Accusations of Anti-Semitism Target Progressive Faculty at CUNY

Kingsborough Community College Kingsborough Community College

Accusations of Anti-Semitism Target Progressive Faculty at CUNY

By : Rachel Ida Buff

Politically progressive faculty at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, have begun organizing more actively at their workplace. Most recently, a number of them have come together to run a slate in the upcoming campus union chapter elections, setting forth a vision of building a vibrant chapter grounded in rank-and-file activism.

As these faculty have organized, they have faced increasingly aggressive push-back from conservatives on campus. Kingsborough administrator Michael Goldstein, in particular, has accused progressive faculty at the college of orchestrating a “systematic and pernicious campaign” of anti-Semitic hate against him. “The reason for their attack?” he writes. “I’m Jewish, politically conservative and I believe in Zionism, the civil rights movement of the Jewish people.” These accusations have been picked up and amplified by the Jerusalem Post and Tablet magazine.

These accusations are irresponsible and unsubstantiated. In making them, Goldstein is adopting a dangerous, increasingly common tactic of the right: cynically deploying anti-Semitism—a very real problem—as a weapon to intimidate political opponents.

Progressive faculty have been subject to a number of different forms of harassment. More than a dozen, for example, have received letters from the Lawfare Project threatening a lawsuit. Some of the progressive faculty accused by Goldstein in the press of inciting anti-Semitic hatred have also received threatening emails and letters.

Kingsborough English Professor Anthony Alessandrini, who is also on the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center’s MA Program in Middle Eastern Studies, is one of those Goldstein publicly accuses in a recent article of being a “puppet-master” of his fellow progressive faculty, and of inciting anti-Semitic hatred at the college. The article specifically cites Alessandrini’s scholarly and political involvement with Palestine solidarity work, and make the case that an article he wrote about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is evidence of his anti-Jewish views. That Goldstein and the journalistic outlets reporting his story are conflating critique of Israel with anti-Semitism threatens to squash discussion of an issue that faculty KCC have the right to study, write about, and discuss freely, as they do regarding all important political and intellectual matters.

It is telling that Goldstein has called on the support of the Lawfare Project, whose mission involves using lawsuits alleging anti-Semitism as a means to harass faculty and educational institutions, perhaps most notably San Francisco State University, in a case recently dismissed by a federal judge. (A separate, related case in state court is still pending.)

The Lawfare Project has already been involved for several years in legal action regarding accusations of anti-Semitism at Kingsborough. Like Goldstein, Kingsborough Business Professor Jeffrey Lax, has also turned to the Lawfare Project to bring a case alleging employment discrimination against the college. (The case argues, among other things, that the fact that Kingsborough’s faculty has a lower percentage of Jews than the surrounding Brooklyn neighborhood of Manhattan Beach is evidence of employment discrimination against Jews.) The director of the Lawfare Project, Brooke Goldstein, takes extreme stands on a number of issues, speaking on outlets such as Fox News. She has denied the existence of Palestinans and critiqued the institution of birthright citizenship, for example.

Kingsborough’s Progressive Faculty Caucus (many of whom themselves are Jews) has not been involved in any harassment of colleagues. The Caucus came together in the wake of the election of President Trump 2016, as a loose collective. Faculty associated with the Caucus shared a stated commitment, as they informed their colleagues in an open email, to:

  • strengthening existing institutional structures of shared governance; making sure the interests of part-time faculty are more equitably recognized;
  • fostering a stronger sense of intellectual community through a shared commitment to the broad and progressive cause of public education; and
  • addressing questions of structural oppression–including, but not limited to, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiments, and oppression along the lines of gender identity–as they affect all of us who teach, study, and work at KCC.

Upon reading reports that a photograph of Goldstein’s father had apparently been vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti last spring, thirty-seven faculty members, many affiliated with the Caucus, signed to a letter condemning such acts. Goldstein, however, has insisted, including in this video he posted last year, that the “highly organized” progressive faculty, who he describes as socialist and communist “fringe of the far left,” have created a climate of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate on campus in general and incited that act of vandalism in particular.

Other CUNY faculty have come out in support of their Kingsborough colleagues targeted by these accusations. “We stand against attempts to silence members of our faculty who are exercising their right to organize, research, and write about the compelling issues of our times,” they wrote in an open letter.

Kingsborough Community College and CUNY have been conducting investigations into the accusations, but have yet to issue a statement beyond this recent letter from Kingsborough President Claudia Schrader to the New York Daily News, noting that “recent reports” of anti-Semitism on at the college had “inflamed the acrimony” on campus.

These false accusations of anti-Semitism at CUNY-Kingsborough mask a concerted assault on progressive faculty organizing.

[This article was published by the Academe Blog on 19 March 2019 in response to the recent accusations levied against CUNY faculty.]

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412