Office Politics
Students work to shut down PLO’s New York office
The group of 30-odd students stood across the street from the Palestine Liberation Organization’s mission to the United Nations, chanting “hey ho the PLO has got to go.” The February 24, protest was one of many demonstrations organized by “PLO out of NYC,” a campaign run by students from several area colleges working to shut down the PLO’s New York City offices.
PLO out of NYC is taking its message to the streets: setting up regular rallies in front of the PLO mission, phone campaigns, and plastering the streets with PLO out of NYC posters. “We felt that in the post 9/11 world the American public mind was ripe for the message that those who sponsor terrorists are the same as terrorists themselves,” said New York University student and protest organizer Nathan Gessner. “There is no way we could allow Al Qaeda or the Taliban to have an office in New York City.”
Gessner said that the group has made a great deal of headway in the past few months, citing a proposal by a New York City Council member that aims to shut down the PLO’s New York City offices.
The campaign to kick the PLO out of New York, however, hasn’t met with universal approval in Zionist circles. Jamie Levin, national director of Habonim Dror North America, a Labor Zionist youth movement, initiated an e-mail campaign to ensure that the city council knows there are Jews who disagree with the effort to shut down the PLO office. “The only thing we guarantee through an end of dialogue is an end of dialogue,” said Levin. “Not that anyone is particularly so fond of the PLO, but even the American and Israeli governments have left the channel open for dialogue.”
For his part, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has declared his opposition to the proposal: “As the host city for the UN, we have to–even when it is painful and disgraceful and disgusting, any term you want to use–we have to be willing to let anybody that the UN wants to credit, or visit, come here.”
Debating the Issues That Matter
Hamentashen proponents face off against latke lovers
It’s an annual controversy at the University of Minnesota. Which is superior, the latke or the hamentashen?
For the past four years, professors at the University of Minnesota have engaged in this great debate. According to The Minnesota Daily, the event traces its roots to a 1946 discussion at the University of Chicago, and was brought to Minnesota by University President Mark Yudof, the moderator of this February’s debate. Yudof called the rivalry between the two foods “one of the great dichotomies that has dominated our world for centuries.”
Jewish professors at the university are invited to bring their respective disciplines to bear on this weighty subject. Three years ago, The Minnesota Daily reported, a plant biologist debating on behalf of hamentashen contrasted the chemical complexity of its key ingredients–fruit and wheat–favorably with the simplicity of the latke’s key ingredient, the potato.
This year, pro-hamentashen professors assailed the latke, accusing it of causing everything from sexual dysfunction to bowel irregularities. “A friend told me, ‘Latke binds you while hamentashen sets you free,'” said pro-hamenstashen professor of health services and public policy Lester Block.
But pro-latke professor Judith Katz cited the resilience of the potato pancakes in the face of “latke-phobia” as a measure of their worth: “If we’re still eating them even though people hate them, that says something.”
This is News?
“Students Not Concerned By Grade Inflation”
–a February 13, headline in The Harvard Crimson
