Anti-Semitism at US Universities and elsewhere

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 minute ago, TerraPrime said:

Maybe because the former is the root cause for the latter?

 

It is not true that all Jewish organizations support Israel's current foreign policy. Therefore, using the government's foreign policy as justification to condemn a Jewish organization is not legitimate, unless we can show a tie that a specific organization does specifically endorse the state of Israel.

 

But then, it'd be difficult to establish that identity, as a pro-Jewish organization but not explicitly endorsing the state of Israel, given that Israel is the nominal home to all Jewish people.

 

I think it's worth pointing out that regardless of the atrocities in foreign policy of the Israeli state, anti-Semitism is never justified. Whether it's Nazi symbols or racist stereotypes, we shouldn't tolerate it even if we disagree with the state of Israel's foreign policy.

TP,

Thank you, that's my point.

 

[sologdin]

seems that criticism of a state's policy is not inconsistent with defense of the state's citizens (and members of those citizens' ethnicities and religions in other states) from racism/xenophobia/ethnocentrism/chauvinism (can we just boil this cocktail down to fascism?).

 

is the allegation that the fascist rhetoric in this instance is based on the policy of the state of israel?

[DunderMifflin]

The one thing that makes me question the authenticity of this is........chalkboards??? Really??

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

15 minutes ago, DunderMifflin said:

The one thing that makes me question the authenticity of this is........chalkboards??? Really??

There aren't chaulkboards in Universities any longer?  They had them 20 years ago when I matriculated.  They had them 16 years ago when I was in Law school.  Why is it shocking to think there would be chaulkboards at schools today?

[DunderMifflin]

I haven't seen a chalkboard since like '92. There werent any at my university in '04. I thought theyd been extincted long ago.

[Happy Ent]

I spent two hours lecturing in chalk today. If I have a choice (chalk- over white-) I always take the former. Whiteboards suck. Chalk rules.

[sologdin]

i haven't taught since 2004, but then it was a mix of chalk and those awful dry-erase markers.

[DunderMifflin]

I stand corrected I guess I thought they were a relic

[Happy Ent]

Oh, architects will win this battle soon enough. (Architects hate blackboards and think them ugly.) With every new building, the number of bona fide teachers who are willing to invest the life blood in extremely hateful discussions dwindles.

And then there will be no more blackboards. Good teaching will come to a halt.

And modern society will cease to exist.

HAS THE WORLD ENDED?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Architects don't like blackboards?

[DunderMifflin]

 

I thought instructors wouldn't like them due to chalky pants that inevitably accompany them

[Happy Ent]

23 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Architects don't like blackboards?

Hate them. They want white. And open spaces. Glass walls. No doors. Everything in flux. Constant chatter.

Architects are the bane of the enlightenment project. (Research and teaching requires blackboards. Shell-formed lecture halls with cramped seating, good acoustics, and twelve blackboards that can move up and down. Small, individual offices where you can close the door and either think in solitude or have a private one-on-one with a colleague or student. Ownership of common areas. Small islands of messy spaces at which to congregate (such as coffee machines).)

Architects probably also are antisemites, just to get the thread back on track.

[Happy Ent]

27 minutes ago, DunderMifflin said:

 

I thought instructors wouldn't like them due to chalky pants that inevitably accompany them

But they are good for writing on. They make you want to express yourself. And what you write is legible.

White boards are not legible (hard to see, and hard to write well on), and you psychologically averse to using them (they are pristine, you need to take the cap off the marker, which typically doesn’t work anyway.) (And white board markers smell. You lose the dust but get the smell.)

There exists very good chalk with little dust. But it is impossible to get administrators to buy that. Also: http://gizmodo.com/why-mathematicians-are-hoarding-this-special-type-of-ja-1711008881, so it’s a dying form of communication. Unfortunately, a very useful one. But teachers have very little influence on such decisions.

[DunderMifflin]

We used to prank our professor with the whiteboard everyday.

The same marker had no ink left in it so he would throw it away, and every time we would get it out of the trash and put it back on the board. He'd pick it up and try to write with it and it wouldn't work, he'd throw it away again and we would get it out of the trash can again. This went on an entire semester and he always fell for it.

 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

14 minutes ago, Happy Ent said:

Hate them. They want white. And open spaces. Glass walls. No doors. Everything in flux. Constant chatter.

Architects are the bane of the enlightenment project. (Research and teaching requires blackboards. Shell-formed lecture halls with cramped seating, good acoustics, and twelve blackboards that can move up and down. Small, individual offices where you can close the door and either think in solitude or have a private one-on-one with a colleague or student. Ownership of common areas. Small islands of messy spaces at which to congregate (such as coffee machines).)

