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Abstract of Dr. Beck's Paper

Scholars for Peace in The Middle East Finds Faculty Israel Advocates Labeled "Right Wing"

In trying to establish a "big tent" grass-roots faculty organization, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East president, Edward S. Beck found that very quickly professors who publicly advocated for Israel were automatically labeled as "right wing." The organization prides itself in not dictating the terms of peace and supporting the legitimate peaceful aspirations of the Palestinians and the right of Israel to live within safe and secure borders at peace with her neighbors. SPME has said the ultimate peace agreement must be negotiated and accepted by both parties. There is no litmus test for membership as there are in other groups where one might have to agree to certain preconditions to join.

 Nevertheless any number of Jewish organizations and others have seen this as a "right-wing" hawkish approach, when many of the SPME founders and board of directors have strong histories in the progressive movements, including Dr. Beck who headed the "Dump Johnson" movement at NYU in the 1960's and was head of NYU students for Gene McCarthy, did work for the American Friends Service Committee, worked with Viet Nam Vets, Holocaust Survivors and Sexually Abused Females and Males. The labeling of Israel advocates as "right-wing" in academia is a significant problem in combating anti-Israelism on campus.

Abstract of Dr. MacDonald-Dennis' Paper

Seeing the complexity: Understanding how Ashkenazi Jewish undergraduates identify in social justice educational contexts.

This presentation discusses the findings of a dissertation study that examined the ways in which Ashkenazi Jewish undergraduates understood and used their Jewish identity in their work in diversity education. Moreover, this study investigated how Ashkenazi Jewish undergraduates involved in social justice education made sense of being both White and “Other.” Because Ashkenazi Jews often find themselves questioning the racial space they occupy and confound established notions of identity, the ways in which Ashkenazi Jewish students identify are often at odds with how non-Jews label them. (See implications analysis below.)

COMPETING NARRATIVES: THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN RACIAL AND ETHNO-RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AMONG ASHKENAZI JEWISH UNDERGRADUATE ANTI-RACIST PEER EDUCATORS

Abstract of Implications for Education
 Christopher MacDonald-Dennis, Ed.D.
Assistant Dean/Director of Intercultural Affairs
Bryn Mawr College
cmacden@brynmawr.edu

Presented at the Facing A Challenge Within Conference, Newark 3.28.06
SPME Editor's Note: This is an abstract of Dean MacDonald-Dennis' doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts. Its findings have enormous implications for faculty, faculty mentors, counselors, student personnel professionals, Hillel Directors and others who work with Jewish students on campus in terms of multicultural and Jewish issues on campus

        This study presents important implications for multicultural education programs. These implications provide opportunities for multicultural educators to design programs that are more sensitive to Jews.  These implications will present a fuller understanding of anti-Semitism to all students.

Overall, there is little discussion about Jewish oppression at all in diversity-related discussions. Beck (1995), Kleeblatt (1996) and Langman (1999) assert that Jews are not represented in multicultural education. Langman (1999) contends that Jews are not included in discussions of multiculturalism by non-Jews for five reasons: 1) A lack of knowledge of Jewish oppression and that Jews are seen as 2) an assimilated non-minority; 3) economically privileged; 4) part of the White majority; and 5) members of a religion, not a culture.

The findings of this study support the general view presented in the literature that Jews conclude that many people do not perceive Jews as currently being oppressed; rather, many non-Jews focus on historical instances of anti-Semitism, such as the Holocaust. If non-Jews do see Jews as oppressed, they minimize anti-Semitism. The students explained that Jewish identity and anti-Semitism was not studied in a respectful or serious manner in this university’s anti-racist education program. The students claimed that the staff of the program did not attempt to understand the challenges that Jews articulated in class. Given the overall knowledge and sensitivity of the faculty and staff on other issues of oppression, this insensitivity to anti-Semitism was particularly painful for many of the students.

With the results that this study found (as did Brettschneider, 1996 and Langman, 1999), studying Jewish oppression and anti-Semitism ought to be more fully incorporated into multicultural education programs. Students should have an opportunity to examine the history of Jewish exile and oppression, especially the „middle role“ Jews have played throughout history (Cantor, 1995). By doing this, students will begin to understand that Jews have served as the „face of the oppressor“ and are not the hyper-privileged group that becomes successful at the expense of other groups. Students can begin to comprehend that anti-Semitism is also a system of oppression.

Students should also study how anti-Semitism operates as a system of oppression. The complete history of anti-Semitism ought to be taught, helping students realize why Wistrich (1991) calls anti-Semitism „the longest hatred.“ In fact, because of the longevity of this form of oppression, several researchers contend that the Jewish community has been affected into the present-day generation. This includes the contention that Jews continue to suffer from trauma and/or post-traumatic stress disorder because of the centuries of oppression the community has endured and that have been handed down as part of the group’s collective memory (Hammer, 1995; Horowitz, 2003).

Likewise, students could have an opportunity to explore the stereotypes and myths that they learned about Jews. One of the by-products of not adequately covering Jewish issues is the fear that students will leave the class with the same stereotypical thinking about Jews that they had when they began the course. This process is especially important for Jewish students who may have internalized anti-Semitic beliefs or who might collude with their own oppression by minimizing the impact of these beliefs on the lives of Jews.

