MK Yulia Shamalov-Berkovich (Kadima) has published letters she sent earlier this week to Welfare Minister Moshe Kachlon and Bar Ilan President Moshe Kaveh, asking them to rethink a conference that is to be held at the university on January 3.

The conference is hosted by the university’s Rackman Center, which is headed by militant feminist Dr. Ruth Halperin-Kadari. Another leading speaker will be Dr. Dafna Hacker of Tel Aviv University’s Gender Studies program, a militant feminist with strong ties to the New Israel Fund.

Whether the conference has a political agenda or not, I loved INN’s “militant feminist” designation. Previous discussions about Rackman Center related controversies can be found here and here.

מועצת החוג למחשבת ישראל התכנסה היום, יום א’ ה-11.12.2011 , והחליטה לבטל את האירוע המתוכנן למחר על הספר “תורת המלך”. נימוקיה של המועצה היו: הענקת במה אוניברסיטאית, במיוחד עם נוכחות המחבר או נציגו, עלולה לתת גושפנקא לתוכן הגזעני של הספר ולחזק את השפעתו המסוכנת בחברה הישראלית
מתן במה מעין זו עלול גם לסייע בבוא הזמן לסנגוריו בבית הדין. אם האירוע יתקיים כמתוכנן בפורום כלשהו בניגוד להחלטת מועצת החוג, מוצהר בזאת שאין לו חסות של החוג למחשבת ישראל וכל חבר בחוג שישתתף בו עושה זאת כאדם פרטי ולא כחבר בחוג או כראש החוג. החוג מתנער מכל אחראיות מוסרית ומשפטית לאירוע.

Update:

The following flyer was being passed around Hebrew University today.  Thanks to Yitz Landes for sending it to me.

Is Calling for Murder a Legitimate Opinion?

“When we come upon a non-Jew who is transgressing one of the Seven Noahide Laws, we kill him from a place of caring about the Seven Noahide Laws, and there is no prohibition in this.”

“There is a rationalization for causing harm to children if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us. In a situation such as this the attack will be directed just at them, and not only in order to harm adults.”

From the book Torat ha-Melekh

This coming Monday, 12.12, Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, who supports the book Torat ha-Melekh that permits and encourages the killing of non-Jews, will come to speak on a panel at Beit Hill of Hebrew University.

“The is no place in reality for a non-Jew as he is..the prohibition to kill a non-Jew does not come from the value of his life, which are not legitimate in and of themselves.

-Is every opinion legitimate for public debate?
-Do we want to let opinions like this into our conversation?
-What type of university grants a forum to someone who publicly supports racism and calls for murder?
-What type of campus are we if we are quiet about this?

You are invited to come and protest with us, today, Monday, 12.12, 6:15 pm Beit Hillel

The Facebook page of Beit Hillel is reporting that the panel discussion is happening as planned and all of the planned participants are there, so maybe the Department of Jewish Thought was unsuccessful in getting it cancelled.

Some people are trying to lobby the university to make sure that it doesn’t become a forum for incitement, although I am not sure if they would really like to see it cancelled.  A university should be about critical discussion of ideas and issues and not ignoring them.

Call for Papers:

Location and schedule: The Jewish Law Association in conjunction with Yale University Program in Judaic Studies will hold the 17th
International conference of the JLA at the Yale University Law School, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A., on July 30-August 2, 2012.

Proposals for papers: The Conference will include a thematic stream on Interaction of Jewish and Other Legal Systems (from ancient to modern times), but presenters may choose any topic and approach to Jewish Law (historical, doctrinal, comparative or philosophical).

Papers will be allocated 45-minute slots, to include 15 minutes of discussion. Papers at the Association’s conferences are normally
published in Jewish Law Association Studies, subject to peer review.

Proposals for papers should include the paper’s title, a short description of its contents (200 words maximum), and be accompanied by an updated C.V. Please transmit all this material to the conference committee at the following e-mail address: jla2012conference-at-gmail.com no later than January 31st, 2012.

