The Horowitz Hit on Brooklyn College
One of my daughters drew my attention to the following website which details the SAF (Students for Academic Freedom) activities at Brooklyn College:
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6746
Personally I don't like this attack mode approach to conflicting political positions -- such as criticisms directed to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, on the use of an indigenous culture to reach an excluded group, and on justified critiques of religion in its destructive manifestations.
By chance I happen to have some relevant background and experience in all three of these areas:
1) As an undergraduate at Yale (and in my first teaching job at Vassar) I discovered the ugly anti-Semitic biases operative until well into the 1960s -- virtual exclusions of Jewish faculty and informal quotas for Jewish students with an explicit bias against those from Eastern European backgrounds (particularly "from Brooklyn and the Bronx"). I editorialized against this ugly phenomenon at Yale which was the first of the Ivies to break with this horrendous practice (was criticized for "disloyalty to Yale" and down the line threatened with expulsion by our president -- had two relatives on the board unbeknownst to him, so was not bothered by such). However, when I discovered the very explicit anti-Semitic bias while serving as an instructor on the Vassar scholarship committee, I did put my own interests on the line. Three of us who constituted the majority of 4 of 7 against 3 powers that be were out of there shortly thereafter.
Currently I run a PeaceEfforts yahoo group and have among the advisors to my StudentConcerns list peace workers from both sides of the Green Line. I am heartened by the possible break in the log jam there by the Sharon move out of Likud. We shall see.
2) I worked with a juvenile gang in West Harlem during my first year as a student at Union Theological Seminary which made me painfully aware of the horrors of growing up as a member of a despised minority group in America. I was able to make contact with them -- mainly by doing cooking -- they were hungry. I lost contact the next year, as I married and we spent the year in Oxford. Thereafter all but 3 of my little group of about a dozen died violently by the time they had reached their forties. Odell Terry, one of 3 to survive as a hero cop -- he had made it into the Marines and a semester in CUNY -- filled me in. Any efforts we can make to rescue our abandoned children are more than justified.
3) I am entirely sympathetic with Professor Shortell's contempt for contemporary Christianity. Having studied it, I know it to have been the most violent and destructive of the Western religions. My grandfather was our leading biblical theologians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century -- Charles Foster Kent -- and a progressive in his time who reached out to Catholics and Jews who were being excluded by our universities and organized on their behalf a noted university group awarding fellowships for grad studies, the National Council for Religion in Higher Education, which made possible advanced studies for those previously excluded (Jews and minority group members). Some of his students were my own teachers. This web site only gives his publications up to 1909:
http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/encyc/encyc06/htm/iii.lxiv.i.htm
He died young and in 1925 (before my birth) after an extraordinary career as scholar and effective social progressive.
As religion was in my family heritage, I spent three years doing theology prior to returning to philosophy (at Union Theological Seminary in NYC and Mansfield College, Oxford) leading to a B.D. degree. I know, therefore, both theology and the history of our religions -- and we tend to outreach to each other beyond our own bases, so many of my friends have been priests and rabbis. I could offer a scholarly critique of religion matching Timothy Shortell's angry comments which are quite justified as one traces the brutal history of Christian anti-Semitism over the millennia, the crusades against Islam, its contempt for Eastern religions, its justifications of colonial dominance up to and including cruel genocide, its "Manifest Destiny" ("New Israel") justification of our genocidal displacement of native Americans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_Destiny
http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar/dialogues/prelude/manifest/manifestdestiny.html
Thus, I have to reject the David Horowitz attack on those who criticize Israel. There are many good Israelis who have similarly challenged Israel's abuses of Palestinians there over the years. The point is to achieve some sort of accommodation to stop the killing that is threatening life for BOTH Palestinians and Jews. This looks to be the new message of the pragmatic Sharon, and the new direction of the Labor Party leadership.
Those who attacked Priya Parmar simply don't know how desperate is the situation of young African Americans still cut off from America's ladder out of the ghettos to which they have been largely restricted (20% of our prison population consists of such young persons sentenced to lengthy terms for dealing drugs). Whatever it takes to reach these young people is well worth it. And to play the 'ebonics' game is nothing but a cheap shot. One of my great joys is that I was able to have a small role as aide to J. Raymond Jones, the "Harlem Fox" in opening the doors of CUNY to minority students that I could get into Yale, but not CUNY in the 1960s!
And I have said publicly that Timothy Shortell is owed an apology for the rude attack directed at him for his criticisms of religion. His were quite in line with those of one of my own primary teachers, Reinhold Niebuhr directed at the simplistic version of Christianity being put forth by Billy Graham in my seminary days which has spawned our right wing Protestant hate religion of today:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/newsletter/2005/jun17.html
I saw first hand the effects of the Graham crusades when I stumbled in to a summer job at the Protestant Council of the City of New York which was fighting civil rights behind the scenes, supporting anti-Semitic legislation (the Sabbath laws), and variously running a money scam which became the prototype of all too much of contemporary U.S. religion -- Falwell and ilk.
