Yale closes antisemitism research center

[Mediocrates]

WF Buckley would hurl Martini classes at their heads.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion...3U30EcMrxe15UM

From news article:

Yale University last week killed the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplin ary Study of Antisemitism -- the only program of its kind in the country, an academically stellar one-stop anti-Semitism research shop. Worse, it almost certainly did so because YIISA refused to ignore the most virulent, genocidal and common form of Jew-hatred today: Muslim anti-Semitism.

Citing an official review by a faculty committee that it refuses to identify, Yale will shut down the program at the end of next month. The university's top flack, Director of Strategic Communications Charles "Robin" Hogen, wrote an e-mail claiming that YIISA had failed a key test: It was supposed to "serve the research and teaching interests of some significant group of Yale faculty and . . . be sustained by the creative energy of a critical mass of Yale faculty."

Funny, last year, at YIISA's hugely successful inaugural conference on global anti-Semitism, Yale Deputy Provost Frances Rosenbluth said just the opposite, noting that YIISA was "guided by an outstanding group of scholars from all over the university representing many different disciplines," including professors of history, sociology, comparative languages, psychiatry, economics and political science.
Actually, Hogen's e-mail itself contradicts Yale's stated excuse: He notes that "the steering committee did express continued support for the faculty reading group on anti-Semitism." Plus, "institutional support will remain for the group of faculty who wish to continue their scholarly exploration of this important subject."

[JerichoMissile]

Muslim oil money talks, one day jews will have as much rights in the usa as they had in poland in 1910., its only a matter of time..

i wonder if muslim students wanted funding to open a facility to show how bad the israeli "occupation" and treatement of "palestinians" is, would that get funding? im sure in a heartbeat!!

like i keep saying, the world is a joke.

[Aliyah1995]

Muslim oil money talks, one day jews will have as much rights in the usa as they had in poland in 1910., its only a matter of time..

Unless the world switches to electric powered cars and everything else to solar energy....

[Mediocrates]

These are Ben Cohen's comments:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/yale-do...inglepage=true

His main points are "...but of our best friends are Jews...", "the program wasn't interesting because if we told anyone about it they'd complain that is, behave antisemitically" and my favorite "in academia you simply don't talk about antisemitism, least of all as it apples to staff.."

[Mediocrates]

A call to stop funding Yale (it's a rhetorical point at best but one that must be made)
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Ar...cle.aspx/10334
"The powers that be at Yale University view the institution as a mountain," a faculty member who wished to remain anonymous recently told me over the phone, as we discussed their announcement of the imminent closure of YIISA, the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism. "They can't be moved," he continued, "They are not worried about the reaction from Jewish leaders, and there is no chance that they will go back on the decision."

The indicators that the decision was politically motivated are numerous and well documented, specifically by Abby Wisse Schachter of the New York Post and Fern Sidman of INN.

It seems that the greatest misdemeanor of Dr. Charles Asher Small, YIISA's director, is his insistence on highlighting Islamist Antisemitism, a particular strain that has proven to be most lethal in recent years. As my friend at Yale concluded, "If he would have laid low he probably would have survived."

Small's mistake was that he acted on his belief that the study of Antisemitism is by no means limited to the hypothetical or the historic but centers on the present, and how it has impacted on real Jewish lives in the here and now.

After all, when was the last time a neo-Nazi slaughtered a Jewish couple and their infant children in their home, murdered a Chabad Rabbi and his pregnant wife or beheaded a Jewish journalist on camera?

[dayag]

In a sudden reversal of its previous decision, the provost of Yale University has announced the re-establishment of the interdisciplinary program on the study of anti-Semitism. Provost Peter Salovey, Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology at Yale, said in a letter dated June 19th that, “I have been gratified to learn that Professor Maurice Samuels and a group of faculty colleagues have expressed interest in the creation of a new scholarly enterprise, the Yale Program for the Study of Anti-Semitism (YPSA), and that the Whitney Humanities Center has agreed to sponsor it.”...

It was not stated whether Yale’s decision to re-establish a scholarly program on the study of anti-Semitism was predicated upon the flurry of protests and the growing number of negative op-ed articles written by political commentators, distinguished professors and academics over the closing of YIISA.

source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/145104

[Mediocrates]

An interview with YIISAs Charles Small

“It appears that Yale, unlike YIISA, is not willing to engage in a comprehensive examination of the current crisis facing living Jews, but instead is comfortable with reexamining the plight of Jews who perished at the hands of anti-Semites,” Small’s statement read. “The role of a true scholar and intellectual is to shed light where there is darkness, which is why we at YIISA are committed to critically engaged scholarship with a broader approach to the complex, and at times controversial context of contemporary global anti-Semitism.”
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/201...ilence-on.html

[Mediocrates]

Ron Rosenbaum: Slate http://www.slate.com/id/2298200/?wpisrc=obinsite

The reason Yale tried to stifle research into antisemitism, was not because the research is trivial but because they dared point out that it exists.

From news article:

Yale cited several reasons for killing YIISA, a program devoted to the cross-cultural examination of anti-Semitism that had been in operation since 2006. But many observers suspect the turning point was a YIISA conference last August called "Global Anti-Semitism: A Crisis of Modernity" which, while featuring 108 speakers from five continents, dared acknowledge the existence of anti-Semitism in some Islamic cultures. There has been talk—though no proof—of fear of offending potentially lucrative donors from the Middle East. Charles Small, the director of YIISA, "blamed radical Islamic and extreme left wing bloggers for the bad publicity," according to the Yale Daily News, which also reported that Small "pointed out that it was the largest conference on antisemitism ever, and it would have been absurd for the conference to ignore Muslim antisemitism."

It is worth noting that discussing the existence of anti-Semitism in some Islamic cultures does not imply there is anything essentially anti-Semitic about Islam. Small denied emphatically to me that any such Islamophobia was evident in the conference or in YIISA's seminars. But while the backlash against YIISA's conference included predictable protests from the official PLO representative and the group's supporters in America, the more subtle—and yet ludicrous—objection to YIISA's conference and YIISA's work came—as Ben Cohen pointed out in the Forward—in the charge of "advocacy," leveled by some YIISA opponents on campus. The charge that the program exhibited too much "advocacy" against anti-Semitism, as opposed to academic analysis of anti-Semitism. It seems unlikely that Yale tells its cancer researchers not to engage in advocacy against the malignancies they study, doesn't it?

In addition, Yale was essentially inventing a new kind of Jewish quota: putting a quota on the anger that Jews could express against those who wish for their extermination. After all, such anger would be "advocacy." Apparently YIISA exceeded its quota.