Would You Allow a White Supremacist to Teach Black History?
No? Then why allow an antisemite to teach the history of the Jews?
Are you familiar with Dr. Joseph Massad? He’s a tenured professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University who wrote the following lines about Hamas’s October 7th massacres that the “Electronic Intifada” published on October 8th:
“What can motorized paragliders do in the face of one of the most formidable militaries in the world?
Apparently much in the hands of an innovative Palestinian resistance, which early on Saturday morning launched a surprise attack on Israel by air, land and sea. Indeed as stunning videos show, these paragliders have become the air force of the Palestinian resistance.
[…]
No less awesome were the scenes witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs who spent the day watching the news, of Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it by air.
The resistance’s remarkable takeover of Israeli military bases and checkpoints, where even the resistance fighters marveled at the rows of abandoned Israeli tanks and armored vehicles, upon which they placed their banners, has both shaken Israeli society and struck Palestinians and Arabs as incredible.”
He’s currently on Columbia’s Spring 2025 schedule to teach a course on—wait for it—Zionism.
Back when I took Zionism class, Dr. Dan Miron, one of the world’s leading scholars of Hebrew literature (since retired), taught it. We read texts by authors such as Vladmir Jabotinsky, Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, and Mordecai Kaplan. I wonder how much Dr. Massad plans to draw from those materials. Think he would consider making the syllabus available to the public and livestreaming the lectures so that I can compare them for “research” purposes?
Massad’s shenanigans are nothing new. In fact, this very course (“Palestinian/Israeli Politics and Society”) with Massad teaching it appeared in Columbia’s course offerings back in the early 2000s. Back then, however, there were enough tenured Israeli faculty members around who prevented Massad’s fuckery from infecting the entire school. Since there was a legitimate class on Zionism available with a professor actually qualified to teach it, Massad didn’t advertise the course as focusing on “the development of Zionism.”
I am having a vivid flashback to sitting in Dr. Miron’s class. We were reviewing the syllabus, and many of us saw that the texts were all from the late 1800s/early 1900s. So we asked, “why are there no texts from 1948 onward? Why are all of the readings from before Israel’s founding?” His response: “because this course is a cultural perspective on Zionism, a project that planted its roots in that era, so that’s the foundation I am teaching you.” In another class meeting, a student asked why the course never discussed discrimination against Arabs.
Surely, there are flaws in this teaching modality—namely that since the course restricted itself to the early era of modern Zionism, all of the writers/thinkers were Ashkenazi men. A course on modern Zionism could no doubt expand include more recent texts from a more diverse set of writers if the instructor so chose. But that flaw aside, I believe the most important takeaway from the course was the following: the real ‘Zionist idea’ is nothing like how the public currently chooses to frame it. It’s not about the Holocaust (although many early Zionists predicted it). It’s certainly not about displacing other ethnic minorities. It’s about the need to maintain the Jewish homeland because without it, we do not really have a home. No matter what, Zionism is squarely about the Jews and no one else.
If people like Massad choose to bastardize the real meaning of Zionism, fuck them. But it has real consequences. The intimidation against Jewish students that he stoked was the subject of the 2004 film “Columbia Unbecoming.” One portion of the documentary highlights an incident involving Massad asking an Israeli student in front of his peers “how many Palestinians he killed” during his IDF service. When the student retorted with “if we are going to go by stereotypes, how many members of your family celebrated on 9/11?,” Massad blew up and shut down the discussion. Very professional.
Zionism is one of the most successful projects of the Jews in the last 2000 years, and anyone who cares to study it knows that the history is complicated. It is incredibly disrespectful and frankly racist for an Ivy League university to have a tenured professor pretending at teaching it who has openly shown disrespect for Jews and Israelis, who has voiced direct support for terrorism by calling it “resistance,” and who thinks that the nation that resulted from the project should not even exist.
I once proudly called this university my alma mater. Now, I feel entitled to a gift card of some kind to compensate for the devaluation of my degree.
Once the New Left abandoned class politics and fell into the trap of identity politics, it also abandoned all Enlightenment values in favor of medieval barbarity. Instead, it built its own religion, with its own saint, sinners, confessions, and self-flagellation. As those deemed "oppressed" by the "right people" (fashionable "academics") are viewed as perfectly virtuous, Palestinian terrorists became new saints to this new religion. Of course, as in most such faiths, Jews became the scapegoats...
I stick to my Old Left values, as set forth by the Enlightenment: universalism, humanism, and the adamant support of human autonomy, alongside loyalty to the working class. This is likely to make me a "conservative" nowadays, and if so - I will bear that title with no shame.
(Needless to say, the rotten New Left's abandonment and vilification of the majority of the US working class, which is composed mostly of White and Hispanic "cis" people, half of whom are men, enthroned Trump this week)
I would love to see Einat Wilf register for this course.
I bet she’d get an A+.