First, they say they want you/ Indeed, how they really need you/ Suddenly, you find you’re out there walking in a storm… – Neil Diamond
Neil Diamond’s 1981 hit song “Love on the Rocks” captures my anger, angst, disgust, and deep sense of betrayal regarding America’s elite two-coast universities Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Columbia, NYU, Stanford, and Berkeley. I did my PhD at Princeton, taught for 20 summers at MIT, visited many of the others – always, when walking their halls, with a sense of awe and affection for these sacred places where creative ideas thrived that made the world a better place.
Until October 7 2023, when pro-Hamas demonstrations constantly made life miserable on these campuses for Jewish faculty and students for over a year. BDS – boycott, divest, sanction – came alive. Israeli brains were subjected to boycott, disguised as pro-human rights. And to a large extent, they still are.
A Wall Street Journal report on October 15, 2023, noted there were “30 student groups [at Harvard] who held that “the Israeli regime was entirely responsible for the mass killing and kidnapping of Israelis.” Or, as the infamous UN Secretary General António Guterres commented: “What did you [Israelis] expect?”
As a direct result, I doubt I will ever again set foot in these once revered temples of scholarship, which have become cesspools of antisemitism.
I spoke about the anti-Israel academic boycott with Prof. Boaz Golany. He is an emeritus Technion professor and former fean of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Management. He also served as Technion vice president and director general.
Golany leads a team of S. Neaman Institute researchers that studied the academic boycott and has issued an in-depth interim report. The team includes Dr. Rivka Carmi, a pediatrician and former president of Ben-Gurion University.
Keep reading at jpost.com.
Technion Professor Boaz Golany is quoted in this article sharing his thoughts.
