The Rising Generation Discusses Universities

Posted on October 30, 2023 by First.One.Through

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.

This year’s event was centered around “THE RISING GENERATION: WILL OUR CHILDREN DEFEND AMERICA, ISRAEL, AND JEWISH CIVILIZATION?” While always a timely subject for Tikvah which focuses on educational programs for middle school through university, the rising antisemitism on college campuses made the focus on the rising generation even more pressing.

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

The Problem With Antisemitism On College Campuses Stems From Where Jews And Arabs Focused Their Donations

Biden Enables Anti-Semitism On College Campuses

Should The KKK Open Chapters In Every American University, What Say You?

Deformity Of Palestinian Culture In America’s Youth

Columbia University Completely Fails Mission. And Jews

Posted on October 16, 2023 by First.One.Through

In the aftermath of the grotesque massacre by Palestinian Arab terrorists of 1,300 Israelis and taking nearly 200 hostages, the most prestigious school in the largest diaspora community in the world served warm water to allay Jewish fears.

The scale and barbarity of the crime against humanity has few parallels in modern times. Yet Minouche Shafik, President of Columbia University in New York City, could not clearly condemn the Hamas massacre. Instead she discussed her sadness of violence impacting BOTH SIDES. She led with:

“I was devastated by the horrific attack on Israel this weekend and the ensuing violence that is affecting so many people. Unfortunately, at this moment, little is certain except that the fighting and human suffering are not likely to end soon.

“I know many members of our community are being impacted in profound ways and I want to assure each of you that Columbia will provide any measure of care or comfort that we can. This is your community, and you are not alone.”

She would go on to discuss logistical support at the school for everyone.

She refused to clearly comfort Jews in the worst slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust and instead offered a generic “many people”, “many members” and general “human suffering.” She tied the attack in Israel to “ensuing violence.” By being generic like “All Lives Matter” in a moment of severe anguish, she very much made Jews feel alone and abandoned.

This same university has a professor, Joseph Massad, who celebrated the attack as the “start of the Palestinian War of Liberation.” Not a surprise when he has also stolen the entire history of the Jews by calling the Children of Israel in the Old Testament “Palestinian Hebrews.”

In September 2019, Columbia invited Malaysian Prime Minster Mahathir Mohamad to speak on campus, even though he is a known Holocaust denier and “proud antisemite.”

Shafik thinks that Columbia’s “job to educate, enlighten, and engage” students involves enlightening people by bringing antisemites onto campus, miseducating students that Jews have no history in the holy land, and engaging Jews that their torture is quite unimportant.

*Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, Columbia University President as of July 1, 2023*

It is shocking that the last president of Columbia was so moved by the killing of a single Black man, George Floyd, to internalize the “destructiveness of racism, and of anti-Black racism specifically,” that he had the university take on many new initiatives and openly support the Black Lives Matter movement, yet the current president cannot recognize the collective trauma of Jews from the butchering of 1,300 Israelis, to clearly condemn Hamas’s brutality and antisemitism, and support Jews specifically.

Marc Rowan and Jon Huntsman announced that they will stop donating to their alma mater which has become ‘unrecognizable,’ elaborating in an email “Moral relativism has fueled the university’s race to the bottom and sadly now has reached a point where remaining impartial is no longer an option.” Their university president at University of Pennsylvania had penned a letter about the Hamas slaughter which was very similar to Shafik’s tepid comments.

It is time to ask for more, much more of Columbia University. And of its alumni.

ACTION ITEM

Call Columbia University President Shafik at (212) 854-9970 “Fire the antisemitic professor Joseph Massad who incites violence and miseducates, clearly condemn Hamas, and support Jewish students whose community just experienced a trauma multiples the impact of 9/11.”

Contact Columbia alumni to stop donations and sending children to the school.

