There was a time when elite institutions successfully hawked their wares in an effort to stuff more cash into their bloated pockets. Universities like Harvard, Columbia and Cornell would shill like snake oil salesmen that thousands of dollars ponied up for pieces of paper with their embossed emblems would lead to greater riches, so a worthwhile investment.
Harvard’s online course on “leadership”
But the fragrance has left the rose and all that remains are prickly thorns from these former institutions of higher knowledge.
The weeks of October 2023 will be remembered for when the world blanched at the horrific comments stemming from the institutions’ leadership, professors and students, either endorsing or excusing the maiming and butchering of over 1,000 people in Israel.
At Cornell, professor Russell Rickford called the Hamas atrocity “exhilarating” and “energizing” before a crowd. Jewish students at the school were threatened with violence in a number of online posts.
Somehow, the school thinks that people still believe that the institution has a shred of morality to offer a course on the “psychology of leadership.”
Cornell University offering a course on “leadership” pitching that it “leads with empathy”
Columbia University professor Joseph Massad thought Hamas’s burning families alive was “awesome.” This is the same university that INVITED Malaysian Prime Minster Mahathir Mohamad to speak on campus, even though he is a known Holocaust denier and “proud antisemite.” It also INVITED Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who threatened to wipe Israel off the map.
No worry. For several thousands of dollars you can get a paper from the school attesting to your skills at “communication,” because maybe you can find an employer stupid enough to believe that the certificate you bought from a formerly elite university is worth something.
Columbia hawking a communications degree for anyone willing to pay
Harvard is producing so many quality students that gleefully stand in support of Hamas that the school’s paper will now be known as the Bloody Crimson. Clearly everyone should purchase a “leadership” piece of paper from a school that produces such evil creatures.
America’s universities have become cesspools of radical socialism and jihadism, and the world has taken notice. People will no longer pay for worthless pieces of paper from morally bankrupt institutions which funnel proceeds to classes labeling Zionism a form of “European settler colonialism.” Employers are now shunning the schools, and people are removing any mention of them from their LinkedIn profiles.
Ivy League universities are churning out monsters. Finally, Americans are recognizing the rot and seeking to quarantine them before they destroy what was once the land of the free.
The Tikvah Fund hosts an annual event in New York City with great speakers discussing Jewish thought, Zionism and Western Philosophy. Hundreds of people attend, mostly from the tri-state area but also Israel, the United Kingdom, Canada and even Brazil.
The first roundtable discussion after an incredible speech by Ruth Wisse featured: Dore Feith (Columbia), Zach Kessel (Northwestern), Alexandra Orbuch (Princeton), Josh Blustein (University of Chicago), Tal Fortgang (New York University). Each student discussed their experience on campus, ranging from antisemitic groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), to terrible administrations which could not bear to clearly condemn the barbarity of Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7.
Student panel at the Jewish Leadership Conference, October 29, 2023
Tal Fortgang concluded the discussion by making four observations about the state of academia in the United States today.
1. University presidents today do not stand by Jews, as evidenced by the amount of time and statement revisions issued to condemn the heinous Hamas attacks. The fifth attempt at condemnation reads like a hostage note written by lawyers.
2. Socialists and foreign entities have colonized the elite institutions. Dore Feith shared that the de-colonialist worldview has infiltrated every department in universities and is now part of the core curriculum at Columbia. Every student is fed a charged philosophy, including that Israel is a European Colonial settlement. There is no room left to debate this hallowed dogma at the Ivy League institutions.
3. There is a dire need to reexamine the admission policy at schools. While schools manage to be highly selective about GPAs and standardized test scores, somehow they manage to “accept 25% of students who are genocidal maniacs.” Based on recent videos of SJP on campus, it’s not an exaggeration.
4. Everyone must do their utmost to “drain the residual prestige which remains for these institutions.” They no longer teach people how to think but what to think, and the modern tenets are immoral by any measure other than a lens of radical socialism. The effort to drain those schools means no longer sending money or children to the school. It may also mean no longer recruiting students for jobs from those institutions.