Founded in 1978, the Jewish Law Association seeks to promote study and research in Jewish Law. It provides a major interdisciplinary meeting point for scholars and practitioners in both Law and Jewish Studies. Its membership represents diverse religious, philosophical and intellectual perspectives, and is drawn from many nations, from Israel to Brazil, from Canada and the United States to Australia, from Western Europe to South Africa.

Registration for the conference will include the $50.00 membership fee for 2012 (and its member privileges, including publications: see the Membership page on the Association’s website, at http://jewishlawassociation.org/), if not already paid.
Conference papers are, in principle, to be given in English. As in the past, members who prefer to present in Hebrew are asked to prepare for distribution a translation of their paper into English.
The conference academic committee will review each proposal and its relevance to the conference. The committee is not obligated to accept any proposal.

Dr. Yalow, a product of New York City schools and the daughter of parents who never finished high school, graduated magna cum laude from Hunter College in New York at the age of 19 and was the college’s first physics major. Yet she struggled to be accepted for graduate studies. In one instance, a skeptical Midwestern university wrote: “She is from New York. She is Jewish. She is a woman.”

Read the obituary for a discussion of the important discoveries that she was a part of.

Another interesting aspect of her life was how she and her collaborator in research, Solomon A. Berson, encountered resistance to their new theories.

Their early work met with resistance. Scientific journals initially refused to publish their discovery of insulin antibodies, a finding fundamental to radioimmunoassay. The discovery, in 1956, challenged the accepted understanding of the immune system; few scientists believed antibodies could recognize a molecule as small as insulin. Dr. Yalow and Dr. Berson had to delete a reference to antibodies before The Journal of Clinical Investigation accepted their paper, and Dr. Yalow did not forget the incident; she included the rejection letter as an exhibit in her Nobel lecture.

Sometimes people who are supposedly critical scholars can be as orthodox as anyone else.

I am reminded of these comments when reading about the new book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa on higher education in America. Their book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, paints an unflattering portrait of undergraduate college education. They claimed that 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated “no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years.” That must make parents who are paying $40,000 a year very happy.

William Pannapacker, under the pen name Thomas H. Benton, has published two articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the book. They are worth a read for those interested in the quality of higher education. In the first article Benton raises questions about the desire to increase the number of students studying in college.

What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?

His second article attempts to identify some of the underlying problems that he thinks are behind this worrying trend. Towards the end of his second article he wrote:

Academically Adrift ends on a depressing note: “A renewed commitment to improving undergraduate education is unlikely to occur without changes to the organizational cultures of colleges and universities.” Institutions are inherently conservative; they do not change easily. Many leaps of faith are necessary, and the people involved—teachers, students, parents, administrators, lawmakers, and others—have so many fundamental disagreements about the purposes of higher education that it is hard to know where to begin the conversation. It’s far easier to make cuts to an inherently broken system than to begin building something new.

His articles are recommended reading, although a bit depressing.

For other discussions about Academically Adrift see here, here, and here.

Jewish Law Syllabus Project:

Here is an announcement from Samuel J. Levine (Touro).

On behalf of the Jewish Law Institute at Touro Law Center, I am pleased to announce the initiation of the Jewish Law Syllabus Project.With the continuing emergence of Jewish Law as an area of focus in both the American law school curriculum and American legal scholarship, recent years have seen an expansion of law school courses and centers dedicated to exploring various aspects of Jewish Law. The aim of the Jewish Law Syllabus Project is to help facilitate this increasing attention to Jewish Law in American law schools, through the compilation of a collection of syllabi from Jewish Law courses. This collection will serve as a resource, for scholars who are interested in undertaking the teaching and study of Jewish Law, as well as for those who are currently pursuing these fields.

