We asked Rabbi Jonathan Hausman of Congregation Ahavath Torah of Stoughton, Massachusetts for his views on why Jewish students at Princeton caved to demands of campus Muslim and Jewish chaplains as well as student Muslim, pro-Palestinian and Arab advocacy groups and summarily cancelled the appearance of colleague, Nonie Darwish, co-founder of Former Muslims United. He sent us this thoughtful appraisal of the malaise of self censorship and moral relativism afflicting both Jewish students and much of American Jewish leadership.
Read his telling comments. They are a clarion call for a new movement to equip American Jewish students to develop the skills of critical thinking to enable them to combat on-campus threats by Muslim and anti-Israel advocacy groups. What happened at Princeton and my alma mater Columbia University this week is not an isolated phenomenon.
Carolyn Glick in a Jerusalem Post column, today, "Whither Ameican Jewry? " drew attention to the bizarre case of the NYU Hillel chapter Rabbi urging students to join Muslim groups commemorating the massacre and protesting a Professor whose Wall Street Jounal op-ed stating clealy that Major Hasan was an Islamic terrorist. She noted:
It certainly trumps the interests of New York University's Hillel director Rabbi Yehuda Sarna. As James Taranto reported on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, this week Sarna called for NYU's Jewish community to join NYU Muslims at a rally that both commemorated the massacre at Ft. Hood and denounced NYU professor Tunku Varadarajan for writing a column in Forbes magazine. In his article, Varadarajan committed the crime of stating the obvious fact that Ft. Hood terrorist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was motivated by his Islamic beliefs when he shouted Allahu Akbar and shot some 40 people, killing 13.
Given that people and groups like al-Qaida and Hamas that share Hasan's views assert that all Jews should be killed, it would seem that the good rabbi would not feel the need to attack professors who point out that Hasan's views are dangerous. But then, it is no longer strange to see Hillels on American university campuses behaving in a manner that is not in line with what might be considered the interests of either the American Jewish community or the Jewish people as a whole.
Here is Rabbi Hausman's jeremiad.
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I was stunned by the cancellation of Nonie Darwish’s talk at Princeton as both a Jew and a Rabbi. I am appalled by the outcome, disappointed at the lack of courage shown by Princeton's Tigers for Israel and the American Whig-Cliosophic Club. However, I think that the problem borders on a politically correct stupor or psychosis. In an attempt not to offend Muslims or anything Islamic, the campus is silent on Islam. There is neither critical academic exploration into the totality of Islamic doctrine nor on how such doctrine has been put into practice in the 14 centuries since Muhammad and the 'Ummah' burst upon the historic scene from its Arabian Peninsula birthplace. Are the rigors of higher criticism of the Bible (an exercise Rabbis had undertaken 1800 years before Wellhausen's founding of Higher Biblical Criticism, much of it couched in anti-Semitic jargon) not to be applied to Islam's foundational sources (Qur'an, Hadith, Sira) for fear of offending? If so, when did the First Amendment's guarantee of Freedom of Speech include under its umbrella the right not to be offended? This was the argument provided during this most recent Princeton ruckus.
When did it become de rigueur to enforce a code of silence in academia, by professors and students, regarding Islam's dealings with the kaffir, honor killings, and the like? It seems that Jews, Jewish students and the Jewish professorate, religious leaders such as Princeton's Director of the Center for Jewish Life, in particular, suffer the pain of cultural and moral relativism. "We have to understand the cultural context/milieu as truth is multifaceted." In so doing, the forces of decency and reason will wither and die. We Jews and Americans, by our hand, will shirk from robustly defending ourselves, our way of life, our American values and our Jewish identities. The result is self-censorship, a classic dhimmi behavior. The Islamists will only have to threaten the charge of libel and slander, or categorize as an Islamophobe anyone who examines and speaks about the essence of textual Islam. An Islam with its Qur'anic mandated treatment of women as chattel, Islam's supersessionist and supremacist theology, second class treatment of non-Muslims, death penalty for apostasy, the forced payment of the jizya for non-Muslims, and the inhumanely segregated sexual roles which channel energy into Jihad, etc.
This is a direct result of Jewish leaders who have replaced a thorough grounding in Jewish knowledge and parochial concerns with the myth of universal utopianism, wherein leaders and educators have raised two or more generations of Jews with a complete absence of traditional Jewish values. The demands of mitzvot observance have been replaced with a misplaced emphasis solely on the emotional and spiritual dimensions of life. As a result, so-called secular progressive norms have filled the vacuum. We now have a situation wherein universal truths are no longer taught by our leaders and the space has been filled with "understanding the cultural norms of the other,” multicultural and moral relativism, and an emphasis on liberal politics so pliable that such a worldview can fit any construct.
The result is that we have sent generations of Jewish students to the college campus unable to defend themselves against the slightest anti-Jewish provocations, disconnected from the corpus of Jewish identity fostered by our common texts and history, uninterested or ashamed or embarrassed by Israel's existence or actions taken by her in her own defense. As Rabbis, we learned that Rabbinic aphorism chutzpha k'lapei shamayim. We have the nerve to challenge the Almighty in contrast to the absolutism of Islam. However, our Campus Rabbis refuse to defend our students or teach them to defend themselves in debate and action. Where is the Campus Rabbinic leadership?
This has been a complete abdication of moral and intellectual leadership by our Jewish leaders in order to appear reasonable. The Islamists know western weakness well. The post-modern, global West does not want to be cast as intolerant. So, we give away the store, strip ourselves of our defenses and hope that we will be left alone. We will lose instead.
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