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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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.