With the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) vote over criticizing Israel scheduled for this coming Sunday, the Washington Free Beacon today reported on a recently discovered listserv where a number of members of the organization engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric.
The highly charged rhetoric about Israel, revealed last week on a leaked listserv, show that some professors involved in the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) resolution to boycott Israel are motivated by the belief that Jewish people are nefariously pulling the strings in American academia.
The leaked comments have spurred accusations of anti-Semitism in the MLA’s ranks and prompted outrage among Jewish leaders who say that this type of discourse is motivated by a deep seated bias against Jewish people and the state of Israel.
The Free Beacon’s report expands on observations made by Prof. Jonathan Marks, who reported on the leaked comments for the Chronicle of Higher Education last week.
The anti-Semitic tropes in these statements are not subtle. But even if they were, I wonder why the academic left, which is usually so attuned to the subtlety of racism and sexism, puts up such a high bar for anti-Semitism. Suddenly “But I said Zionist, not Jew”; or “I’m a Jew, so I can’t possibly be in league with haters of Jews”; or “Yes, I’m focusing on the Jewish state and no other state, but so what?”; or “Sure, I’m echoing standard anti-Semitic tropes, but they’re really applicable here” are incontrovertible arguments, and it becomes bad form to suggest that anti-Semitism is at work unless someone is screaming anti-Semitic slogans.
I don’t think that many of the resolution’s supporters harbor conscious or unconscious anti-Jewish sentiment. But I do think that they should be a lot more worried about anti-Semitism, and that any MLA member who has yet to vote should vote against this tainted resolution.
Previously, the American Studies Association (ASA) voted to support an academic boycott of Israel. The backlash against the ASA started with over two hundred and fifty universities rejecting the boycott. Subsequently, two chapters, the Eastern American Studies Association and the California American Studies Association, refused to go along with the national organization’s boycott.
The intemperate tone of the debate revealed in the e-mails raise questions about the motivations of the BDS movement. Academic who support boycotting Israel used terms like “Zionist attack dogs” and complained about “the humongous influence that Jewish scholars have in the decision making process of Academia in general.” The idea that Jews exercise inordinate influence over society is a common anti-Semitic trope.
In Why Liberals Must Repudiate the BDS Movement in the March 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Howard Wohl observed, “When it comes to the issue of Israel’s right to exist, extremists in the media and academia dominate,” and that “academics and the media have too often accepted as fact the tripe that is emitted by such extremists.”
[Photo: Rebecca W / Flickr ]