![]() As a militant feminist, however, she was on a bizarre mission. Are we to say that Israelis who are critical of Israeli policy are self-hating Jews, or insensitive to the ways in which criticism may fan the flames of anti-Semitism?” The proper answer to her question is often: yes.īutler recently showed up in the Middle East, to strut her support for the intifada. She writes, “Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the existence of the small but important post-Zionist movement in Israel, including the philosophers Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the sociologist Uri Ram, the professor of theatre Avraham Oz and the poet Yitzhak Laor. ![]() She writes, “A challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people only if one believes that Israel alone keeps the Jewish people alive or that all Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state of Israel in its current or traditional forms.” The fact that the very people calling for Israel to be annihilated are not calling for the elimination of any other country, not even a single one of the 22 fascist Arab states, cannot possibly have anything to do with anti-Semitism, she insists.īutler’s proof that anti-Israel radicals are not really anti-Semites? It is that she manages to find some anti-Israel extremists among Israelis, the Israeli equivalents to Taliban John, Lord Haw-Haw, and Noam Chomsky. The fact that a second Jewish Holocaust would result from Israel’s annihilation does not seem to matter to his attackers like Butler. ![]() Summers insists that people who oppose Israel’s very existence are anti-Semitic. Butler could hardly have failed to notice that the Berkeley divestment petition had supplied the impetus and inspiration for anti-Israel mob violence on her own campus on 24 April 2001, a few weeks after it had been circulated, and for more explicitly anti-Jewish mobs at San Francisco State University in May of the following year.” She therefore found Summers’ remarks not only wrong but personally ‘hurtful’ since they implicated Judith Butler herself in the newly resurgent campus anti-Semitism. “Butler had herself signed the divestment (against Israel) petition at its place of origin, Berkeley, where it had circulated in February 2001. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent (September 17, 2002).” Butler venomously denounced Summers for telling the truth, arguing that telling the truth threatens academic freedom: “Summers has struck a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not in intent.”Įdward Alexander, who is also a professor of comparative literature, explains that Butler’s hysterical attacks on Summers stemmed from something more than her girlish enthusiasm: She was horrified when Summers proclaimed: “Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Butler is perhaps best remembered as one of the most strident attackers against Lawrence Summers, the ex-President of Harvard.
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