Toward that goal, I would like to invite you to participate in the Jewish Law Syllabus Project. I would appreciate if you would send to my attention copies of Jewish Law syllabi, from both current and past courses, taught by you and/or others. Please send email attachments, to: slevine [at] tourolaw.edu; or printed copies, to: Touro Law Center, 225 Eastview Drive, Central Islip, NY 11722.

I thank you in advance for your participation, and I welcome any questions and comments you may have about the project.

mw

I do not share Joffe’s gloomy view of Jewish Studies, nor his call for teachers of Jewish Studies to help lead “a counter-movement to the prevailing ethos” of “politically correct cosmopolitanism.” Each college and university is different, and if anything, society must address what actually is the purpose of higher education. I’ll throw you one of my elitist zingers that luckily isn’t applicable to Israel and in the month of March is dangerous in some parts, higher education should not be about spending so much time, money, and resources on college sports.

The field will adapt the circumstances, things will change, but the present should be seen as a time of flux. Jewish Studies also does not have to understood as limited to what happens within the ivory tower. There are many promising scholars of Jewish Studies that are out there who happen to be working in non-university settings. Also, many non-academic journals show the influence of academic Jewish Studies, whether knowingly or unknowingly.

I wanted to mention one great debate about the nature and even the possibility of Jewish Studies. In 1965, Baruch Kurzweil published an article in Ha-Aretz, “Dissatisfaction in History and the Science of Judaism.” Gershom Scholem, who himself critiqued Wissenschaft des Judentums, responded to Kurzweil’s article and so began one of the great Jewish debates of the second-half of the twentieth century. It harkens back to a period when it seems, probably incorrectly, that ideas and ideology were actually important.

Below are some sections from David Meyers’s article, The Scholem-Kurzweil Debate and Modern Jewish Historiography.

In recounting the charges and counter-charges levelled in this spirited debate-and indeed, it is important to do so periodically as a sort of intellectual accounting-one is struck by the divergent perspectives from which the respective arguments are presented. One is also struck-momentarily at least-by the common motives which encouraged Scholem (and [Jacob] Katz) on one hand and Kurzweil on the other. That is, Scholem and Kurzweil advocated positions which both reflected and addressed the contemporary Jewish condition. Scholem portrayed his dialectical advance over the panegyrists of the 19th century, in large part, as the result of the superior historical force of Zionism over assimilation. Conversely, Kurzweil saw the Zionist impulse in modern Jewish historiography as a symptom of a radical break with traditional Jewish values, a break which began in the 18th century with the penetration of “(rationalist) philosophical systems from outside into the Jewish world”.

Clearly, then, the two men had radically different conceptions of Scholem-Kurzweil Debate the role and importance of Zionism, and more specifically, of its relation to the renewed undertaking on behalf of the Science of Judaism. The passion, even ferocity, with which each man propagated his ideas indicated that the stakes in their exchange were quite high. At issue was not a genteel scholarly excursion into the ethereal world of the philosophy of history, but rather an existential dilemma of sizeable dimensions. Both from Scholem, as a “post-assimilatory Jew”, and from Kurzweil, as an observant Jew in Israel, Zionism evoked a response which reflected openly on their respective professional and Jewish self-images. In Scholem’s case, Zionism shaped the course of his personal and professional life, particularly through “aliyah” or immigration to Palestine. Not surprisingly, a frontal assault upon the presuppositions underlying Zionism, when carried upon the pages of Israel’s most respected newspaper, raised the ire and consternation of Scholem and his colleagues.

Seen from the other side, Kurzweil’s attacks were, to his own mind, a measure of last resort. Zionism, in its most expansive formulation, was a movement which threatened to detach the Jewish people from the roots of its tradition. Though ironically he himself had chosen to immigrate to Palestine, Kurzweil vigorously and bitterly objected to the image of
Zionism as a trans-ideological force of normalization, capable of rejuvenating the Jewish soul and body. Indeed, such an expansive conception encroached upon his own religious faith and historical perception that the binding force of Jewish identity and historical consciousness was belief in the Divine Will.