerusalem”), has rare footage of the City of Peace from the early twentieth century on. The scenes are touching, tender, terrible, but also unexpectedly intimate, the way home movies are. This is due to the primitive camera technology which renders major historical figures in a slightly jerky, amateur manner.

This film would be an important teaching tool and historical corrective to the often savage propaganda war against Israel and the Jews. It documents how very small, poor, and wretched Jerusalem was at the end of 400 years of Ottoman rule. Only 10,000 people lived there at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the end of World War One, it was a city with no food, fuel, medicine, or sanitation–a city unclaimed by any Arab nation. The film also presents the British in an unexpectedly favorable light and shows how difficult it was for them to please both the Arabs and the Jews. And, it fills in some historical gaps.

For example: After the Turks abandon the city, we see the Mayor of Jerusalem trying to find someone–anyone–among the British to whom to “surrender” the city in December of 1917; we see the British-Jewish High Commissioner, a top-hatted Herbert Samuel, walk a great distance to pray in a synagogue in the Old City on his first Shabbat in the Holy Land–and are told that he said: “Nahamu, nahamu Ami” (be comforted, be comforted, my people); we see the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, elevated by Samuel (!) as he turns an initially peaceful reign into one in which he incites his people against the Jews; we also see him meeting with Hitler’s right hand men; we learn that the same architect who built the Empire State Building also built the YMCA in Jerusalem. (His name was Louis Harmon).

Clearly, this film was a labor of love. Ya’kov Gross, the historian who researched and wrote the film, together with director Eli Cohen and producer Zvi Shefi did this film on a shoe-string budget. Now, they need $30,000.00 to reduce their debt to the various archival companies without which they cannot begin to copy and distribute the film for educational purposes.

Ya’akov Gross, who spoke to us in person, wants “everyone in the world to be able to see this film in order that they understand the status of Jerusalem in the twentieth century.” I strongly recommend that people make a donation to this film project. Gross may be reached at yakgross@yahoo.com

The Festival has a website: www.israelfilmfestival.com . It runs until November 8th. I urge you to attend this wonderful Israeli-New York event at the Clearview Cinema 62nd and Broadway.

DAY TWO AND COUNTING:

So, I scanned my hard copy of the New York Times today and did not find any further or in-depth coverage of the swastika incident at Columbia. Perhaps they plan a huge weekend feature. I have my magnifying glass at the ready.

NEWSFLASH! A CORRECTION.
I have just been told that the New York Times described this incident in their online edition today–not at length, not in any depth, but the swastika has definitely made it onto their radar screen. My informant happens to be my son–and therefore we both agreed that it would be safer and wiser if he sent it to me for a final, maternal inspection. What can I say? I am relieved, my faith redeemed, etc. I look forward to their in-depth hardcopy coverage of the many ways in which Israel and Jews have been demonized on American college campuses.
END CORRECTION

Just when I think I’ve seen it all–there is always more to see.

I am talking about my favorite newspaper: The even-handed, totally objective, fair-minded, high-stepping Grey Lady aka The New York Times and their unwritten policy about the Jews and Israel.

I know, I know: My standards are impossibly high and to boot, I am allegedly “paranoid” on the subject of the Jews and Israel. That’s precisely the word that their managing editor, Bill Keller, used to describe me in a note he sent my way. (I had asked why the Book Review and the paper itself had decided not to review my book about anti-Semitism or to interview me about the issues the book raised or to allow one of their own reporters to continue working on a story about anti-Semitism and the demonization of Israel on college campuses way back in 2003-2004).

Fast forward to 2007. When the noose was found outside Professor Madonna Constantine’s door at Columbia University Teacher’s College, the Times published not one, not two, but three stories about it with many accompanying photos. As well they should have. As I recall, they may even have published a fourth story exonerating another female professor who was implicated in a rivalry with Professor Constantine.

On October 10, 2007 Sewell Chan wrote a piece titled “Noose Puts Columbia at Center Stage Again.” On October 10, 2007, a second article also appeared in their pages, (perhaps only online, I am not clear about this), written by Anahad O’Connor and titled “Hate Crime Investigation at Columbia.” On October 11, 2007, a third article, written by Elissa Gootman and Al Baker appeared, titled “Noose on Door at Columbia Prompts Campus Protest.”

This morning, in the New York Sun, I read that a “Swastika Is Found at Columbia.” The article, written by Sarah Garland, tells us that Professor Elizabeth Midlarsky, of Columbia’s Teacher’s College, found a swastika painted on her office door. Professor Midlarsky is Jewish and she researches the European Holocaust against the Jews.

I dutifully scanned each and every page of the New York Times’s main and metro sections. I held the newspaper up to the light and looked at it in my bathroom mirror (just in case it was written in invisible ink or backwards). I even considered calling upon Harry Potter or Nancy Drew to help me out.

Perhaps the Times is working on a longer story. As well they should. But still: I wonder what they said at their editorial meeting about whether to cover this story or not. When the Times finally does the story I hope they research it fully. Why? I have been told, very confidentially, that similar swastikas have recently appeared on the doors or in the offices of two other Jewish professors at Columbia, both of whom decided to keep it quiet. Perhaps they wanted to demonstrate that their greater loyalty was to the university and not to any “narrow” Jewish interests; perhaps they felt that the media can only make things worse and that publicity might lead to more copy-cat incidents.

I have not been able to confirm these incidents. Perhaps they never happened. But surely, the Paper of Record will get to the bottom of this. And when they do, I will be the first to congratulate them.