Architects probably also are antisemites, just to get the thread back on track.

[Ormond]

35 minutes ago, Happy Ent said:

But they are good for writing on. They make you want to express yourself. And what you write is legible.

White boards are not legible (hard to see, and hard to write well on), and you psychologically averse to using them (they are pristine, you need to take the cap off the marker, which typically doesn’t work anyway.) (And white board markers smell. You lose the dust but get the smell.)

There exists very good chalk with little dust. But it is impossible to get administrators to buy that. Also: http://gizmodo.com/why-mathematicians-are-hoarding-this-special-type-of-ja-1711008881, so it’s a dying form of communication. Unfortunately, a very useful one. But teachers have very little influence on such decisions.

Most of the classrooms at my university have whiteboards now. However, the main room I teach in as a psychology professor still has a blackboard, because my colleague who is the chair of psychology is allergic to the chemicals in the markers used on whiteboards. She has told the university administration that if they will pay to have a "smart board" (also called an "interactive whiteboard") in the room she'd be happy to get rid of the blackboard. 

Hate to link to Wikipedia but it seems the best place to get a quick definition of "interactive whiteboard" at the moment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_whiteboard

 

[Happy Ent]

I’ve never seen an interactive board that was actually good to write on. They exist at many places, and always empty of content, often just plain broken. It’s too much technology, while forgetting the important part (namely, to make writing and reading an immediate action.)

Blackboard > whiteboard > interactive whiteboard.

[Altherion]

7 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Is anyone else surprised by the tolerance and apology offered for pretty blatent anti-semitic rhetoric?

No. There is a long and storied history of antisemitism in European societies which, to some extent, also made its way to the US. After WWII, people looked at where following that track to its terminus goes and it was so horrifying that open antisemitism was no longer acceptable... but something that is so old and so widespread does not simply go away. Fortunately for the antisemites, Israel came along and allowed them to continue as before with only minor modifications.

They weren't antisemites anymore, they were anti-Zionists. They're not against an immutable quality, they're against an ideology or a nation -- which also had the benefit of allowed them to enlist Jews who were willing to attack Israel, thus further distancing the entire group from antisemitism. It is hard to criticize them: there are legitimate problems in the behavior of any nation and there's nothing wrong with pointing these problems out.

Their only giveaway was perhaps the singlemindedness with which they pursued Israel. Never mind that Israel's neighbors are constantly doing something worse, never mind that Western nations (and the US in particular) routinely do stuff that is much worse -- there's probably no country which gets more attention per magnitude of action than Israel. Also, every once in a while, the anti-Zionists will repackage antisemitic arguments using packaging that is perhaps a bit too transparent. For example, consider this gem from this very thread:

Quote

That is the political sea we swim in right now.  It is the elephant in the room.  Israel, for better or worse, effectively has a blank check with our foreign policy.  Congress' obsequience to Netanyahu in the face of Obama's slightests of slights - BTW in dealing with our foreign policy with a completely different country - should double underscore this. To not acknowledge that is to ignore a major prior, like refusing to acknowledge police shootings or people of color, and then pondering the "real" purpose of BLM.

The hardest of the hardcore Zionists are getting all they could want, and are taking more every day, and the US and Europe for their support are facing outsized repercussions.

This is just the old "Jewish conspiracy" repackaged into Israel having a blank check with our foreign policy and "the hardest of the hardcore Zionists" getting everything they want, humiliating our leaders and causing problems for our country in the process. Just like the Jewish conspiracy, the details of how exactly Israel is managing to control entities two orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than itself is left unstated (probably something having to do with money and corruption?). Furthermore, also just like the Jewish conspiracy, these statements are complete and utter nonsense which do not survive even the most cursory examination -- but that does not stop anti-Zionists from constantly repeating them.

Thus, antisemitism never truly went away -- it merely acquired a politically correct cloak. If I understood you correctly, you are surprised by the fact that this cloak is partially off now and we have swastikas drawn in public places and the like which cannot plausibly be explained away as anti-Zionism. There are two reasons for this. The first is that WWII was a long time ago and it recedes into the distance with each and every day. If somebody dared to draw a swastika on a college campus in 1956, there would be widespread outrage. In 2016, it barely rates a mention in the college newspaper. The cloak is much less necessary than it once was. The second is that there are more and more Muslims in the US and they come from cultures where the treatment of Jews during WWII does not have the same impact. The transformation of antisemitism into anti-Zionism is foreign to them and while some adopt it, many do not. This is why it is even worse in, say, France, where the fraction of the population that is Muslim is significantly higher.

