Israel and Academics

It is difficult for me to write about Israel, because I have conflicting feelings. On my only visit to Israel in 1993, when I was 45 years old, I felt a surprising exhilaration when I landed. For the first time in my life, I was not an exception, a minority, an identity that needed to be explained. I felt at home in a place I had never been, safe from misunderstanding.

After six weeks in Jerusalem, I also felt that I had never lived in such a racist place. Openly expressed sentiments about Arabs, derogatory, demeaning and condescending, made me think of Southern whites talking about blacks before the civil rights era.

Although the conflict between Jews and Palestinians, so prominent in the headlines during the recent Gaza conflict, has faded once again into the media background, it remains a hot topic for academics. The traditional late fall and winter meetings of academic organizations has brought up the question of boycotting Israeli universities as punishment for the invasion of Gaza and the deaths of civilians. The larger context is the emotional issue of the existence of Israel itself.

At the end of November, the Middle East Studies Association held its annual meeting in Washington DC. Although MESA calls itself “a non-political association”, its focus on the Middle East is one-sided: none of the editors of its three journals and its nine current “honorary fellows” study Israel or are Jewish; they all focus on Islamic nations. On the first day of the conference, Steven Salaita appeared to a standing ovation. Salaita has become famous, not for his scholarship, which is shoddy, but because his virulently anti-Israel tweets cost him a job at the University of Illinois. He is an open hater of Israel: “‘Hate’ is such a strong word. That’s why it’s my preferred verb when discussing racism, colonization, neoliberalism, sexism and Israel.”

Salaita asks, “What exactly is wrong with hating Israel?” The answer for any academic is obvious: our job is supposed to be to evaluate dispassionately, to weigh objectively, to write even-handedly. Yet the MESA participants applauded Salaita. Presumably they agree with his claim that “civility is the language of genocide”.

Lara Kiswani, leader of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center in San Francisco, said last month at UC Berkeley that the boycott of Israel was intended to destroy the Israeli state. When a Jewish member of the audience said she felt threatened by such language, Kiswani said, “part of the problem with the Palestine question particularly on campus is it always gets framed as this two-sided thing and liberal democracy loves to make it seem like everyone has a right to speak . . . . As long as you choose to be on that side, I’m going to continue to hate you.” So much for discussion.

The kind of argument made by such demagogues is well represented by the Kent State University professor of Latin American history Julio Pino, who recently wrote that “academic friends of Israel” are personally “culpable” “for the murder of over 1,400 Palestinian children, women and elderly civilians” by a “regime that is the spiritual heir to Nazism.”

MESA and other academic organizations which have endorsed a boycott of Israel represent one side of one-sided arguments about the Middle East. They never mention the launching of rockets at Israeli civilians or the terror bombings inside Israel. Nor do the boycotters ever announce a set of principles for deciding whom to boycott, because that would force them to expand the list of nations they hate for human rights abuses: China, Iran, North Korea.

The other side is loudly voiced in Israel and the US, and has gained weight in response to the increasing noise from the Israel haters. Anyone in Israel who dares to assert that Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent have rights is liable to be shouted down, cursed and threatened. A recent poll showed that one third of Israelis believe Israeli Arabs should not have the vote. When a newscaster reported on deaths in Gaza, a Facebook page with thousands of supporters demanded that she be fired. A group of rabbis said property should not be rented to Arabs. Another religious organization named Lehava (Flame) breaks up weddings between Jews and Muslims. Fans of the soccer team Beitar Jerusalem protested when two Muslim players were signed.

The new President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, a Likud member and ardent supporter of continued construction of settlements on the West Bank, is also a passionate defender of equal rights for Arabs in Israel. For that he has been called “President of Hezbollah”, “traitor”, and “Arab agent”. President Rivlin recently argued that Israel is “a sick society”, and asked if Israelis have “forgotten how to be decent human beings”. On November 29, a bilingual Jewish-Arab school in Jerusalem, the largest mixed institution in Israel, was set on fire after the arsonists had scrawled “Death to Arabs” on the walls.

Here in the US, an organization named Amcha has published a list of 200 Middle Eastern studies academics who, it claims, are antisemitic because they criticize Israeli policies. In October, 40 Jewish Studies professors shot back with a statement deploring Amcha’s efforts to stifle open discussion.

The Israeli government deserves condemnation for its racist treatment of Palestinians, within Israel and in the occupied territories. Palestinian organizations, like Hamas, must be deplored for their terrorist attacks on civilians. Academics, and anyone else, who ignores the murderous behavior of both sides contributes to further polarization.

And I despair of ever seeing peace come to the one place where Jews are not a minority.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 9, 2014

Giving Thanks

A sign outside of a local church had a short but profound message: “Give thanks.” We could all do more of that.

While the tradition of giving thanks to God for the harvest was well established in Europe, the first Thanksgiving of the Pilgrims in 1621 offered gratitude more explicitly to the Wampanoag tribe, who had taught the Pilgrims to grow corn and had helped with supplies of food during their first winter. Sadly that gratitude to Native Americans for their life-saving assistance did not last long.

Our national Thanksgiving celebration was proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 in a futile attempt to forge a sense of unity between North and South during the Civil War. He had been influenced by the efforts of the writer Sarah Josepha Hale, who was an advocate for ending slavery, for higher education for women, and for women entering the work force. She was a national patriot, advocating the preservation of Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, the building of a monument at Bunker Hill, and the unifying spirit of Thanksgiving. Lincoln was the fifth president to whom she wrote requesting that Thanksgiving become a national holiday.

At Thanksgiving many families say what they are thankful for. It is important to remember and articulate those things in our lives for which we are most grateful. But the thanks given around the dinner table are often not directed at anyone. The real power of “thanks” comes when they are given freely to another person.