In fact, anti-Semitism cannot be truly understood without comprehending how it fits into an historical system of racial constructions. Anti-Semitism can be considered the prototype of racism (Fredrickson, 2001; Omi & Winant, 1994). Although most Jews of Ashkenazi ancestry are now seen as White, Jews were explicitly regarded as non-Aryan in 19th century Europe, and U.S. neo-Nazi and Christian Identity groups still maintain fundamental division between Aryans/Whites and all others. In the U.S., there is a connection between White racism and anti-Semitism (Azoulay, 1998; Barkun, 1997; Langman, 1996). Hence, anti-Semitism needs to be understood within the context of racism.

Similarly, Jews should be understood as a distinctive identity group, despite the language used to describe them that is often racialized. Adams (2001) contends that racialized groups are ones in which pan-ethnic lumping occurs (Ibos and Yoruba became „Negroes,“ Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans became Latinos/as, Chinese- and Cambodian-Americans are Asian-Americans), while Jacobson (1998) states that racialized groups are seen as phenotypically different. Given that ethnic designations of Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Mizrachim are subsumed under the larger rubric of „Jewish“ and that one often hears that a Jew with certain features „looks Jewish,“ Jews can be understood as a racialized group.  Kaye-Kantrowitz points out, „A Jewish nose, I conclude, identifies its owner as a Jew. Nose jobs are performed so that a Jewish woman does not look like a Jew. Tell me again Jewish is just a religion“ (1996, p. 123).

Moreover, multicultural educators should begin to realize the way that Jews understand themselves and to respect their self-definitions. Participants articulated, as Blumenfeld (2001) and Grande (2004) proposed, that many white-skinned Jews see themselves not as White people who are Jewish but as Jews who are White. The emphasis in this identity terminology is vital to comprehending how Ashkenazi Jews make sense of their identity. The emphasis, as one can see, is on the Jewish identity. Jews must be able to define themselves in the way that is true and authentic for them. Multicultural educators must respect that being Jewish is a highly salient identity for many Jews

 

Abstract of Dr. David Hirsh's Paper

Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and the Academic Boycott of Israel

This paper looks at the boycott campaign in the Association of University Teachers in 2005 as a case study of the politics and operation of the anti-Zionist movement.

i. It analyses the literature produced by the campaign, the arguments relied on and the organizational actualization of these discourses.
ii. It looks at the ways in which the campaign often mirrored some of the old antisemitic narratives.
iii. It argues that the boycott campaign was not organized by conscious antisemites but that it nevertheless operated with an effectively antisemitic politics. Left anti-Zionism is more analogous to institutional racism than to openly racist movements.
iv. But a politically antisemitic movement may function as comfortable homes for more open antisemities; it has the potentiality to create open antisemites and to spawn openly antisemitic political currents.
v. The paper looks at evidence that this transition from unconscious operational antisemitism to open conscious antisemitism is under way.

Abstract of Dr. Graves' Paper

Anti-Semitism and Racism: Cut from the Same Cloth to Achieve the Same Ends

The relationship between anti-Semitism and racism are examined in this paper.  Anti-Semitism is defined as prejudice against members of the Jewish religion or culture (Jews).  In actuality, conflict between Jews and non-Jews is much older than racism.  Biblical sources suggest that Judaism was formed by Abraham and his followers around 3,500 years ago in the region between the Nile and the Euphrates River (called the Fertile Crescent.)  The narrative suggests that the followers of this faith came into immediate conflict with other religious groups.  This conflict further developed with the migration of this cultural group into the region along the Jordan River occupied today by the nations of Israel and Palestine.

However what we recognize today as anti-Semitism arose in later historical periods in which followers of the Jewish religion were a numerical minority and socially oppressed within societies characterized by other dominant religions (particularly the other two Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam.)  Thus, medieval anti-Semitism was the fore-runner of modern racism.  It parallels the former, in that this ideology also relied on a series of false and negative biological characterizations of a minority group.   In the 20^th century, the most egregious example of anti-Semitism was the Nazi holocaust.  However other examples include the treatment of Jews in Stalinist Russia and that exhibited by some Arab political entities associated with the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Alternatively, racism is the belief that some races are superior to others and that this fact justifies discrimination against and subordination of the inferior races.  While xenophobia and ethnocentrism existed in the ancient world, modern racism is a product of the Age of Discovery.  It relies on the classification of human beings into racial groups, on arbitrary and often blatantly false criteria.  Racism saw its greatest intellectual formulation in the West, but it rapidly became a feature of virtually all cultures throughout the modern world.  Examples of racial injustice between the 15 - 20^th centuries are numerous, including the Transatlantic African slave trade, the colonization and destruction of Amerindian culture in the Western Hemisphere, the European colonization of Africa, India, and much of East Asia, the Nazi genocide against the Jews of Europe, American Jim Crow and racial policy in general, the treatment of non-Japanese by the Japanese, South African Apartheid, and some argue by the European-derived Israeli population against the Palestinians.