[BloodRider]

9 minutes ago, Altherion said:

This is just the old "Jewish conspiracy" repackaged into Israel having a blank check with our foreign policy and "the hardest of the hardcore Zionists" getting everything they want, humiliating our leaders and causing problems for our country in the process. Just like the Jewish conspiracy, the details of how exactly Israel is managing to control entities two orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than itself is left unstated (probably something having to do with money and corruption?). Furthermore, also just like the Jewish conspiracy, these statements are complete and utter nonsense which do not survive even the most cursory examination -- but that does not stop anti-Zionists from constantly repeating them.

Thus, antisemitism never truly went away -- it merely acquired a politically correct cloak. If I understood you correctly, you are surprised by the fact that this cloak is partially off now and we have swastikas drawn in public places and the like which cannot plausibly be explained away as anti-Zionism. There are two reasons for this. The first is that WWII was a long time ago and it recedes into the distance with each and every day. If somebody dared to draw a swastika on a college campus in 1956, there would be widespread outrage. In 2016, it barely rates a mention in the college newspaper. The cloak is much less necessary than it once was. The second is that there are more and more Muslims in the US and they come from cultures where the treatment of Jews during WWII does not have the same impact. The transformation of antisemitism into anti-Zionism is foreign to them and while some adopt it, many do not. This is why it is even worse in, say, France, where the fraction of the population that is Muslim is significantly higher.

Whew.  I am glad you take issue with my statements.  I thought I might have been out of line there.

[TheKitttenGuard]

6 minutes ago, Altherion said:

No. There is a long and storied history of antisemitism in European societies which, to some extent, also made its way to the US. After WWII, people looked at where following that track to its terminus goes and it was so horrifying that open antisemitism was no longer acceptable... but something that is so old and so widespread does not simply go away. Fortunately for the antisemites, Israel came along and allowed them to continue as before with only minor modifications.

They weren't antisemites anymore, they were anti-Zionists. They're not against an immutable quality, they're against an ideology or a nation -- which also had the benefit of allowed them to enlist Jews who were willing to attack Israel, thus further distancing the entire group from antisemitism. It is hard to criticize them: there are legitimate problems in the behavior of any nation and there's nothing wrong with pointing these problems out.

Their only giveaway was perhaps the singlemindedness with which they pursued Israel. Never mind that Israel's neighbors are constantly doing something worse, never mind that Western nations (and the US in particular) routinely do stuff that is much worse -- there's probably no country which gets more attention per magnitude of action than Israel. Also, every once in a while, the anti-Zionists will repackage antisemitic arguments using packaging that is perhaps a bit too transparent. For example, consider this gem from this very thread:

This is just the old "Jewish conspiracy" repackaged into Israel having a blank check with our foreign policy and "the hardest of the hardcore Zionists" getting everything they want, humiliating our leaders and causing problems for our country in the process. Just like the Jewish conspiracy, the details of how exactly Israel is managing to control entities two orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than itself is left unstated (probably something having to do with money and corruption?). Furthermore, also just like the Jewish conspiracy, these statements are complete and utter nonsense which do not survive even the most cursory examination -- but that does not stop anti-Zionists from constantly repeating them.

Thus, antisemitism never truly went away -- it merely acquired a politically correct cloak. If I understood you correctly, you are surprised by the fact that this cloak is partially off now and we have swastikas drawn in public places and the like which cannot plausibly be explained away as anti-Zionism. There are two reasons for this. The first is that WWII was a long time ago and it recedes into the distance with each and every day. If somebody dared to draw a swastika on a college campus in 1956, there would be widespread outrage. In 2016, it barely rates a mention in the college newspaper. The cloak is much less necessary than it once was. The second is that there are more and more Muslims in the US and they come from cultures where the treatment of Jews during WWII does not have the same impact. The transformation of antisemitism into anti-Zionism is foreign to them and while some adopt it, many do not. This is why it is even worse in, say, France, where the fraction of the population that is Muslim is significantly higher.

Plenty of Anti-Semites can be big fans of Israel for they do not take from shit from others and various other reasons that do not make them less Anti-Semitic. 

Yeah Israel have brought changes and in many ways it was it's point.  It is an actual Nation State and not some mysterious International Jewish Conspiracy.

I do not know Europe. I do know in the U.S, Evangelical Christian are some of the biggest Israel supporters and are very supportive of Israel's settlement policies.  It is actually fairly well documented they are more extreme in their support than U.S Jewish population.