John McWhorter: ‘I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.’
“Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?”
Professor McWhorter is right about this, of course.
He writes at the New York Times:
I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.
Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4’33”,” which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that period of time.
I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon, because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway, but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building. Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others to my knowledge are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.
I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?
Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew-hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.
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Comments
“I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon”
Why would you even have to arrange a performance? The piece is ideal for home study, especially after lights out in the dorm. The students can get together the next day and trade opinions about which movement they liked best. My college dorm room was right next to the restroom, so I would have had a variety to choose from.
We’ve found an answer to unemployment in America. Have people show up and ask everyone to be quiet for 4+ minutes and call it “music”…..here’s your 6 figure salary
(and I say this as an academic myself)
The Times printed his piece because he gives cover for antisemitism. His argument is internally illogical.
If one is trying to make sense of how antizionist is antisemitic, and not simply ‘legitimate criticism of a country’, the root of antizionism is a deadly Russian conspiracy theory about Jews called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Those are the same thing.
That “line” is so fine that it doesn’t exist.
Wow. Music must be starved for teaching material if they use that kind of dreck.
Zionism and Jewish survival are deeply interwingled. There’s no unwinding that one. I’m reminded of an interview of a Muslim Brotherhood leader years ago. Paraphrasing the translation:
Q — Well, how do Jews survive without a homeland?
A — If European Powers want to make the Jews a homeland, let them do that in Europe.
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