Anti-Israel incidents on campus

This year a number of anti-Israel incidents have occurred on US campuses, ranging from vandalism to vitriolic speakers to anti-Semitic cartoons. Are the campuses ablaze or are these relatively insignificant brush fires? The answer depends on whom you ask.

Some pro-Israel advocates will not be satisfied unless no critics exist on campus and believe that virtually every anti-Israel speaker or incident merits a response. The establishment groups focus more on proactive than reactive programming. I continue to believe, and reports from campuses bear this out, that the overwhelming majority of campuses today have more serious problems with apathy than anti-Israel activity.

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Questioning - A cultural gap

Prof. Elisheva Rosman is the 2008-09 Schusterman Visiting Israeli Scholar at the University of Texas in Austin, and a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Bar Ilan University.

When people in Israel hear I am at the University of Texas at Austin for the year they ask the obvious questions: Are there Jews in Texas?! (Yes, quite a few actually); Students there are actually interested in Israel?! (Strange, but true. In fact my informal survey indicates that most of my students are not Jewish and knew next to nothing about Israel before stepping into my classroom); How big is the university? (about 40,000 students, approximately 4,000 of them Jewish). But the hardest question to answer is 'What is it like there?'

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Sherlock Holmes and the high holidays

On a recent Shabbat in Washington DC, I went to doven at Congregation Kesher Israel, which seems to be the nearest shul to the White House (it was not exactly the same excitement as dovening at the nearest spot to the Holy of Holies, but still I make this point).

On that Shabbat the shul hosted Mr. Richard Joel, the president of Yeshiva University. This was not the first time I heard Richard Joel speaking and as usual I enjoyed his lecture, even more so the initial story. It went like this:

Sherlock Holmes and Watson go on a camping vacation. At night Holmes wakes Watson up and asks him: 'Do you see the sky with all the stars above, Watson? What does it mean to you?' 'Well', answers Watson, 'astronomically I realize how immense our universe is, theologically I cannot but acknowledge G-d's unfathomable greatness, existentially I realize how small we are, and from an epistemological point of view I see how limited our knowledge remains. But what does it mean to you, Mr. Holmes'? Holmes lights his pipe, ponders for a while and then answers: 'It means, that someone just stole our tent'.

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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.