Good reporting at the Forward, by Joy Resmovits, on Columbia U. opening a new Center for Palestine Studies. No funding for it, though note the appearance of filmmaker James Schamus, who is Jewish, near the end of the story. I wonder why the Forward did not call Columbia alum Robert Kraft, who gives a ton of money to Jewish causes and to dialogue causes, and ask why he isn’t ponying.
The piece contains in the negative the shadow possibility (which I sense even at AIPAC with its blind generosity), that two Jewish American traditions, rachmones (or compassion) and wealth, might actually at last be turned like a spigot on the only critical-moral real-world object of Jewish attention, the Palestinians, whom we have done so much to dispossess, dishonor and disfigure. I believe naively and faithfully, that some day that will happen, because the Schamus’s are defeating the Foxman’s, slowly.
“We have absolutely no money,” Rashid Khalidi, the center’s co-director, told a packed audience at the launch event, attended, among others, by some notable supporters from the campus Jewish community. The center is now funded through Columbia’s Middle East Institute. In an interview, Khalidi, Columbia’s Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and Literature, expounded on his hopes for the center. “We’d like to have post-docs, be able to bring students here from Palestinian universities and fund research,” he said. “I’d like to give Palestinian universities the sense that they’re not so isolated.”
But he added, “It would be nice to have money for programming and ultimately have money for an endowment, but that’s very difficult.”
An historian of the Middle East and leader of the project, Khalidi is co-directing the center with Columbia University anthropologist Brinkley Messick.
Unlike Israel Studies, which has expanded rapidly with support from wealthy Jewish donors, “Palestine studies” as an autonomous field of research has no ready-made set of foundations and donors to back it…
Schamus said he became involved in the center’s formation when a group of Columbia faculty felt the sting of the earlier campus polarization. “There was a real assault on fundamental academic freedoms a few years ago. That really galvanized a lot of faculty,” Schamus told the Forward after the event. He cited the highly publicized film “Columbia Unbecoming,” which advanced the anti-Semitism charges, later refused, against Professor Joseph Massad, and to the high-profile tenure case of anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj at Barnard.
Schamus said the center’s launch marked a new moment of civility for Middle East dialogue on Columbia’s campus. “The failure of those assaults has made everyone — no matter what their political opinions — much more sensitive to the value of open and courteous dialogue, and has given real impetus to the establishment of the center, the first ever of its kind in North America,” Schamus said.