Donate to Yeshiva University, a proud Jewish and Zionist university

Donate to StandWithUs, as they fight for Jews on other college campuses

The Problem With Antisemitism On College Campuses Stems From Where Jews And Arabs Focused Their Donations

Act Against The Antisemitic Slanderers And Definitely Those In Power

The Noxious Anti-Semitism Of “European Settler Colonialism”

Courageous Jews On Hostile Campuses

Columbia University’s Latest Anti-Semitic Inanity: “Palestinian Hebrews”

Posted on July 31, 2022 by First.One.Through

Joseph Massad teaches at Columbia University on Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History. In addition to his coursework, he publishes essays in places like Middle East Eye which give the general public a small taste of what he is teaching to students at the Ivy League institution.

*Tenured Columbia University professor Joseph Massad appearing on Russian news*

Massad concocted a bizarre phrase called “Palestinian Hebrews” in recent articles. In order to understand this new noun, it is best to see how Massad used his invented term.

In one article, Massad wrote “Zionists deployed this originally antisemitic claim to argue that modern European Jews are somehow rooted in Palestine in order to render them fantastically the descendants of ancient Palestinian Hebrews.“

In another article, he used the expression twice:

“Like France and Italy, the European Jewish Zionists claimed to be descendants of the ancient Palestinian Hebrews and to be merely “returning” to their ancient land. Israel, which established a Jewish majority by expelling the majority of the Palestinian people in 1948, voted against the 1952 UN resolution recognising Tunisian and Moroccan self-determination.“
“Socialist pan-Arab nationalism was castigated by the French as reactionary and seeking to re-establish “Islamic” glories. By contrast, the pan-Jewishism of European Zionism, which sought to recreate the “Judaic” glories of the Palestinian Hebrews, who were appropriated as the ancestors of European converts to Judaism, was depicted as progressive and socialist.“

The absurd phrase reveals Massad’s anti-Semitism on two levels.

The first anti-Semitic assertion of this Columbia professor is that Jews are not really Jews. According to this professor’s narrative, today’s “European Jews” who peddle “European Zionism” are not ancestors of biblical Jews but only of “European converts to Judaism.” Jews have lied to themselves and the world that they are descendants of the Jews in the bible.

Massad believes that the small number of European Jews who managed to survive the forced expulsions, conversions, Inquisitions, pogroms and the Holocaust are disgraceful liars. They’re just a band of thieves who adopted a story from the bible. The anti-Semitic world which persecuted Jews for their faith were in truth attacking charlatans according to this tenured anti-Semitic Palestinian professor.

The second anti-Semitic lie told by Massad is that the real Jews in the Old Testament are “ancient Palestinian Hebrews.” He attempts to strip the Jews out of the bible and replace them – presumably – with a new group of people who are somehow tied to Arabs.

The claim is of course, nonsense. Arabs did not come to the Jewish holy land en masse until the Muslim invasions of the 7th and 8th century, over 1,000 years from the writings of the Old Testament and over 500 years from the writing of the New Testament. The land wasn’t rebranded “Syria Palestina” until the year 135CE, well after Jesus died. The Koran, written hundreds of years later, never used the word “Palestine.”

But Massad has absurdly attempted to purge the ancient Jews from the holy land and replace them with an early version of today’s Palestinian Arabs called “ancient Palestinian Hebrews.” Not Jews of Judea, the way Roman historian Josephus wrote then (Judea is mentioned over 100 times in The War of the Jews), but Palestinian Hebrews.

The transparent purposes of stripping Jews of their history and falsely replacing them with “ancient Palestinian Hebrews” is a pathetic attempt to assert that Jews do not have thousands of years of history in the land of Israel, and that Palestinian Arabs are somehow the real biblical Jews. It is cultural appropriation of the most heinous kind, breeding lies and anti-Semitism. In its most gentle form, it presents as the idiocy behind Linda Sarsour and Bella Hadid claims that Jesus was a Palestinian. In its most violent, it manifests in the foundational Hamas Charter which calls for the destruction of Jews and the Jewish State because of their “usurption of Palestine.”

