Confusion at Columbia

On Friday, the Columbia Spectator ran an article by its "news staff" under the headline: "Yiddish Prof Named Acting Director of Israel Institute After False Media Speculation." The Yiddish professor is Jeremy Dauber, and the institute is the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Mazel tov to Professor Dauber.

The article then adds the following:

Last week, the New York Sun reported that sociology professor Yinon Cohen was appointed permanent director of the institute. The article quoted several professors upset by Columbia's decision to appoint Cohen, who signed a letter condemning Israel's policies concerning 2002 military operations in Gaza. The Sun also wrote that it found the information about Cohen on a blog named Sandbox, written by academic Martin Kramer who obtained his master's degree in history from Columbia in 1976.

[Columbia Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nicholas] Dirks said the Sun's article was completely false. "I don't know what the basis for the attack on Professor Cohen is," he said.

Cohen came to Columbia in fall 2007 as a visiting professor from Tel Aviv University. While Cohen was never appointed director of any institute at Columbia, he recently received the endowed position of Yosef Haim Yerushalmi professor of Israel and Jewish studies - a name similar to that of the institute, which may have been the source of confusion.

The report leaves the vague impression that I contributed to that confusion.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (0)

Columbia's Israelis

On Friday, Amnon Rubinstein, the distinguished Israeli jurist and professor, published a column in the Israeli daily Maariv (in Hebrew) and an op-ed today in the Jerusalem Post, summarizing his stint as a visiting professor at Columbia University. A grim story it is: Ahmadinejad's visit to campus stirred all the muck back up again. 

Rubinstein discovered that the only truly active friends of Israel on campus were orthodox Jewish students. For him, a self-avowed secular humanist, it came as crushing disappointment that like-minded Israelis weren't standing up. At the demonstration against Ahmadinejad, he could "count the Israelis on a hand that's missing fingers." At the faculty level, it was worse. He tells of being present in a meeting attended by two Israeli professors. One proposed the screening of the film Jenin, Jenin, a cinematic slander of Israel, and the other proposed inviting Israel-demonizing Norman Finkelstein to campus. Rubinstein doesn't name the two, but the sad thing about Columbia is that their identities aren't obvious. More than two Israeli professors there could have made these sorts of proposals.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (10)