Holy cow. Prof. @hashtagoras can't bring himself to condemn the bigoted disruption of a class on Israel at @Columbia without a long screed about how activism for Palestine is being silenced. A Jew who didn't grow up Jewish - whose parents converted out of Judaism - still has the gall to deploy that wonderful phrase, "as a Jew," to explain why he cannot wear the Star of David ever since Zionism polluted it. I mean, he was about to, he was almost there, it was his next big step on his Jewish journey, and then - kapow! - Zionists ruined it for him. My concern isn't that this bigot has a platform at an elite university. My concern is that this ignorant ideologue *is* the elite university, that he represents the mainstream on campus. My concern, in other words, is that his students aren't really learning in his class, and certainly not being taught that the world is complex, that many narratives exist and none are stupid. This man who can't even condemn a specific act of bigotry without burying the condemnation in a long screed that implicitly validates that act of bigotry, is unlikely to be teaching complexity and nuance and the lived experience of real human beings. I spoke at @Columbia yesterday evening. The hall was full. When I mentioned a fairly mild critique of the ideologizing of history and Middle East education, I got applause from the Jewish students. If you go to Columbia today, are you going to learn real things - or just to repeat Prof. Howley's claptrap?
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