Pro-Israel students return to school upbeat

For the first time in some time, Jewish students will go to college campuses without any trepidation about anticipated anti-Israel activities. With most of the political attention directed toward the election, absent any major incidents in the Middle East, Israel does not figure to be an issue this year.

This is not to say that Israel will be spared any scrutiny. The usual suspects will make the rounds giving anti-Israel lectures and the same propagandists masquerading as tenured professors will be misinforming their classes. The pro-Israel students, however, increasingly dominate the debate on the quad and most of the theatrics, such as "apartheid" walls and mock checkpoints have disappeared as it became clear they were having no impact. No new attacks on Israel are on the horizon so there is no sense of having to gear up for widespread confrontations.

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Good news from American campuses

Another academic year has come and gone and the big news was that there was little news from the campus. This was a year dominated by positive stories, the enthusiasm for Barack Obama and nationwide Israel at 60 celebrations.

The year began with fears that professors Walt and Mearsheimer would infect students with their venomous inventions about the Israeli lobby, but they barely caused a ripple. Their long-term impact in the classroom as their book is adopted in Middle East courses may yet be corrosive, but their immediate impact was nil.

There were the usual handful of anti-Semitic incidents to report, but nothing unusual in terms of either quality or quantity. The truth is that anti-Semitism is not a problem on American campuses.

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The cruel jokes of US weather

ST. LOUIS - FEB. 8-13 - Here  and in  America in general, there has been some terrible, horrible and even deadly weather for several weeks about which one should not joke [scores killed in tornadoes, fires, floods, ice-storms], but then, again, sometimes you need to joke about the weather because there is little you can do to change it.  

There is a joke in St. Louis which deals with this weather situation and other "weather" [events in our daily lives]:  "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes. It'll change."

Here in St. Louis we have had many days this winter where we have seen dramatic change - shifts of fifty and sixty degrees in less than two hours, placid days becoming tornadoes,  and storms turning into idyllic, halcyon tranquility.

When America is really troubled by bad news - tornadoes killing 60 people, a sugar refinery blowing up in Georgia killing several and wounding more than 100, floods that turn into sheets of ice on highways here and in Indiana, causing tremendous car crashes - people go back to joking about their politicians.

Super Tuesday turns to Ash Wednesday in America

When America's biggest presidential primary day in 2008 - known as Super Tuesday - began last week, I was situated well in Missouri, considered by many to be the "bellwether" state that might predict the overall election. But that presumption was proved wrong already by sunset. Many polls were wrong, again, and the fortunes of  Clinton, Huckabee, McCain, Obama and Romney did not seem important.

February 5, 2008 or  "Super Tuesday" - so called due to more than presidential 20 primary elections - will probably be remembered for a series of highly unusual natural disasters that swept across the middle and southern range of the United States: at least 90  powerful tornadoes that killed more than 50 people in five states. 

The full details of the destruction cannot yet be estimated, and 200 people are still missing. Amazingly, an 11-month old boy was found in the twisted debris and broken lumber of his town, several hundred feet from the body of his dead mother. He was barely scratched.

Winter between the goal posts of dejection and election

Winter officially arrives on December 21, but I write this wintry report amid a dejected and storm-battered America that is living a kind of hopeful time-out between the goal posts of the Super Bowl and Super Tuesday, icons of entertainment and politics.

If Shakespeare had lived in 2008, he would have been correct to call this season "the winter of our discontent" both in America and the Middle East, where leaders seem to flounder between their past missed opportunities - George Bush, Ehud Olmert and (if we can call him a leader) Mahmoud Abbas-- and their planned photo opportunities. [But there is an optimistic note at the end of this blog, if you can get to the end.]

Because this blog has a lot of territory to cover (I've been grading exams and preparing for extra courses), let me try to pick and choose from the datelines below:

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The deceptive beauty of the American landscape

ST. LOUIS, OCT 14--  Autumn weather brings remarkable and deceptive color changes to the American landscape. Few things are as beautiful or as misleading as an American university campus bedecked by the  golden, red, pink and yellow Fall leaves.
 
Washington University in St. Louis is sometimes called "The Harvard of the Mid-West." [Frankly, I don't think that Harvard is such hot stuff, but that's another conversation.] WASH-U with its red-stone castle motif is especially beautiful now after baking through a long summer. Leaving the Mid-Western oven, we now put aside polo shirts  and consider putting on sweaters for a few moments for a leisurely stroll to look at the gorgeous foliage, before stepping into snow boots. It looks like a beautiful scene, and that is very dangerous.

One day it was summer (95 F or 32-35 C) and the next day we had a blast of winter with a 40-degree (Fahrenheit) drop in temperatures. Then the next day we climbed back into summer, and there was a return of tornadoes to the Midwest?even as far north as Michigan, where two people were killed when they were sucked out of their house and thrown several hundred yards away.

Across the river in Illinois, two people were killed as their trailer went flying the length of a football field. Meanwhile, a three-month-old baby was thrown hundreds of yards from its parents, but was miraculously unscathed.
 
And they say Israel is a dangerous place to live.

The deceptive beauty of the American landscape

The Times is still probably the best newspaper in the world, but in many respects, it is a far worse newspaper than it was 30, 40 and 50 years ago. This is seen in the basic writing on the news pages and in the slanted playing of items.

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Restoring the context and comparative perspective to Israel Studies

Instead of segregation and discrimination based on ideology and interest, the study and teaching of Israel, across the various disciplines, needs to be re-integrated into the general academic discourse. The sooner this happens, the better.

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The Butterfly effect

You may find this hard to believe but the average person here cannot resist making a cellphone call right in the middle of making a turn or pulling into traffic. Yes, Virginia, Israelis are better behaved in this area than the inhabitants of St. Louis

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