Jewish Students Allege Anti-Semitism on University of Michigan Law School Listserv
“Enjoy the apartheid with your falafel!”
Anti-Semitism has become all too common in higher education. It’s really sad.
David Bernstein writes at the Volokh Conspiracy at Reason:
“Antisemitic Invective” at the University of Michigan Law School
[Author’s note: I published a significantly longer version of this post at the Times of Israel.]
I recently posted an article about the increasingly hostile environment Jewish students face at elite law schools. Within hours, I heard from Michigan Law students upset and concerned about what one called “antisemitic invective” on a student email listserv called LawOpen, a listserv used almost entirely for student-group events and to resell tickets.
Students representing the Jewish Law Students Association sent out two separate emails, each advertising an event. The first announced an anti-bias event sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the prominent (and very liberal) Jewish civil rights organization. The second announced that students could apply for a trip to Israel.
The ADL email was met with unhinged invective. One student wrote, among other things, that ADL is a “hateful group” that, among other things, supports “racist, militarized policing.” Moreover, the student claimed that ADL’s anti-bias work “centers the experience of white Jewish people” and therefore “is not true anti-bias work.”
A second student accused ADL of being a “pro-racism organization” and supporting this accusation with a laundry list of charges ranging from the grossly exaggerated to the inventively imaginative. As a rather clear example of the latter, the student claimed that ADL tried to squash medical and social recognition of AIDS. Right-wing hate groups and the Nation of Islam have made wild charges against the ADL in the past, but even after consulting Dr. Google and inquiring with antisemitism experts, I couldn’t find a source for that one.
More disheartening to me than the nutty conspiratorial emails about the ADL is the reaction of the rest of the students, which was that no one objected to this absurd calumny. One student raised the question of why this particular event attracted so much vitriol: “We don’t have a whole public discourse on every event that FedSoc [the conservative Federalist Society] puts on, in fact any discourse at all, and they’re FedSoc.”
The second mail, about the trip to Israel, was met with the response, “Enjoy the apartheid with your falafel!”
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Comments
“More disheartening to me than the nutty conspiratorial emails about the ADL is the reaction of the rest of the students, which was that no one objected to this absurd calumny”
Yes, it would have been nice if someone had posted, “Hey, the ADL is basically on our nutty side.”
What I would like to see is the nutty postings repeatedly re-posted along side of the identities of the posters.
I think it was Tucker Carlson who made this point (and whoever made it, I’m inelegantly paraphrasing it):
“The first announced an anti-bias event sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the prominent (and very liberal) Jewish civil rights organization. … One student wrote, among other things, that ADL is a “hateful group” that, among other things, supports “racist, militarized policing.”
I thought I had a year’s supply of popcorn in the stockroom, but I was wrong.
The Heritage Foundation ran a study that showed that far too many DEI divisons were ripe with anti Semitism
A topic of extreme complexity with many valid points and counterpoints slathered across the Web.
A commonality I have noticed is that the current major power structures within the USA at all levels . . . from neighborhood to town to city then state then regional all the way up to the national level do not allow even legitimate criticism of anything either Jewish or Israel related that criticizes those two entities in even a mind manner. Doing so and the attacks begin.
Discussing or arguing or engaging in total warfare about this topic is futile. The depth of indoctrination is simply too great to overcome except for a few intrepid souls whose quest for knowledge allowed the slipping of those surly bonds that enwrap the mind and prevent the accumulation of new perceived realities.
Let it be known that one CAN disagree with a Jew, Jews or Israel and not be a supporter of those or that which seeks to bring death or destruction to those entities.