Archive
Last week, we published an article about acclaimed (by the sort of people who acclaim such things) Holocaust denier Arthur R. Butz, a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University. Yesterday, I put together a blog post featuring some of the emails I received in response to that article, all of them from members of […]
Here’s Noam Chomsky on the enormously changed landscape on US campuses over the past twenty years surrounding the US/Israel-Palestine conflict. Among the issues discussed is the growing influence of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) groups and the petty isolation of pro-Israel groups on campuses. The following is a raw excerpt from dialogues with prominent […]
I was surprised by the volume of emails I received in response to last week’s article by Gabi P. Remz about Arthur R. Butz. Butz is a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University in Chicago. Tenured decades ago, he’s now more well known for his work as a Holocaust denier than his academic areas of expertise, which, […]
With one day left of school now, I feel I must reflect. What they say about this school is true, you know — people really do sleep in the library, and it is hard to make friends. Really, two of my only friends here include the rabbi and the Catholic priest. It’s kind of interesting. They […]
One of the foremost experts on the Second Temple Period, Shaye J. D. Cohen, the Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard University, writes, “In the eyes of the ancients, the essence of religion was neither faith nor dogma, but action” (51). Though counterintuitive, this statement seems absolutely correct. If one searches the […]
Are there resource guides for modern Jews, or on the subject of modern Judaism for others? My bookshelf is loaded with theology. Make that bookshelves—three of them, crammed with as much Waskow, Armstrong, Schachter-Shalomi, Kaplan and Michaelson as I can fit into one three-room apartment. When non-Jewish friends ask me for a book about Judaism, I […]
November was Out in Israel Month. As the Out in Israel Month campaign’s website puts it, the initiative was designed to “celebrate the LGBT community and culture in Israel.” It should be no surprise that a well-funded public relations campaign such as this — targeted at several heavily Jewish college campuses, and centering on both gay rights and on Israel’s image — attracted a bit of controversy. Out in Israel Month was sponsored by, among others, two national right-wing pro-Israel campus advocacy groups, The David Project and StandWithUs.
Controversy around Out in Israel Month centered around a little portmanteau: “pinkwashing,” the practice of employing Israel’s good track record on LGBT rights to whitewash its less liberal-friendly policies in the West Bank and Gaza.
This debate is becoming yet another piece of the larger debate about on campus. Great. Because what we really needed was the opening of another front in the campus war over Israel/Palestine.
If Poland to Jews around the world represents one big Jewish cemetery, it goes without saying that for them, Jewish life in Poland is dead. Then, how can there still be Jews in Poland? After the Holocaust, after the 1946 Kielce Pogrom, and after the 1968 Jewish purges? It follows, that there must not be any Jews […]
Students don’t have too many nice things to say about Arthur R. Butz. He is a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, and according to his students, he is boring, his handwriting is too small to make out on the board and he leaves all the real teaching to the teaching assistants. While their words about Butz are harsh, students tend to keep their silence when it comes to a darker part of his work, one that extends far outside the realm of electrical engineering. Butz is a prominent Holocaust denier, but many students walk into his classes without knowing it.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the recent trend among a small sect of ultra-Orthodox women to follow the example of modesty set by Muslim women by wearing burqas that completely disguise the shapes of their bodies. Most Orthodox communities are confounded by this latest stringency, thankfully. Us Modern Orthodox women needn’t fear that this will spread […]