A year back we did a few posts on the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism. Well my friend Abe Foxman informs that Yale is shutting the initiative down. No funding? And Jeffrey Goldberg, whose concern about anti-Semitism motivated his political engagement, is moving from the Atlantic to Tablet, a Jewish online publication. These are signs of the gradual retreat of the Holocaust inside the American political mind, and our weariness with the portrayal of Jews as victims.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today said the decision by Yale University to shut down the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA) at the end of July was “particularly unfortunate and dismaying” given the persistence of anti-Jewish hatred in the United States and around the world.
Update: The Yale Daily News reports that the program is being shuttered due to a lack of student interest, and its failure to “to meet high standards for research and instruction”:
The decision to end the program has met criticism from groups across the nation that show support for Jewish people, such as the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. But Green, a political science professor, said YIISA generated little scholarly work that earned publication in highly regarded journals, and its courses attracted few students.
“YIISA suffered the same fate as other initially promising programs… that were eventually terminated at ISPS because they failed to meet high standards for research and instruction,” Green said, citing the Center for the Study of Race, Inequality and Politics as another example of an underachieving program.
Failure to meet high standards for research? I wonder if hosting a conference with sessions titled “Self Hatred and Contemporary Antisemitism,” and “Scourges and Their Audiences: What Drives Jews to Loathe Israel Publicly and What To Do About It?” had anything to do with it?