This is written in haste, as I have papers galore to read. But I will happily expand on any points necessary. I hope any B.C. colleagues and students who have been misled on some of these matters will attend to what I am saying. The Horowitz route is NOT the way to go!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6746
Personally I don't like this attack mode approach to conflicting political positions -- such as criticisms directed to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, on the use of an indigenous culture to reach an excluded group, and on justified critiques of religion in its destructive manifestations.
By chance I happen to have some relevant background and experience in all three of these areas:
1) As an undergraduate at Yale (and in my first teaching job at Vassar) I discovered the ugly anti-Semitic biases operative until well into the 1960s -- virtual exclusions of Jewish faculty and informal quotas for Jewish students with an explicit bias against those from Eastern European backgrounds (particularly "from Brooklyn and the Bronx"). I editorialized against this ugly phenomenon at Yale which was the first of the Ivies to break with this horrendous practice (was criticized for "disloyalty to Yale" and down the line threatened with expulsion by our president -- had two relatives on the board unbeknownst to him, so was not bothered by such). However, when I discovered the very explicit anti-Semitic bias while serving as an instructor on the Vassar scholarship committee, I did put my own interests on the line. Three of us who constituted the majority of 4 of 7 against 3 powers that be were out of there shortly thereafter.
Currently I run a PeaceEfforts yahoo group and have among the advisors to my StudentConcerns list peace workers from both sides of the Green Line. I am heartened by the possible break in the log jam there by the Sharon move out of Likud. We shall see.
2) I worked with a juvenile gang in West Harlem during my first year as a student at Union Theological Seminary which made me painfully aware of the horrors of growing up as a member of a despised minority group in America. I was able to make contact with them -- mainly by doing cooking -- they were hungry. I lost contact the next year, as I married and we spent the year in Oxford. Thereafter all but 3 of my little group of about a dozen died violently by the time they had reached their forties. Odell Terry, one of 3 to survive as a hero cop -- he had made it into the Marines and a semester in CUNY -- filled me in. Any efforts we can make to rescue our abandoned children are more than justified.
3) I am entirely sympathetic with Professor Shortell's contempt for contemporary Christianity. Having studied it, I know it to have been the most violent and destructive of the Western religions. My grandfather was our leading biblical theologians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century -- Charles Foster Kent -- and a progressive in his time who reached out to Catholics and Jews who were being excluded by our universities and organized on their behalf a noted university group awarding fellowships for grad studies, the National Council for Religion in Higher Education, which made possible advanced studies for those previously excluded (Jews and minority group members). Some of his students were my own teachers. This web site only gives his publications up to 1909:
http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/encyc/encyc06/htm/iii.lxiv.i.htm
He died young and in 1925 (before my birth) after an extraordinary career as scholar and effective social progressive.
As religion was in my family heritage, I spent three years doing theology prior to returning to philosophy (at Union Theological Seminary in NYC and Mansfield College, Oxford) leading to a B.D. degree. I know, therefore, both theology and the history of our religions -- and we tend to outreach to each other beyond our own bases, so many of my friends have been priests and rabbis. I could offer a scholarly critique of religion matching Timothy Shortell's angry comments which are quite justified as one traces the brutal history of Christian anti-Semitism over the millennia, the crusades against Islam, its contempt for Eastern religions, its justifications of colonial dominance up to and including cruel genocide, its "Manifest Destiny" ("New Israel") justification of our genocidal displacement of native Americans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_Destiny
http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar/dialogues/prelude/manifest/manifestdestiny.html
Thus, I have to reject the David Horowitz attack on those who criticize Israel. There are many good Israelis who have similarly challenged Israel's abuses of Palestinians there over the years. The point is to achieve some sort of accommodation to stop the killing that is threatening life for BOTH Palestinians and Jews. This looks to be the new message of the pragmatic Sharon, and the new direction of the Labor Party leadership.
Those who attacked Priya Parmar simply don't know how desperate is the situation of young African Americans still cut off from America's ladder out of the ghettos to which they have been largely restricted (20% of our prison population consists of such young persons sentenced to lengthy terms for dealing drugs). Whatever it takes to reach these young people is well worth it. And to play the 'ebonics' game is nothing but a cheap shot. One of my great joys is that I was able to have a small role as aide to J. Raymond Jones, the "Harlem Fox" in opening the doors of CUNY to minority students that I could get into Yale, but not CUNY in the 1960s!
And I have said publicly that Timothy Shortell is owed an apology for the rude attack directed at him for his criticisms of religion. His were quite in line with those of one of my own primary teachers, Reinhold Niebuhr directed at the simplistic version of Christianity being put forth by Billy Graham in my seminary days which has spawned our right wing Protestant hate religion of today:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/newsletter/2005/jun17.html
I saw first hand the effects of the Graham crusades when I stumbled in to a summer job at the Protestant Council of the City of New York which was fighting civil rights behind the scenes, supporting anti-Semitic legislation (the Sabbath laws), and variously running a money scam which became the prototype of all too much of contemporary U.S. religion -- Falwell and ilk.
This is written in haste, as I have papers galore to read. But I will happily expand on any points necessary. I hope any B.C. colleagues and students who have been misled on some of these matters will attend to what I am saying. The Horowitz route is NOT the way to go!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp
posted by Ed Kent at 11:10 AM
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