Jonathan Marks | @marksjo1
05.08.2014 - 4:45 PM Commentary on line LINK
Vassar has recently distinguished itself in at least two ways. First, it is one of a tiny group of colleges whose faculty supported the American Studies Association’s boycott of Israel in substantial numbers. Thirty-nine faculty members signed a
letter that sang the praises of the boycott-Israel movement. Second, as I have written here
before, Vassar was the venue for an open forum at which two professors were vilified for leading a trip to Israel and at which Jewish students who spoke up were
heckled. William Jacobson has provided
extensive coverage of the situation at Vassar and was there to speak earlier this week.
In a blog entry describing reactions to Jacobson’s speech, Jewish studies professor Rebecca Lesses
draws attention to a series of posts by Vassar’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, the most shocking of which includes this language: “Of course, mainstream media hasbarats have been around for decades, as have ‘hasbaratchiks,’ fifth-columns in foreign governments who subvert national policies to serve Israel.” The author of the linked article, Greg Felton, also wrote a book entitled
The Host and the Parasite: How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America. Lesses observes that the
Occidental Quarterly, on which the SJP draws, is an anti-Semitic magazine. While I hesitate to take the word of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which she cites, for it, a look through the
Occidental Quarterly, which includes an article about libertarianism as a creed advanced by Jewish intellectuals to advance Jewish “group evolutionary interests,” tends to support the charge.
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