[A-List] Jewish Professors for Divestment

["bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

Published on Saturday, December 21, 2002 by the Boston Globe

Jewish Professors Keep Divestment Drive Alive
by Patrick Healy

CAMBRIDGE - The national movement to pressure universities to pull their
investments from Israel has been battered this year by critics who call it
divisive and anti-Semitic.

But it has shown remarkable staying power in large part because of an
unusual group of supporters: Jewish professors.
Hundreds of college professors nationwide have signed petitions calling for
divestment from Israel, among them several dozen Jewish professors who call
their signatures an act of political conscience. As the fall semester draws
to a close, many have found themselves - not always purposely - becoming
spokesmen for a cause that has deeply split their campuses.

''I simply couldn't afford to sit back any longer,'' said Harvard
psychology professor Elizabeth Spelke, whose family has roots in Israel,
and who signed the petition to protest Israel's military crackdown on
Palestinians.

Modeled on an anti-apartheid campaign that led campuses to divest from
South Africa in the 1980s, the petition criticizes Israel's actions in the
occupied territories and calls on universities to sell any investments in
Israel, and in companies that do business there. It has circulated at more
than 50 campuses, including Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst.

Although most university presidents have repudiated or rejected its
demands, the petition has had a powerful impact on campus. It has become a
flashpoint for arguments among students - particularly Jews and Muslims -
and triggered a far more popular counter-petition supporting Israel.

Since they signed, Spelke and other Jewish professors have been bombarded
with e-mail and letters accusing them of betraying fellow Jews and Israel,
of self-loathing and anti-Semitism, and - most disturbing to some - of
giving comfort to suicide bombers in Israel. Most prominently, Harvard
president Lawrence H. Summers has publicly suggested that the divestment
movement has anti-Semitic overtones.

Spelke and others say they see it not as a matter of religion or psychology
but of conscience, and their intensely personal responses to the charges of
anti-Semitism have helped keep the divestment movement alive.

''The best way we as a society can debate this is not to poke fingers -
`Oh, you're saying that because you're anti-Semitic' or `Oh, you're saying
that because you're Jewish' - but rather to evaluate the arguments straight
up,'' Spelke said.

Sylvain Bromberger, a noted Massachusetts Institute of Technology
philosopher whose mother once edited a Zionist newspaper in Belgium and
whose family narrowly escaped capture by the Nazis, became a hero to some
divestment supporters this fall when he defended them in a toughly worded
letter to Summers.

''They are good and courageous people, the sort of people who took great
risks to save Jews during the occupation,'' Bromberger wrote to Summers.
''What you insinuated about them was sheer, crude calumny. You must have
known that. You must know people like them. ... As a Jew, I found your
statement to be slanderous. As a holder of a Harvard degree I found it
embarrassing.''

Summers sent a polite reply, Bromberger said in an interview.

Summers's spokesman, Alan J. Stone, said: ''President Summers was clear in
saying that Israeli policies should be rigorously challenged. He used the
phrase `anti-Semitic in effect if not intent' to describe a range of
actions from boycotts of Jewish scholars to pressure on universities to
single out and ostracize Israel through divestment.''

In interviews, Bromberger, Spelke, and several other Jewish scholars who
have signed the petition described themselves in similar terms: Not at all
religiously devout, they feel culturally tied to Judaism. They emphasized
that they signed the petition only to criticize the Sharon government, not
to attack Israelis. They said they see the Sharon government as a political
entity supporting a territorial occupation with new housing settlements -
and some have targeted him, rather than other leaders, in part because they
feel a personal affinity for the Jewish state.

''As a Jew, it's so personally disturbing to me that this is even happening
in Israel,'' said Charles G. Gross, a psychology professor at Princeton
University. ''I'm a little bit more concerned with social justice in Israel
than in some other countries.''
While supporters of divestment cross many ethnic and religious lines, the
Jewish signers of the petition have drawn critics who see psychological
factors at play. Richard Landes, a Boston University historian who has
signed a counter-petition supporting investment in Israel, said he believes
that Jewish support for divestment is ''enabling'' those who attack Israel.

''Jews are probably the most self-critical people, the most self-critical
culture, historically speaking - just go back to the prophets,'' said
Landes, who spoke at a Harvard forum last week titled, ''How Do You Know
When It's Anti-Semitism?''
Landes said he was especially troubled that Jews would support a petition
that asks nothing of Palestinians or terrorist groups, but puts the onus on
Israel.

Raw emotion has marked much of the debate, and Jewish supporters of Israel
have not been shy about labeling the petition as anti-Semitic.

''I don't know if these people themselves are anti-Semitic, but Jews and
non-Jews alike have a responsibility to get their facts right - Israel is
under attack, and a petition that doesn't acknowledge this but only
condemns Israel is anti-Semitic,'' said Asher Schachter, a Harvard Medical
School instructor who is one of 439 Harvard faculty to sign an
anti-divestment petition - far more than the 75 faculty at Harvard who
support divestment.

This mixing of the personal and political has led to soul-searching for
some of the Jewish scholars.

Sara Roy, a child of Holocaust survivors and a Middle East researcher at
Harvard, has not signed the divestment petition but is seen as an ally in
the movement because of a Holocaust Remembrance Lecture she gave this year
and published last month. In the speech, she said: ''For my mother and
father, Judaism meant bearing witness, railing against injustice, and
forgoing silence. ... What sort of meaning do we as Jews derive from the
debasement and humiliation of Palestinians?''

Spelke said she paused for some time before signing the petition because
she feared it would do more harm than good, a fear deepened by her Jewish
history. Her late grandmother, Mae Barros Simon, always won their arguments
about Israel by casting the Middle East conflict in personal terms, Spelke
said.

''Lizzie, Israel is the land of our hopes and dreams. Every year I planted
a tree there for you,'' Spelke wrote in an essay, quoting her grandmother.
''How can you destroy my dream?''

Yet Spelke says she felt more connected to her Jewish roots after she
signed the petition because she was no longer ''sitting around worrying,
being fearful, hoping for the best, and doing nothing.''

Ken Olum, a member of the Tufts physics department who helped organize a
divestment petition on campus, said he has wrestled so long with his
frustrations with Israel, and with widespread Jewish support for the
government there, that he has stopped identifying himself as a Jew when
people discuss religion, the Middle East, or other subjects.

''The fact that a lot of people who count themselves as among the Jewish
people are doing a great evil, an un-Jewish evil, has been overwhelming,''
Olum said. ''The moral stakes here are too great to not take this stand.''

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company
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