Group decries 'new anti-Semitism' on UCSC campus
Santa Cruz Sentinel 4/27/07
In a letter to acting Chancellor George Blumenthal, Los Angeles-based StandWithUs takes issue with a March 15 conference titled "Alternative Histories Within and Beyond Zionism," among other special lectures, contending it promotes subtle forms of anti-Semitic bigotry "camouflaged" as criticism of Israel.
Such terms as "Judeo-Nazis" and other links made between Israelis and Nazi Germany are among the examples of inflammatory language cited by critics.
"This one-sided, politicized conference violates elementary scholarly and educational standards," said Roz Rothstein, director of StandWithUs, claiming the March conference, and at least a dozen other talks and seminars since 2001, run in violation of state law, which bars public universities from promoting partisan politics.
UC attorney Carole Rossi wrote in an e-mail this week that campus events may be one-sided, but that does not violate any rules. While the university must remain neutral on matters of electoral politics, nothing requires the university to interfere with any debate or discussion over current political issues, Rossi said.
"While the university is committed to providing a diversity of views, there is nothing in policy that suggests that each individual event must represent all points of view," Rossi said.
The letter to UCSC is just one example of the often bitter and emotional debate over how Israel-Palestine relations are discussed on campuses. As concerns about bias grow, university officials around the country are struggling to protect free speech on the Arab-Israeli conflict while promoting academic responsibility.
The debate is especially lively at UCSC, where liberal activism is strong.
But faculty leaders say the discussion is healthy and that Jewish students do not feel threatened.
"If students were mistreated in any way because they were Jewish, that would be intolerable ... and I'm confident that attention has been paid to any charges of anti-Semitism," said literature professor Chris Connery, who chairs the faculty committee on academic freedom.
StandWithUs is calling on the UCSC academic departments that sponsored last month's conference to "refund the public money misused for the event" They also want UCSC to sponsor events that present alternative views and develop mandatory sensitivity training for faculty and students about anti-Semitism.
The group joins other Jewish organizations around the country in saying Israel's critics are singling out the world's only Jewish state for behavior tolerated by other countries. Other themes fall under what many people have dubbed the "new anti-Semitism" Those include demonizing Israel with comparisons to Nazi Germany and delegitimizing the country by saying it doesn't have a right to exist.
UCSC Hebrew lecturer Tammi Rossman-Benjamin cited several examples from the March conference, including use of the phrase "Judeo-Nazis" and statements that Israel wants to protect its "racial purity" made by speaker David Theo Goldberg, director of the UC Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine. And, she said, speaker Terri Ginsberg, a professor at Purchase College in New York, alluded to Israeli policies toward Palestinians as being a form of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Rossman-Benjamin and her husband Ilan Benjamin, an Israeli-born chemistry professor, have long argued that conferences addressing Zionism, without a balanced panel of speakers, are essentially political rallies, not the scholarly forums they're promoted to be.
Besides violating the state constitution, which states that the public universities should remain free of political bias, "the hostile climate created by numerous academic units on our campus is in conflict with federal civil rights guidelines and could have a deleterious effect on the federal funding which UCSC receives," Tammi Rossman-Benjamin wrote in a seven-page letter to Blumenthal last month on behalf of her group, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
The group also complained to UC regents at their September meeting and met with John Oakley, chair of the UC-wide Academic Senate.
In addition to the university's legal opinion, several professors challenge the notion that the string of conferences that critique traditional Zionism can be classified as political events.
Ronnie Lipschutz, a professor in UCSC's politics department, which co-sponsored the March event, said the critic's claims are unwarranted "because they have to learn to distinguish between outright rabble-rousing and educational and scholarly presentations"
UC policies restrict political advocacy in the classroom, but not the funding of after-hours lectures, he said.
"Nobody was keeping students captive," Lipschutz said, adding that the Benjamins have hosted a variety of their own pro-Israel speakers he described as being extremely one-sided. "They argue that they don't use public funds, but they're still using public space"
In January, the Benjamins organized a campus lecture by pro-Israeli journalist and author Melanie Phillips, which was sponsored by StandWithUs and the UCSC Jewish Studies program, among other groups. That event drew a handful of student protesters, claiming that Phillips' views were prejudiced against Muslims.