In Favor of Padilla Peralta Moving On

I also support Professor Padilla Peralta’s decision to leave completely. The University, and the classics department (my undergraduate home) in particular, will be stronger without him. Padilla Peralta was the only Princeton professor to sign the anti-Zionist petition “Classicists and Ancient Historians in Solidarity with the People of Palestine,” which declared the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 to be “unlawful” and asserted that Zionists “attempt to falsify a historical claim to the land by laundering its antiquity.” While Padilla Peralta is no international lawyer and his opinions about the legality of Israel’s statehood cannot be taken seriously, he is (purportedly) a scholar of ancient religion, and his endorsement of the idea, in whole or in part, that the abundantly well-documented ancient Jewish connection to the land of Israel is counterfeit constituted professional malpractice.

And while Padilla Peralta claims that the University “put a target on my back,” even as he was promoted in the midst of the controversy, it is rather his zealous anti-Zionism that targeted Israeli and Zionist students, faculty, and alumni with the stigma of facilitating “genocide,” when in truth there is little that the University or its members can do to influence the defense policy of the strongest military in a region on the other side of the planet.

It is remarkable that, for a Princeton professor with a first-class training in classics, PAW has so little to say about his actual academic work. While efforts to broaden the field are laudable, the ideal at Princeton has been that such efforts are built on first-rate research. What are his accomplishments in his actual area of academic expertise? To the contrary, Padilla Peralta declares narrow academic research, the traditional bread-and-butter of the Ivy League professoriate, to be “an aridly compartmentalized end in itself.”

It is also quite remarkable that with respect to an institution that educated him as an undergraduate, gave him a scholarship to study at Oxford, advocated for him with respect to his immigration status, and then hired him and gave him tenure, Padilla Peralta can only speculate that he might miss a local ice cream store. I wish him better luck at ASU.