Uncouth Reflections

Fenster writes:

There has been coverage in the right-wing blogosphere/press of a faculty listerv at Brandeis that is held to contain anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rants.  Odd for a school that is the pride of the American Jewish Community?  Perhaps, but irony tends to disappear under the microscope.

Here’s The National Review.

Breitbart.

Washington Free Beacon.

The Daily Caller.

The College Fix.

No left-leaning coverage at HuffPost, Salon, Slate, Daily Kos, etc.

Which is seemingly ironic as well, since hard lefties can also be anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian, and the gist of the faculty inside chatter reveals them to be just these kinds of folks–hard lefties with Palestinian sympathies.  For instance, the faculty on the listserv appear to have been big-time opponenets of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s abortive commencement appearance at Brandeis.

But what gives the story its catnip allure is not just the anti-Israel voicings, but the allegedly anti-Semitic ones.  But is that the case?

It can be difficult to tell anti-Israel talk from anti-Semitic talk, and different parties have interests in smudging the line from time to time.  But it is usually a distinction worth parsing.  What have we here?

Here, it appears less a matter of broad-gauged anti-Semitism and more a case of a heavy handed critique of Brandeis’ ex-president, framed by using unfortunate and even ugly tropes.  Reinharz and his wife are referred to as “Mein Leader und Frau.”  The same professor refers to Brandeis as the “Reinharz shetl”.  Not nice.

But here’s what all of the stories missed, at least so far.  The most quoted faculty member, and the author of the above phrasings is one Donald Hindley.  Ring a bell?

If you pay attention to free speech issues in higher education, you will know the name.  Hinldey is the guy who used the term “wetback” in a class in 2007 and had the book thrown at him by the Reinharz administration.

It was a big story for a while, as these things go.  Lefty prof uses “wetback” in class in a suitably contextualized way, criticizing how Americans tend to view Mexicans.  Some students complain.  The PC machine gets rolling down the track.  Next thing you know he is a racial harasser and his classes are being monitored.

FIRE was all over it, and still carries it as a free speech black mark.  Inside Higher Ed reported the story here.  Reinharz, famously a hard-headed sort, didn’t back down and never looked back.  With Reihnarz no longer president, even the student newspaper called for an apology as recently as 2012, here.

So what the right leaning press missed here is that while a lot of the listserv rhetoric is boiler-plate academic politics, the anti-Semitism appears to be mostly a form of score settling on the part of an angry faculty member who felt railroaded by the Reinharz administration.  That doesn’t excuse the bad language–Hindley appears to have chronic case of being too glib and smarty-pants for his own good, a poster child for the bad effects of tenure.  But it is something the press ought to note.