To give thanks, we are often urged to give, to make donations of time or money to deserving causes, like the homeless, animal shelters, or senior centers. That is a form of paying it forward, a phrase originated a century ago by Lily Hardy Hammond in her 1916 book “In the Garden of Delight”, long before the film “Pay It Forward” was produced in 2000. She wrote, “You don’t pay love back; you pay it forward.” Turning our sense of gratitude for the bounties we enjoy into good deeds for others is an important social glue. But this form of thanks also does not reach the people to whom we owe our gratitude.

I don’t believe it is possible to say “thanks” to people too often. Great leaders I know use frequent gestures of public thanks to encourage and motivate. Giving thanks brings people together in relationships of support, appreciation and trust, and encourages our best behavior toward each other.

We all need appreciation. When our random acts of kindness are acknowledged with thanks, we feel empowered to continue our generosity. Thanks can lead to more thanks.

Thanking someone is not always easy. It might acknowledge that another person’s help was needed, that they had power we didn’t have. Giving thanks, though, can level those differences by evening the score.

Sometimes people have difficulty accepting thanks. Yet even when someone says, “Oh, that’s nothing,” they may appreciate the thanks.

I am thankful for my good health at 66, but it would be very easy to forget the many doctors who have employed their extraordinary skills to keep my body functioning. From the regular ministrations of my chiropractor, Jackie Lausen, to the emergency intervention of my eye surgeon, Lanny Odin, doctors doing their jobs have earned my personal thanks for their work. Thanks should be given not just for unexpected favors, but also for normal services.

Although I expect my children to be kind to their father, I also thank them for love I don’t take for granted. The less we take for granted, the more we will say “thanks”, the more appreciation is spread to another person, the more joy in giving is shared. Good givers don’t need thanks, but always appreciate them.

Thanks for reading my words.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 2, 2014

Technology Versus Jobs

The replacement of human workers by machines is an old story. In early 19^th-century England, weavers and agricultural laborers, under the banner of their imaginary commander General Ludd, attacked the new machines which threatened to eliminate their jobs. Since then people who oppose technological innovation have been called Luddites, meaning benighted opponents of “progress”.

Although our very present-minded society might consider two centuries an eternity, the transformation of human life through technological innovation has been rapid, even violently so. In 1850, most people on earth still lived and worked much like their ancestors 1000 years before, assisted only by hand tools and animal power. Within a few generations, everything changed, and now it seems like everything keeps changing faster than we can keep up.

While technology has destroyed jobs, it has created even more new ones. The blacksmiths and wheelwrights who maintained the primitive vehicles of the 19^th century were replaced by many times as many automobile workers and mechanics. But in recent decades, many of those jobs have disappeared, replaced by machines. Over the past 20 years, the US has lost about one quarter of our manufacturing jobs. That rapid decline has been due to the twin processes of automation and export of jobs to places where workers are paid much less.

One drive of capitalist business is to create new products and new markets, which can mean more jobs. But an equally important drive is to reduce costs by replacing skilled workers with cheaper, less skilled workers, and then replacing them with even cheaper machines. The benefits of that kind of progress flow to the owners of industries, while their formerly employed workers have to scramble for other jobs. The first kinds of jobs that were replaced by machines were in manufacturing. But recently clerical and service sector jobs are also being replaced, usually by computers.

That brings me to one of the most recent technological innovations, online education. We are told, or being sold the idea, that computers can replace teachers. Even though teachers are paid strictly middle-class incomes, replacing them with ever cheaper computers could represent enormous savings. At the university level, the development of MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, vastly increases the number of students who can be reached by one teacher. Harvard University recently offered a course on ancient Greek literary heroes that enrolled 27,000 students. In order to provide a minimum of real human contact, Harvard alumni and former teaching fellows were asked to volunteer to direct online discussions. But most of the interaction was among the students, rather than between students and teachers.

The fundamental claim behind MOOCs is that content is everything. The personal interaction between teacher and student is unnecessary, or can be reduced to occasional email question-and-answer, without any loss in learning. Because much of the teaching at giant public universities is already done in courses with hundreds of students, this may seem like only a minor shift. But even when the professor lectures by Power Point to an auditorium full of passive students, graduate students or part-time adjuncts supply the possibility of human contact and personal attention. MOOCs and similar forms of online education eliminate that remnant of the teacher-student relationship.

EdX, a consortium between Harvard and MIT, one of the larger enterprises offering online education, uses computer programs to grade student writing. That effort has spawned a Luddite reaction: thousands of faculty have signed a petition against this practice, stating clearly “Computers cannot read.”

Public universities are starving for financial support as state educational budgets have been reduced in recent years. The recession caused major cuts to state financial support of higher education: per student funding has fallen by 23% since 2008. An inevitable result is that tuition has increased by 28% over inflation, greatly outpacing the sluggish growth in Americans’ average income.

I am not opposed to all forms of online education. The use of computers to deliver information and ideas cheaply and across any distance can greatly increase access to learning for students of all kinds: families who cannot afford college tuition, adults who wish to pursue special interests, professionals who seek further knowledge in their specialties. But the drive to cut costs in secondary and higher education, the increasing reliance on standardized tests, and the easy provision of content via computers could come together in the near future in the replacement of teachers with machines.

Last year the American Council on Education recommended that college credit be given for some MOOCs. The model of teaching and learning through personal interaction would be replaced by Power Point lectures, passive video watching, and computerized grading of student essays, all in an effort to save money.

Maybe I’m just a Luddite at heart. I don’t have a smart phone, a Facebook page, or any presence on social media. I don’t want to talk with my refrigerator. I do like to talk with students, to see their reaction to the information I give them and the questions I ask. I believe that my colleagues are far more effective at teaching information, concepts, and ways of thinking than any computer program.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 25, 2014