Two years ago Yale closed down the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism because its purpose was too frankly political: to support Israel. Ehud Barak was on the outfit’s board. And at a conference, it hosted settler leader Itamar Marcus, Elliott Abrams, Islam-basher Steve Emerson, and a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
Back then, Charles Small, the former executive director of the initiative, blamed the closure on political correctness:
Small blamed radical Islamic and extreme left wing bloggers for the bad publicity the conference got.
Well apparently Small was biting his tongue. Now he’s blaming anti-Semitism.
Speaking at the Israeli government’s fourth Global Forum on Combating Anti-semitism last month in Jerusalem, Small was asked whether anti-Semitism played a role in Yale’s decision. He responds at 14:00 above:
“I would say unequivocally yes. Our basic focus was on contemporary issues. And I was basically called into the adminstrative office and told that if I do not deal in the Middle East, that I would be able to stay at Yale and run the center. So I stood up and shook this person’s hand and I said, it’s not possible to run a research center on the Middle East ignoring an important part of the world. So I think if contemporary anti-Semtism deals with the demonization and dehumanization of Israel and, as a result, of Jewish communities in the Diaspora with a strong connection to Israel, if this is the new contemporary anti-Semitism, and there’s a taboo… in the universities… in elite institutions, in the media, the elite media, in some western governments, of dealing with anti-semitism in this post-colonial moment– It’s almost a taboo, to deal with those who were once colonized. If we criticize parts of the world that were once colonized, some people on the left, on the so called left, put us in a box as being right-wing or fascist or making excuses for the Zionist enterprise and the like. So I think there’s definitely at an intellectual level, we are trying to break through an intellectual taboo and it is I would say, to me, anti-Semitism.
Small continued that a Yale vice president framed the discussion about his institute by stating that “I as its director was an advocate and not a scholar,” and that this administrator was named Charles Hogan, who was the vice president of Yale and a former roommate of “Rashid Khalili.” Hogan, he went on, has worked for organizations that get money from Arab governments. That puts people like Small on the outs.
We’re all sort of fighting this marginalization. Some of us are on the left, some are on the right. But we’re all being demonized as this sort of reactionary force. This is an important struggle against anti-Semitism… Our enemies are literally trying to push us off the battlefield.
Interesting that Small regards harsh criticism of the lobby– “Jewish communities in the Diaspora with a strong connection to Israel”– as anti-Semitism. Dershowitz and Elliott Abrams have made the same contention.
this is from the ” blamed the closure on political correctness:” page:
he’s not being completely honest. his likely intent with the center, and certainly the intent of this israel foreign ministry conference which is clear from the beginning of the video, is to adopt the european union definition of anti semitism which conflates it with anti zionism. so when he says “contemporary” anti semitism this is what he’s talking about , the “new” anti semitism.
and in that same 2011 link this is spelled out as such:
I’ve written about this before here – I’ve seen Small in action, and he is positively small-of-mind. The gossip at Yale is not so much that what he was doing was “too political” but that he was embarrassingly unsophisticated. I think Yale would have gone along with his agenda if he had been a bit more slick and polished in how he went about it. I’ve seen him speak a few times and it was pretty consistent: his presentations were amateurish, childlike and insulting. He would then get worked up that his cartoonish powerpoints were not rousing the audience to tears for his claim of an impending New Holocaust of world Jewry (to be perpetrated by venomous Muslims who have always in history wished to massacre the Jews). After realizing his failure to convince, he would resort to snide comments directed at the audience, and further alienate everyone. Perhaps his shtick would work in very limited ideologically homogenous settings, but in general public/academic settings he was a disaster. I can give more detailed examples of Small’s embarrassments, but the best summary would be to say that he’s a real lightweight in terms of his thinking, and plus, he does very poorly at cocktail parties and receptions. Sweat on his brow, awkward banter. So again, I don’t think Yale was so much antithetical to his politics as to his style.
And just a word on Jeffrey Alexander and some of the others who are involved in the new Antisemitism initiative: these guys are real scholars. Alexander’s work on cultural trauma is groundbreaking, and while he like many other trauma-studies scholars depends on the Holocaust as paradigmatic, he affords Israel no special dispensation and is (gently) critical of its abuse of Holocaust memory, as well as acknowledging Palestinians a legitimate place in the discussion on cultural trauma.
Elite media presumably is code for lossmaking. It sounds like a classic antisemitic term to go with ‘cosmopolitan’. The bots can turn everything around. They know that if they lose control of the narrative in the US then Israel is toast. Maybe they should be let have as much leeway with the new antisemitism – the use of the term to buttress human rights abuses in Palestine is a total fraud and the more people see it, the better.
There is no “new” antisemitism, just new uses for the charge of antisemitism.
Calling Jewish opponents, such as Richard Falk, of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, anti-Semites demonstrates how zionists have stripped the word of meaningful content.