A letter was shared at a New Jersey Jewish high school which said it would no longer allow some universities to present on site unless they attest that the schools are safe.
Letter from the Torah Academy of Bergen County, NY
Jewish institutions, parents and students are taking a new look at Jewish life at America’s leading universities and are not pleased with what they see. Perhaps not coincidentally, Yeshiva University, America’s flagship Jewish university, had admissions jump by 25% over the past three years. It is likely to see a continued surge in the coming years.
ACTION ITEM
Write to your alma mater’s administration, office of the president and alumni affairs “I am appalled at the antisemitism rampant on your campus. I will no longer send donations nor encourage family members to attend your institution. I will pressure high schools to not allow your school to present on campus, and ask my place of employment to stop recruiting from your school.”
Columbia University- alumni affairs caaalumnirelations@columbia.edu UPenn- alumni affairs alumni@ben.dev.upenn.edu Cooper Union- alumni@cooper.edu
Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official state-run news agency, has once again tried to incite 1.8 billion Muslims to fight Jews and the Jewish State.
The Temple Mount has regular visiting hours and Jews have always used it to visit their holiest site. That angers Jordanian and Palestinian Arabs that Jews claim to have rights to the location which Arabs falsely assert is a purely Islamic holy place.
The Wafa article was horrific from its headline to its last sentence:
“JERUSALEM, Wednesday, October 25, 2023 (WAFA) – Dozens of Israeli settlers Wednesday morning stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied Jerusalem, under protection from Israeli occupation police, according to local sources.
Witnesses said scores of settlers entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque in separate groups, where they conducted provocative tours through the courtyards of the mosque, received explanations about the alleged “Jewish Temple,” and performed Talmudic rituals near the Dome of the Rock.
This latest incident adds to the ongoing tensions surrounding Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third most revered site in Islam. The entry of settlers into the compound, backed by Israeli security forces, is often met with condemnation from Palestinian officials and religious authorities.
The Islamic Waqf, the Jordan-run authority in charge of the holy site, has repeatedly called for international intervention to prevent these incursions, which are seen as a direct challenge to the status quo of the holy site and an affront to the sentiments of Muslims worldwide.
Since 2003, the Israeli occupation authorities have been allowing Israeli Jewish settlers into the compound almost on a daily basis, with the exclusion of Friday, the Muslim day of rest and worship.
Israel captured East Jerusalem, where Al-Aqsa Mosque is located, during the Six-Day War in 1967 in a move never recognized by the international community.
Al-Aqsa Mosque is subjected to almost daily incursions by Israeli settlers, except on Saturday and Sunday, which are done under the heavy guard of the Israeli police in an attempt to divide the mosque spatially and temporally between Muslims and Jews.“
Jews visit their holiest location during regular visiting hours and need protection of police to keep Muslims at the site from attacking them. Jews go because it is the location of two Jewish Temples and the physical center of Judaism. The fact that Muslims get upset does not make it a “provocation” but goes to the antisemitism of those Muslims.
The Palestinian Authority is attempting to get 1.8 billion Muslims riled up against Jews at this most dangerous time. It must be condemned clearly and quickly and forced to stop promoting lies and incitement.
ACTION ITEM
Email White House “Get the Palestinian Authority to stop claiming that Jews are desecrating the Al Aqsa Mosque in an attempt to incite 1.8 billion Muslims around the world to attack Jews.
First you broke with your religious friends. You decided that Orthodox Jews were homophobic and against the broad LGBT+ community. In Israel, they were portrayed as sucking off the system and not paying taxes, while in the US they did much the same, while denying young children a proper education.
Then you purged your right-of-center family to gain alliances. You and your comrades labeled the right-wing “racists,” and refused to have them to your house or dine with them anymore.
You gave up your Jewish homeland, buying into the narrative that Israel is some version of “European settler colonialism.” You joined calls to boycott the Jewish state, its institutions and people.
