Dear Editor,
As a former university professor I want to thank Bard College for offering the course: “Apartheid in Israel-Palestine,” as I thank them for all the classes in their various programs that tackle difficult and controversial issues. That is what a good institution of higher learning is mandated to do around the many political and social contentions in our world – past and present. Ignoring, denying and shutting down a discussion of what’s happening on the ground in Israel and Palestine, is closing the door on dialogue and discussion, the bedrock of a Liberal Art’s university experience. 

 

Should we not talk about the silence and complicity of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust; the near genocide of indigenous people in the Americas; the role of Africa’s elites in the slave trade; the way the United States cherry picks human rights abuses in countries around the world and completely ignores them in others? I hope not, despite the fiery content. Leon Botstein should be applauded for not caving into the Ulster County Jewish Federation’s hollow and desperate charge of anti-Semitism. 

 

To brand a course anti-Semitic because it examines the social constructs of Zionism, Apartheid, Occupation, Democracy, and Colonization is dangerous, and runs the risk of tempering and diluting the very real forms of anti Semitism that threaten our social order. This course is NOT one of them. 

Jim Savio
Woodstock, New York