I read “What You Need to Know About the Israeli Divestment Proposal” (September issue) with grim interest, knowing that universities have a sordid history of shaming and mistreating their Jewish students and faculty. There is no doubt that when the University of Vienna banned its Jewish students in 1938, there were articles written in the genteel style of an alumni magazine assuring readers that it’s just something they needed to know, and that harassment of Jews by high-minded university types is just part of academic life, rather than what everyone knows it is: sordid antisemitism. What a nasty surprise for those of us who thought Princeton would never devolve into similar anti-Jewish hysterics.
At any rate the timing of this article in the September issue could not be more darkly ironic, because the ostensible reason for the student effort to heap opprobrium on the world’s sole Jewish state, which incidentally is a democracy, is its treatment of Palestinians. And yet who is the subject of the cover story of the September issue? None other than an oil executive and member of the royal family in an autocratic Arab country, who was treated to a puff piece on his achievements, and who faces no similar divestment protests from Princeton’s students, despite his nation’s now-famous expulsion and ethnic cleansing of its Palestinian residents in 1991!
No one should be under any illusions about the anti-Jewish nature of these divestment movements, but readers of PAW are lucky enough that the inadvertent juxtaposition of these articles laid it bare.
I read “What You Need to Know About the Israeli Divestment Proposal” (September issue) with grim interest, knowing that universities have a sordid history of shaming and mistreating their Jewish students and faculty. There is no doubt that when the University of Vienna banned its Jewish students in 1938, there were articles written in the genteel style of an alumni magazine assuring readers that it’s just something they needed to know, and that harassment of Jews by high-minded university types is just part of academic life, rather than what everyone knows it is: sordid antisemitism. What a nasty surprise for those of us who thought Princeton would never devolve into similar anti-Jewish hysterics.
At any rate the timing of this article in the September issue could not be more darkly ironic, because the ostensible reason for the student effort to heap opprobrium on the world’s sole Jewish state, which incidentally is a democracy, is its treatment of Palestinians. And yet who is the subject of the cover story of the September issue? None other than an oil executive and member of the royal family in an autocratic Arab country, who was treated to a puff piece on his achievements, and who faces no similar divestment protests from Princeton’s students, despite his nation’s now-famous expulsion and ethnic cleansing of its Palestinian residents in 1991!
No one should be under any illusions about the anti-Jewish nature of these divestment movements, but readers of PAW are lucky enough that the inadvertent juxtaposition of these articles laid it bare.