In doing so, you unwittingly gave up your heritage and history. You absorbed the narrative that Jews have no place on “Arab land” and don’t belong in the region.
The embrace of all of those approaches was summed up in supporting the ban of Jews from living in the heart of the biblical homeland. You even supported blocking Jews from visiting the holiest place on the Temple Mount, and to pray there, upset that Muslims found it offensive.
Having shunned former friends and family, history and heritage, religion and rights of Jews, you joined your left-wing brothers in all of their causes. Having passed the indoctrination ritual of shedding any particularism and “privilege”, you thought you had clearly earned the right to be called a Socialist comrade.
You even joined anti-Israel groups like J Street and New Israel Fund which pour millions of dollars into campaigns to make Israel appear racist, and successfully got minorities and LGBT people into positions of power.
You even excused your intersectional brothers who called you out as the “enemy” despite your support. You internalized that if minorities were still calling you an enemy after everything you had done, it was evidence that you needed to do more.
But now, after the October 7 Hamas massacre, they have asked you to forsake your humanity. To excuse the beheading of children and burning families alive. To ignore the rape of women and killing of old people. To turn a blind eye to the torture of innocent people and abduction of hostages.
New York Times on October 21, 2023 about Progressives bemoaning the treatment by their intersectional allies after the brutal massacre of 1,400 people in Israel
As your “allies” celebrate the most vicious cruelty to Jewish men, women and children, you pause to think that despite shedding almost every Jew and Zionist from your life, your intersectional brothers still see you as a Jew unless you can join them in cheering the slaughter of Jews and destruction of the Jewish State.
You watch as some fellow Jews like members of Jewish Voice for Peace jump that challenge and cozy to the jihadists. But you pause. Isn’t this obviously morally repugnant you ask yourself?
Your socialist and radical Islamic brothers have killed more than your left-wing friends at the Israeli dance festival and beheaded more than just innocent children in their homes.
They destroyed your faith in a manner more cruel perhaps, than Nazis burning Jews in the town synagogue. Those European Jews had community and faith when they perished. But you, you stand alone and naked as they butcher everyone you know.
I do not gloat. I am not telling you I told you so after I’ve shown you what THEY say and believe for years.
I know that you and your friends painted the “right wing” as irredeemable monsters long ago. But we never abandoned you.
Please come back. Mourn with us. Help identify our dead.
There are several matters fomenting antisemitism at universities. One of them surrounds the topic of “decolonialization” and its impact on Jews on campus.
It is a plain fact that many European countries planted colonies in far away lands. The United Kingdom planted flags in the Americas, South Africa, India and Australia. Portugal took over Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Macau and others. Belgium took the Congo. France had controlled Morocco, Algiers, Tunisia, Senegal, Cameroon and Madagascar. Spain took much of Central and South America while Italy took Libya. It seemed that any European country with a fleet sailed the world from the 15th to 19th century and seized lands and goods.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, European countries left their colonies and those emerging countries had varying degrees of success establishing new functioning governments. Universities established departments devoted to this topic, which analyze how the past 75 years shape events today, such as Brown University connecting the 2011 Arab Spring to “Decolonization, Development and State Building in North Africa.”
Many of the departments and conferences consider how post-colonial state-building left countries vulnerable to autocratic regimes. The issues are typically handled by region, such as Columbia University discussing decolonialization in the Americas in the Latin American Studies department and those in Africa in the Middle East Studies departments. Other schools do much the same.
Things devolve when it comes to Israel.
Many professors in Middle East Studies departments are deeply anti-Israel. They consider the Jewish State to be a colony thrust upon the local Arab population by the United Kingdom and other countries after World War I. They ignore the fact that the UK did not send any Jewish citizens to Palestine nor did the British seize local resources for British use.
Most glaringly, the anti-Israel professors ignore the fact that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. The history of Jews and the core of Judaism is in the Jewish holy land.
