In the drastically over-simplified world of public media, it’s easy for narratives to take off that bear little relationship to the truth. And it’s very hard for even those of us who are attentive to politics to delve beneath the headlines or whole stories in even our “leading” newspapers to find the truth.
I’m sorry I didn’t pay enough attention to the story about the presidents of Harvard and Penn testimony.
I’ve now looked more deeply into what former Harvard President Gay said in her written and oral testimony. And there is absolutely nothing objectionable let alone anti-Semitic about it. It was a good statement.
In answering Rep. Stefanik’s leading hypothetical question she tried to do what a good teacher and intellectual should do, and point out that words and actions have meaning in context and that any set of words have to be evaluated in their context.
That’s the right answer intellectually and morally.
Suppose someone is talking about Nazi ideology in a class. A teacher asks a student, what was Hitler’s goal. And the student answers, explicating Hitler’s views, “Eliminating Jews is critical to the racial purity of Germany.” The student’s worlds literally are calling for genocide of Jews. But he is answering a question about Hitler’s views, not expressing his own.
Or suppose one is having a conversation about nationalism. Could one student make an argument that it is important for a nation state to to ensure that one nation remains by far the dominant one in a state and thus that people from other nations should be have limited rights or be asked to leave or be expelled (which under the broad definition of the term could be labeled genocide.)
Before you say that’s a horrible thing to recommend, remember that this is exactly what both Israelis and Palestinian defenders of a two-state solution want, two states in which people of one nation are the dominant majority.
Context matters. Saying this is the wrong answer in a highly charged political setting in which one side is trying to entrap the other, not have a serious conversation.
Gay’s mistake was to not understand that Congressional hearings are, sadly, not places for serious intellectual conversations. They are circuses in which, to be successful, you have to play to the lowest common denominator (which certainly includes reporters) and ensure that the political point you want to make is absolutely clear to everyone.
That was a failure on her part. But it’s not the failure that’s been attributed to her.
And the right wing echo chamber has run with it.
Sadly, in accusing her of failing to stand up against anti-Semitism, the right is appealing to the right wing Maga men who fear and distrust careful and subtle thought, liberal and cosmopolitan ideas, critical thinking that calls into question the shibboleths that too often undlie our worst practices and thought itself.
And you know who is most often associate with that kind of thought? It is us cosmopolitan Jewish intellectuals
who, precisely because we are critical thinkers lean to the left.
who, precisely because we are critical thinkers lean to the left.
Of course, the other goal of this attack on Gay is to divide Black people and Jewish people by setting the two most liberal groups in the United States against one another. This has long been the goal of the right.
The real anti-semites are in this case Stefanik and her cronies in the anti-semitic party of Trump.