A Flesh Perspective
New student group opposes circumcision
For University of Iowa freshman Neil Peterson, circumcision is a matter of growing concern. Only two years ago, he learned that an overly tight circumcision was the source of the uncomfortable erections he had endured since early childhood. This fall, Peterson made his private pain political and founded the third campus chapter of Students for Genital Integrity, a national support group founded in September at San Francisco State University. “It has healed me to talk about it,” Peterson told The Daily Iowan.
SGI claims that male circumcision—cutting away the foreskin—has no health benefits, impairs normal sexual function, and can lead to “loss of penis,” among other complications. The group works to end forced genital cutting through awareness programs that target students, parents, teachers, and healthcare providers.
According to the Circumcision Information and Resource Pages, an Internet reference page, approximately 60 percent of American males are circumcised. In the Jewish faith, boys are circumcised on their eighth day of life as a symbol of God’s covenant with the Jewish people. SGI decries “the forced cutting of a child’s genitals to conform to a particular society’s concept of aesthetics and normality” as a violation of human rights. At press time, New Voices was unable to ascertain how many members the group has.
St. Cloud State’s Silver Lining
Victim of bigotry wins settlement
“My father is an anti-Semite, and the apple doesn’t fall far away from the tree.” According to the account Israeli-born history professor Arie Zmora gave the Minnesota Daily, this was how a new colleague welcomed him when he began teaching at St. Cloud State University in fall 1998. Finding what he believed to be a larger atmosphere of anti-Semitism, Zmora decided to teach a course on Jewish history. After lecturing to a class about his mother’s Holocaust experience, his department chair told him he would no longer be eligible for tenure.
Zmora took his fight from classroom to courtroom, filing a class-action lawsuit against the state of Minnesota and its state universities system. “I think it’s the first class-action lawsuit against a public university where the basis was anti-Semitism,” Zmora’s lawyer, Judy Schermer, told the Daily. On December 3rd, 2002 the university acceded to a settlement, agreeing to create a new Jewish Studies and Resources Center and make changes in promotion and employment discrimination procedures. Zmora will be paid $165,000 as part of the settlement.
“It’s a moral victoy,” Zmora told the Daily. “What we have said for many months and years has become validated. And for the first time, Jews who were silenced, abused and chased out of the University have a voice in this settlement.”
Getting Even More Jews To Do Jewish With Other Jews
Hillel director to be new Yeshiva U president\t
This spring Richard Joel, international director of Hillel, will become the first non-rabbi to serve as president of Yeshiva University, modern Orthodoxy’s flagship institution. Over the past 14 years, Joel helped make Jewish campus life a focus of the American Jewish community. Princeton University Hillel director Rabbi James Diamond told the Forward: “[Joel] raised the consciousness of North American Jewry to the positive possibilities and potential of the campus. And he has enabled us to see the campus as a Promised Land and not as a disaster area of the Jewish people.”
During his tenure, Joel more than tripled Hillel’s budget, expanded its reach to South America and the former Soviet Union, increased social justice programs at campus Hillels, and partnered with Birthright Israel to bring thousands of Jewish students to Israel.
Joel hopes to burnish Yeshiva’s reputation for both secular and religious studies. “It was the sincerity and the strength of the leadership that challenged me to think of the next vision of Yeshiva University,” Joel told the New York Times. “The combination of the religious and secular schools put the university in a unique position to help continue to build a Jewish renaissance.”
An Explosive Charge
Arab students with alleged prior knowledge of bombing suspended from Israeli college.
On August 4th, Yassera Bakri and Samiah Asadi were traveling by bus to Safed College in Israel’s Galilee. En route, the two Arab Israeli girls got off the bus, hailed a cab, and continued on their way. Moments later the bus exploded, killing two students and seven other Israelis.
Only two days later did Bakri inform police that the bomber had warned her to get off the bus. In October, Safed College suspended both girls on suspicion that they had been aware of the bomber’s intentions and had done nothing to prevent the attack. Hevron Travelsi, Safed’s director-general, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that suspension is in the best interest of the girls as well as the larger community. “The minute the parents of the two murdered students heard that these two girls were going to be studying here, they began protesting, and we had to call in dozens of police cars.” He told the Chronicle that thousands of community members turned up at the school to protest the girls’ attendance. Safed, a regional campus of Bar-Ilan University, is located in a city with a large ultra-Orthodox and right-wing population. The surrounding Galeel region of Northern Israel has a large Israeli Arab population, and roughly half of Safed’s 1,000 students are Israeli Arabs.
Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, has taken up the girls’ case, claiming they were not given a fair trial and that that the school’s charge of “damage to public morals” violates Bar-Ilan’s bylaws. “We say that an academic institution has to protect the rights of its students,” the girls’ lawyer, Gadeer Nicol, told the Chronicle. “And if that means they have to call in police to protect [the two women], then that’s what they must do.”