Those basic truths are not only ignored on university campuses, but a counter-narrative is proffered. For example, Columbia University’s Joseph Massad called the Jews in the Bible “Palestine Hebrews,” ignoring the reality that Arabs did not come to the land en masse until the 7th and 8th centuries.
It’s grossly antisemitic, and ignored by the school administration.
Beyond the cultural appropriation and historical theft, the anti-Israel movement manufactured a lie that Zionism isn’t even Jewish. At a BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) vote at the University of Wisconsin in 2017, a student said “Israel in its inception is not a Jewish idea but a European one,” a principle at the heart of the decolonialization project.
That insane idea is gaining backers. The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) is hosting conferences to advance this proposition in universities around the country. According to its “Points of Unity” which people must sign-on to, the number one affirmation is “Zionism is a settler colonial racial project. Like the US, Israel is a settler colonial state. The Institute opposes Zionism and colonialism, and abides by the international, Palestinian-led call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.”
Its webite goes on that it “aims to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies, and to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism as a political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project, intersecting with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, and related scholarship and activism.”
This group is trying to sever Jews from the Jewish State and Zionism, and place Zionism in the camp of “decolonial studies” and “critical terrorism studies.”
Not surprisingly, this group masks its Jew-hatred under the guise of “academia.” It said that Jews had the October 7 savagery coming to them as part of decolonialization, and was outraged at Jews demanding justice. ICSZ wrote an “open letter to universities and other institutions, demanding they retract their statements endorsing Israeli genocide against Palestinians.” By “genocide”, they meant Israel trying to rescue 200 hostages seized by Hamas, pursue maximum justice for the Satans of Gaza who butchered 1,400 Israelis, and try to return the region to coexistence on either side of the border. Equally upsetting to these evil people at ICSZ, they were “horrified by the ubiquity of messaging from our university administrations that has expressed empathy for Israeli life,” because beheading children and raping women doesn’t deserve “empathy” if the “victims” are Jewish “colonizers.”
This is the state of American academia.
Universities are miseducating students that Jews have no history in the land of Israel and that the Jewish State’s founding was a racist European colonial project. They believe that Israel’s continued existence is an “ongoing Nakba” and Israel must be dismantled “by any means necessary,” which includes the October 7 massacre.
When Joseph Massad of Columbia University wrote about the “start of the Palestinian War of Liberation,” he did not see Arab terrorists hacking children to death and killing the elderly; he saw freedom fighters throwing off the yolk of oppression of Jewish invaders as a moment of “jubilation and awe.”
America’s universities are indoctrinating students in the antisemitic screed of the Hamas Charter, retouched with leftist jingoism to support the slaughter of Jews. And they are pushing the movement to go global. Jews on campuses everywhere have every reason to be terrified.
ACTION ITEM
Demand antisemitic professors and clubs like Students for Justice in Palestine be kicked off campus.
A number of high-level individuals have recently taken aim at their alma maters for the toxic environment that exists for Jewish and Zionist students on campus.
They are very late to the party.
Jewish Philanthropists Donating To Humanities
For many years, billionaires like Ron Perelman, Bill Ackman and Marc Rowan donated tens of millions of dollars for health care facilities, art centers, humanities and economic studies at Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University and others. Yet they seldom put any money into Israel or Jewish Studies programs at these institutions, assuming all was fine and the schools they attended decades earlier remained much the same.
Now, as noxious antisemitism has reached a boiling point as campuses host “Resistance” rallies in support of Palestinians slaughtering Jewish civilians, these philanthropists have suddenly recalled the Jewish and Zionist part of their humanity programs.
Marc Rowan called on alumni to stop donating to the University of Pennsylvania after the school hosted an anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic “literary festival.” He said that the heads of the university should step down for failing to stop the tidal wave of hatred at his beloved school.
These billionaires, who made fortunes in the business world by investing intelligently and properly predicting the future, utterly failed to understand universities today.
