Carnegie Mellon Student’s Lawsuit Alleges Prof Made Shocking Antisemitic Comments About Class Project
“what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group”
Even in light of everything we have witnessed on college campuses over the last year, this is still simply stunning.
From the Volokh Conspiracy blog at Reason:
Allegation: Carnegie Mellon Prof to Jewish Student: Time on Jewish-Related Project “Would Have Been Better Spent” Exploring “What Jews Do To Make Themselves Such a Hated Group”
Some excerpts from Canaan v. Carnegie Mellon Univ., decided Tuesday by Judge Scott Hardy (W.D. Pa.); the opinion is 15,000 words, so this can only give a flavor of the matter. First, the allegations from plaintiff’s Complaint (which, at this stage of the case, the court assumes to be factually accurate in determining whether the plaintiff has a legal basis for her claim):
Ms. Canaan was taking one of her required studio classes where students receive hands-on, practical instruction in architectural design, making models and applying lessons learned in their other classes. These studio classes typically involve small groups, open discussions, and one-on-one meetings with professors. Students receive critically important feedback individually as well as in small group and class-wide settings. On May 5, 2022, Ms. Canaan had the final review for her semester-long studio class project, which was a model she designed depicting the conversion of a public space in a New York City neighborhood into a private space through an eruv (i.e., an integral feature of neighborhoods with large devout Jewish populations). {Plaintiff’s Complaint describes an eruv as a “small wire boundary that symbolically extends the private domain of devoutly religious Jewish households into public areas, permitting activities within it that are normally forbidden in public on the Sabbath.”}
In response to questions, Ms. Canaan was explaining the concept of an eruv to Mary-Lou Arscott, Professor and Associate Head for Design Fundamentals at the School of Architecture …, when Professor Arscott cut Ms. Canaan off and told her that “the wall in the model looked like the wall Israelis use to barricade Palestinians out of Israel,” and that the time Ms. Canaan had used to prepare her project “would have been better spent if [Ms. Canaan] had instead explored ‘what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.'” …
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Comments
The introduction to this discussion is a bit misleading. The conversion of public space into private space by means of an eruv is purely symbolic. On both a practical and legal level, the public’s rights to the area enclosed by the eruv remain the same as they were before the presence of the eruv.
The eruv has a profound impact on observant Jews living within its borders. It has zero impact on anyone else, except perhaps on those who resent the presence of sabbath-observant Jews or fear that their presence in the neighborhood may increase.
If the separation barrier resembled an eruv, which is typically just a piece of fishing line way up in the air where you can barely see it, and some sticks discretely attached to existing poles or fences, then it wouldn’t do any good. Such a boundary may count as a “wall” under Jewish law, but terrorists are unfortunately ignorant of the law and pass through it as if it were not there!
(Walls are of course not continuous. They contain doorways, where there is no physical wall but there is the notion of a wall. A typical eruv boundary is a wall that consists of a series of doorways, one next to the other. The string is the lintel over the doorway.)
Agreed, but what gives you the idea that the eruv was intended to keep terrorists out, or to have any impact at all on terrorism?