Stanley Fish...

on Israel and the academy:

Why has the conflict between Israel and much of the Arab world become a third-rail topic in the academy? Why do so many of the incidents in which academic freedom is invoked by both sides center on that conflict? How can even a non-event, as this appears to be, release virulent energies and give rise to rants and counter-rants that threaten to go viral?

I have tentative answers to these questions, but they don’t really satisfy. For example, academics are always looking for an underdog to champion. I am old enough to remember when it was Jews. After Jews came women, then African-Americans, then the oppressed blacks of South Africa (remember divestment?), then Native Americans, then Latinos and Chicanos, then gay, lesbian and transgendered people, then the disabled and, for some years now, Palestinians. (Commentators on the right complain that conservatives and Christians never make the list.)

There is also the fact that Jews are disproportionately represented in the academy, and as scholars dedicated (in theory) to objectivity and a universal rationality, they may be bending over backward to avoid slipping into a tribal identification. (Hence the very vocal insistence on the part of many Jewish professors that criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism are very different things.) And then there are those academics (Jews and non-Jews) who feel that the whole of American foreign policy is distorted by what has been called the “Israeli lobby” and believe that unless the imbalance is corrected, we are in for a very bad time.