Billions from Muslim Countries For Muslim Studies
The Saudi Arabian government, corporations and particular individuals gave $600 million to several universities between 2011 and 2017 according to The Project On Government Oversight. MIT alone took in $78 million. George Washington University, Columbia University, Tufts University, and the University of Southern California each took $1 million or more.
According to POGO, “the largest foreign funder by far is Qatar, the only country to give over $1 billion in the seven years covered by the Higher Education Act data.” Qatar is a principal funder of the political-terrorist group Hamas which committed the heinous massacre of over 1,000 people in Israel this week, which finally made the Jewish billionaires pay attention to the campus problem.
POGO added that “Harvard University received by far the most foreign money in the period, reporting just over $1 billion from over 60 countries. In addition to Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, and Northwestern University are among the schools that reported receiving the most foreign gifts, each totaling over $300 million.”
Harvard students after Hamas’s jihadi massacreHarvard editorial of 2022 supporting boycott of Israel
The foreign donations take several forms, each of which embeds foreign culture into the universities’ campuses, and ultimately into the country.
Some international money was used to establish university branches in foreign countries. These centers enable U.S. students to study abroad and become more familiar with autocratic regimes in a friendly college environment.
Arab states funded Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern studies departments on U.S. campuses like the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, who donated $2.5 million to the Harvard Divinity School to endow the Sheik Zayed Al Nahyan Professorship in Islamic Religious Studies. Within a short period of time, the Zayed Center became a noxious fountain of anti-Semitic screed complete with Holocaust denials and blood libels.
Significantly, millions of dollars from Arab countries have funded student scholarships for thousands of Muslim students to come to the U.S. to study. During the Obama Administration, tens of thousands of students from Arab countries were present at universities, a number which began to decline significantly under the Trump Administration.
The presence of thousands of foreign students and Muslim teachers taking over Middle Eastern Studies Departments created a toxic brew. Students were able to petition universities to open chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) with a faculty adviser, which were conveniently now present and paid for. The AMCHA Initiative showed that schools with five or more academic advisers favoring boycotting Israel “were 7.24 times more likely” to issue anti-Israel statements than schools with fewer than five advisors. Further, AMCHA Reports “analyzing antisemitic incidents in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 indicate a significant increase in actions which directly harm or threaten Jewish students, including physical and verbal assaults, destruction of property, harassment discrimination and suppression of speech, at schools with an SJP or similar anti-Zionist chapter.”
In short, Gulf states spent billions of dollars over decades at American universities building an anti-Zionist and antisemitic infrastructure, while Jewish philanthropists had ribbon cutting ceremonies on general intellectual matters. The Jewish billionaires are waking up too late to their poor investments, when the anti-Zionist and antisemitic culture on campuses is deeply ingrained and universities are highly addicted to the stable flow of Islamic money.
While Rowan and Ackman may make a lot of noise about getting alumni to stop donating to these schools, they should put at least as much effort to get universities to stop taking money from autocratic, anti-democratic regimes which are poisoning the minds of America’s future and making schools inhospitable for Jews.
The antisemites of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan continued their evil ways in condemning Jews visiting their holiest location on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, even during the Jewish pilgrimage holiday of Sukkot. The Jordanian foreign minister “denounced the continuous break-ins by Israeli settlers [meaning Jews] at Al Aqsa Mosque” and “that the 144-dunum Al Aqsa Mosque is solely an Islamic holy site” and is completely off-limits to Jews.
This false narrative was inserted by Muslim and Arab nations into the United Nations which has subsequently used it for decades.
United Nations map showing the 1949 Armistice Lines between Israel and Jordan through Jerusalem and highlighting the “principal holy places”
As seen in the United Nations’ map above, the The Temple Mount (in red dotted lines) is not marked correctly as a Jewish holy site. The “Haram esh-Sharif (Mosque of Omar and Mosque of Aksa” is only listed as a Moslem holy place, a deliberate insult to global Jewry.
