Erika Dreifus

I don’t even know how to introduce this. I see unfair treatment of Israel in print and online pretty much every day, and while it always saddens, angers, and frustrates me, I can’t possibly chronicle it all. But here you’ll find one recent example. Read the comments carefully, too.

Do read the article–that’s how you’ll understand that while I haven’t yet resolved my opinion about the actual issues initially presented, which in some ways are more complicated than usual (there’s an appearance of punitive action here that makes me especially uneasy), the comments following the piece in particular reveal how easily this kind of situation unravels/degenerates into anti-Israel/anti-Jewish attacks that cannot be ignored.

I’ll add that one commenter’s statement, that a right to speak “does not entail [a] duty to listen, much less [a] duty to provide…a free hall and microphone,” is an eloquent articulation of something I’ve been struggling to voice when I seek to counter the oft-cited cry of “Censorship!” whenever authors of anti-Israel books and essays aren’t welcomed by a particular audience or to a particular location.

And don’t get me started on the many hypocrisies and double standards at play here, too. At least, not in this post. Maybe another time. Because, unfortunately, there will be another time.

“For several years now, British faculty unions have been voting in various ways to encourage members to boycott Israeli academics and universities — and ignoring anti-boycott pleas and resolutions and requests from scholarly societies, university presidents and academics from Britain, the United States and in some cases the Palestinian Authority. On Friday, the union announced an abrupt reversal: Based on legal advice, calls for the boycott will be dropped.”

Thus begins an article on today’s InsideHigherEd.com. Read the rest here.

“What more could there possibly be to say about ‘The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,’ the controversial new book-length version of John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt’s provocative thesis about pro-Israel forces in America?” Luckily, Gal Beckerman does indeed have something to say, on the Columbia Journalism Review Web site.