Professor Jacobson is quoted in this story and talks about what’s happening at Cornell.
Laurel Duggan writes at Unherd:
The DEI industry has an antisemitism problemThe diversity, equity and inclusion industry has been dented by several recent antisemitism disputes. George Washington University postponed a diversity summit last week over concerns about the “current climate”, after a student group projected messages onto a campus building reading “glory to our martyrs”, “free Palestine from the river to the sea” and “GWU is complicit in genocide in Gaza”. The university wrote that the postponement was related to campus safety as well as the “pain” felt by students.Institutions across the country — and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) departments in particular — appear to be reckoning with the same problem. The advocacy group StopAntisemitism found in its 2022 report that the majority of universities it evaluated did not include Jews in their DEI programs.Speaking to UnHerd, Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson claimed that at his university “opponents of Israel seek to racialise what is a religious and national conflict to put together coalitions of students ‘of colour’ versus ‘white’ Israel and Jews”. He suggested that this process has accelerated since the university announced an anti-racism initiative in early June 2020, following the killing of George Floyd.Cornell came under scrutiny after history professor Russell Rickford said he was “exhilarated” by the 7 October Hamas attacks, and the FBI is currently investigating recent antisemitic threats made against its Jewish student centre.“I’ve not seen any response from feminist and women’s rights groups, which overlap significantly with the pro-Palestinian groups, to the use of rape and sexual abuse by Hamas, including rape of dead Israeli women,” Jacobson said. “It may be old fashioned Jew-hatred, but I think more likely it is because campus ‘social justice’ movements, including at Cornell, have been conditioned by the DEI obsession with race to view Israeli Jews as so uniquely evil that resistance ‘by any means necessary’ is promoted, embraced, and excused.”
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