The United States has sometimes taken offense at the erasure of Jewish heritage in Jerusalem. In response to a United Nations vote on Jerusalem in December 2021, Ambassador Richard Erdman, Area Advisor for Near Eastern Affairs issued a statement: “I want to highlight one specific issue of serious concern, which is the reference to the holy sites in the Jerusalem text. The text only references “Haram al-Sharif,” rather than “Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount,” which is agreed terminology that recognizes the shared and diverse history of the holy site. The omission of this inclusive terminology is of real and sincere concern. It is morally, historically, and politically wrong for the members of this body to support language that denies both the Jewish and Muslim connections to the Temple Mount and Haram al-Sharif.“
Yet despite condemning the lack of LANGUAGE showing Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, the United States supports antisemitic ACTIONS against Jews praying at their holiest site.
On September 28, 2023, Linda Thomas-Greenfield said “I also want to reiterate that the United States firmly supports the preservation of the historic status quo with respect to the holy sites in Jerusalem [banning Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount]. And we oppose actions that depart from the historic status quo, or otherwise disturb the sanctity of these sites. Such action is unacceptable.”
It is a disgrace that the United States can acknowledge the centrality of the Temple Mount to Jews and Judaism, while simultaneously supporting banning Jews from praying at the site. The United States is aligning with antisemites on the wrong side of history, supporting outright discrimination in a Muslim religious war against Jews.
Why is the Biden Administration so determined to spread anger, division and hate? Why is it supporting policies in which Jews are targeted for attack at their holy site? To gain support against the Iranian nuclear weapons program or lowering the price of gas a few cents?
It is past time for decent governments to support an honest telling of history and abolish the inequity Jews continue to face in Jerusalem.
ACTION ITEM
EMail Senator Gillibrand “It is a disgrace that the US can acknowledge the centrality of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for Jews yet support banning Jewish prayer at their holiest site.”
It is a disgrace that the US can acknowledge the centrality of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for jews yet support banning Jewish prayer at their holiest site.
Disgraced Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY16) has now admitted to pulling a fire alarm in the halls of congress. Fearing that his apology would be viewed as insufficient, he has instructed his staff to defend his actions by redirecting the question towards Republicans which he calls “Nazis“.
Memo from Bowman’s office directs staffers to call Republicans “Nazis” if asked about the congressman pulling a fire alarm
The internal memo specifically calls on staffers to swear loyalty to the radical congressman and say “I believe Congressman Bowman when he says this was an accident. Republicans need to instead focus their energy on the Nazi members of their party before anything else.”
What kind of inanity is this? It makes a mockery of the entire concept of an apology to hurl insults at the other political party and minimizing the Holocaust as simple fodder for political cover.
It is insufficient for Bowman to only apologize to fellow politicians for causing a dangerous situation in congress; he must ask forgiveness from the entire country for trivializing the genocide of Jews as a red herring to conceal his own stupidity.
ACTION ITEM
EMail Senator Gillibrand “Condemn Rep. Jamaal Bowman for using the Holocaust as a shield for his own stupidity.”
It is insufficient for Bowman to only apologize to fellow politicians for causing a dangerous situation in Congress. He must ask forgiveness from the entire country for trivializing the genocide of Jews to conceal his own stupidity
September 16 and 17, 2023 were celebrated by Jews around the world as the start of the new year. Together with Yom Kippur next week, they mark the holiest days in Judaism.
The United States embassy to Israel did not mark the occasion with any wishes to the Jews in Israel or around the world. This stood in sharp contrast to commemorating holidays for other religions.
Yet the embassy did not post about Jewish Heritage Month in May. It did not post Passover wishes which coincided with Ramadan in 2023. It has not wished any Jews greetings over their high holy days in September.
The embassy is well aware of the holidays. It chose to warn Jews to not travel to Uman, Ukraine over Rosh Hashana. President Biden wished Jews a happy holiday but the embassy staff in Israel did think it important to share, even as it does so for Muslim holidays.
The current staff of the U.S. embassy to Israel is seemingly going out of its way to belittle Jews and Judaism, and court Arabs and Muslims.
First One Through 