The anti-Semitic Lexicon has a new phrase, “Palestinian Hebrews”, courtesy of a tenured professor at Columbia University. Expect to see it wherever anti-Semites and anti-Zionists are found.

Linda Sarsour as Pontius Pilate

The Anti-Zionist Lexicon – Vilifying Israel

The Anti-Zionist Lexicon – Whitewashing Palestinians

The Cultural Appropriation of the Jewish ‘Promised Land’

A Core Tenet of Zionism Is Combatting Anti-Semitism

Is Columbia University Promoting Violence Against Israel and Jews?

Courageous Jews On Hostile Campuses

Is Columbia University Promoting Violence Against Israel and Jews?

Posted on December 16, 2019 by First.One.Through

Columbia University has claimed to be a champion of free speech. It was in that spirit that it invited the noted anti-Semite Malaysian Prime Minster Mahathir Mohamad to speak on campus in September 2019. Mohamad has called Jews “hook-nosed,” said they “rule the world by proxy” and questioned the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. He has even said he is “glad to be labeled anti-Semitic.”

That same week, seemingly to make the Jewish students on campus feel particularly unwelcome, one of Columbia’s professors, Lis Harris, released her book “In Jerusalem.” The student-run Columbia Spectator magazine reviewed the book in its Winter 2019-20 edition.

The review was shocking in seemingly endorsing the author’s contentions that Israel is an oppressor of Palestinians without adding any facts or context.

The article is set up to inform the reader that the book will have a natural “pro-Israel” tenor, as the author Lis Harris “grew up in a secular Jewish family in the United States fully alert, she says, ‘to the wrongs done to the beleaguered Jews across the ocean,’ but with little sense of the ‘wrongs done to the Palestinian people.’” Ah, if someone with a pro-Israel bias can see how terrible Israel is, it certainly must be true. The birth of a woke anti-Zionist is a cause for a progressive party.

Facts in the review and/or the book were seemingly few in the offering.

We are told that the book tries to look at the conflict through the lens of two families, a Jewish one living in “West Jerusalem” and a Palestinian one “living across the border wall in East Jerusalem.” This is fiction. There is no “border wall” between “West Jerusalem” and “East Jerusalem.” In 1967, Israel tore down the fence that divided the Jerusalem after Jordan illegally attacked Israel, and reunited the holy city. There is no West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem, and the fence which had existed from 1949 to 1967 was explicitly declared to NOT be a border by Israel and Jordan in their Armistice agreement. The “security barrier” which Israel began to erect in 2002 to stop the terrorism of Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank is to the east of unified Jerusalem.

Perhaps the facts make the author’s shuttle diplomacy seem less daring, but it’s a sad intro for a writer “who spent more than ten years gathering research and interviews for the book.” The book established zero credibility from the outset.

The review then moves from the gross inaccuracies to ignoring Jewish history and blessing Arab terrorists.

We are informed that the stories in the book are told by “accomplished women” and intelligent and respected family members who “want peace and a fair solution to the conflict.” The Jewish woman’s aunt escaped Nazi Germany who found asylum in Mandatory Palestine “as a refuge from violence.” There is no mention that Mandatory Palestine was designed to REESTABLISH the Jewish homeland years before Nazis came to power. Jews were not dumped into Mandatory Palestine in a reaction to the Holocaust; the land of Israel has been the Jewish homeland for 3,700 years. Modern Zionism pushed for Jewish sovereignty in that land decades before the State of Israel came into being. That’s why Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since the 1860’s, all facts not covered in the review and presumably not in the book.

