The Yale Daily News reports on Yale’s decision to establish a new anti-Semitism shop that will replace the lately-cashiered program, the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism. The story says that leftwing bloggers helped drive YIISA, as it was known, into the wilderness. And it valorizes everything we said about that program: that it was utterly Zionist in its orientation. The money quote:
Sociology Professor Jeffrey Alexander, a member of the YIISA faculty governance committee, said that [YIISA exec Charles] Small’s use of the phrase “engaged scholarship” revealed YIISA’s focus on politics over scholarship. YIISA was “definitely” too political, in his view, which reduced its appeal to the broader Yale population, causing it to fail the review of its academic standards. “The reason [for YIISA’s lack of success] was that it was political, had a strong political orientation,” Alexander said. “[This orientation] was to defend the policies of the current conservative government [of Israel], and the whole post ‘67 tendency of Israel’s foreign policy, which is to occupy conquered territories, to continue the settlement movement.”
Because I am reading Jack Ross’s superb history of anti-Zionism, I can tell you that Zionists made their way into every turret and pillar and pillbox and altar of Jewish life in the 1950s. It didn’t have to be that way, but today people like Peter Beinart and Jeffrey Goldberg and Thomas Friedman accept that universal presence as a norm. Well again, it doesn’t have to be that way. And per Ross, it is about to change.
So what is fascinating about this account in the Yale Daily News is that a guy like Alexander, who had some responsibility to rein in the former anti-Semitism program at Yale, is so outspoken about its failure. I wonder whether Yale’s next anti-Semitism program, which yes, is sure to bring in checks, will be more dispassionate on the Israel question. I think it will be.