This Jewish aunt “is juxtaposed with the experience of Niveen’s [the Arab’s] aunt. At twenty-one, Rasema Odeh was accused of terrorism, illegally tortured, and served ten years at the Ramla prison… Rasmea’s story is shocking, but the chapter devoted to it is one of the book’s best.” The review made it sound like Odeh was a poor victim, unjustly “accused of terrorism.” It neglected to state that she was convicted of terrorism in which she placed a bomb at a supermarket killing two civilians (her accomplices openly admitted such on Palestinian TV). It failed to state that Odeh lied about the events in getting a visa into the United States in 1994 and was stripped of her citizenship in 2017 and deported. It failed to note that many countries – including Germany in 2019 – banned her from speaking in public and denied her a visa as she calls violence against Israel. The mayor of Berlin said about Odeh that “anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic resentments, wrapped up in liberation rhetoric, have no business here. I am glad that we have found a way to stop this propaganda.”

This “juxtaposition” of a Holocaust survivor finding refuge at the expense of Palestinian Arabs seems to take a page out of the book of pathological liar U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) who claimed she found comfort that her ancestors created a “safe haven for Jews“ when they actually did everything they could to kill the Jews and/or keep them out of Palestine. It is called Seeing the Holocaust Through Nakba Eyes, which turns the Jews from victims to oppressors, and the Palestinians from participants in the Holocaust to victims themselves.

The article continues with more inanity such as “Harris is clear-sighted and firm in her own view that the Israeli government is more oppressor than victim. She does not condemn the Palestinian people fighting to live in their occupied home of East Jerusalem (but neither will she excuse the violence of Hamas).” No commentary that the Arab population in the eastern part of Jerusalem has grown FOUR TIMES since 1967, a rate that surpasses the population growth of Arabs in any neighboring country. It also neglects to mention that Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem have the option of becoming Israeli citizens and thousands have opted to do so. Palestinians aren’t “fighting to live;” they are fighting to evict the Jews and destroy the Jewish State.

The Spectator adds that “Harris was able to comment on President Trump’s rash recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.” Rash? Was President Truman’s recognition of Israel in 1948 also rash? The snide comment didn’t even attempt to hide the reviewer’s bias.

In summation, the review states that “through the people she comes to know in Israel and Palestine, Lis Harris sees hope, and this brave new book ultimately helps us see it too.” Palestine? The United States recognizes no such country. And to the extent that it recognizes “Palestinian Territories,” those are limited to Gaza and Areas A and B, and certainly not “in Jerusalem.”

Columbia University has chapters of anti-Israel hate groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace as student-run groups on campus. Their voices seem to have penetrated not only the student-run paper and magazine but the University itself which includes a faculty with anti-Israel authors and promoters of boycotts of Israel, and enabled the invitation of proud anti-Semites like the Prime Minister of Malaysia onto its campus. Beyond the student agitators, maybe the university’s anti-Israel platform was purchased by foreign donors like Saudi Arabia who pumped more than $193 million into Columbia between 2011 and 2017.

In October 2019, a report entitled “A Hotbed for Hate” produced by the Alumni for Campus Fairness listed over 100 anti-Jewish incidents at Columbia and Barnard since the 2016/7 academic year. In addition to the on-campus activities like a swastika painted on a Jewish professor’s office, the report listed numerous faculty members who deny the history of Jews as well as peddle forms of Holocaust denial.

At the very moment when antisemitism is on the rise, the murder of Jews is becoming commonplace and the demonization of Israel is accepted, it is a travesty that New York City’s only Ivy League school gives credibility, honor and an open mic to such vile sentiments.

Related First.One.through articles:

Arabs in Jerusalem

The Jews of Jerusalem In Situ

Ending Apartheid in Jerusalem

The War Against Israel and Jewish Civilians

Students for Justice in Palestine’s Dick Pics

A Response to Rashid Khalidi’s Distortions on the Balfour Declaration

The New York Times All Out Assault on Jewish Jerusalem

The Remarkable Tel Jerusalem

Both Israel and Jerusalem are Beyond Recognition for Muslim Nations

750 Years of Continuous Jewish Jerusalem

Today’s Inverted Chanukah: The Holiday of Rights in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria