Anti-Semitism initiative to end

By David Burt
Staff Reporter
Tuesday, June 7, 2011

The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA), which has operated since 2006, will not continue next year, Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies Donald Green said in a statement.

The decision to end the program has met criticism from groups across the nation that show support for Jewish people, such as the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. But Green, a political science professor, said YIISA generated little scholarly work that earned publication in highly regarded journals, and its courses attracted few students.

“YIISA suffered the same fate as other initially promising programs… that were eventually terminated at ISPS because they failed to meet high standards for research and instruction,” Green said, citing the Center for the Study of Race, Inequality and Politics as another example of an underachieving program.

By contrast, he said, other ISPS programs, such as the Ethics, Politics and Economics major and the Interdisciplinary Bioethics Center, draw “hundreds” of students to their classes each year, and programs such as the Field Experiments Initiative has produced “an extraordinary number” of articles in “top-tier academic journals.”

But several leaders of organizations that stand up against anti-Semitism have issued statements condemning Yale’s decision to close the initiative. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement that Yale should have addressed the shortcomings of the program instead of ending it.

“If there were problems that the university raised, they needed to be dealt with and resolved,” he said. “The decision to end the Center was a bad one on its own terms, but it is even worse because it leaves the impression that the anti-Jewish forces in the world achieved a significant victory.”

David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, echoed Foxman’s sentiment. He said in a statement that he hopes Yale will reconsider and keep the program.

“We hope Yale will review this unfortunate decision so that YIISA’s critical work can continue,” Harris said. “In our experience working with YIISA, AJC has been impressed by the level of scholarly discourse, the involvement of key faculty, and the initiative’s ability, through conferences and other programs, to bring a wide range of voices to the Yale campus.”

A column published Monday in the New York Post claims that Yale closed the program because YIISA “refused to ignore the most virulent, genocidal and common form of Jew-hatred today: Muslim anti-Semitism.”

But Frances Rosenbluth, deputy provost for social sciences and faculty development, said the committee that reviewed YIISA based its assessment “solely on the issue of faculty leadership and involvement.”

“Yale is strongly committed to freedom of speech, which gives rise to a rich diversity of views on campus,” she said.

ISPS was established by the Yale Corporation in 1968.

Comments

  • attila

    Excellent move. This program was an embarrassment to the university. To see how wise it was to shut it down, read the quotes defending the program. It was not about the academic study of an important issue, anti-Semitism. It existed to provide a thin veneer of Yale respectability for hating Muslims.

    And before you call me an anti-Semite, I’m a MOT as are nearly all the Yale people involved in making this decision.

  • The Anti-Yale

    I should think that the letter recently acquired by the Wiesenthal Center, supposedly the first instance of Hitler’s anti-semitic obsession, and signed by Hitler, would open all kinds of possible research for the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism.

    PK

  • CAngelina

    I was curious, so, I searched “anti-semitism” as a topic in Google Scholar to see what sources the published articles were return in. Not surprisingly most of the article were in books: http://tinyurl.com/4yotmth. And although there are 10 Jewish Studies journals listed on JSTOR, a search for “anti-semetism” published in these over the last ten years returned less than 200 articles: hhttp://tinyurl.com/3n9yxj7

    This low number can be tentatively explained, but it makes it more regrettable that the administration at Yale has decided to base the the success for the program on the criteria they did, namely, the quantity of student or faculty publications. When you have a topic, like anti-semitism, that is difficult to find productive ways to generate discussion outside of the the sub-discipline, these are exactly the barriers you come up against. Yet, this supports why it should be a priority for the school. It is an important, and underserved topic. Other schools have made similar decision to shut down specialized programs dedicated to informing broader social science communities, and absorbed these into Ethic Studies programs. In these cases the rationale is usually financial. There is another reason that it is difficult for students in these fields to generate the corpus of work that other students can: the topics have a potential to generate an emotional response (even if they are done objectively and without ‘tone’), and as such, it is challenging to get papers published for fear that research topics will be off-putting and readership will dwindle. Otherwise, I would expect to see more article on “anti-semitism” from prominent journals, rather than books, or more in the most relevant journals. I think these topic are wrongly perceived as less objective, and academics love their universal models and theoretical paradigms, because it removes the researcher from the data; and the peer-reviewers from accountability.

    This decision to end the program is predictable, given the emphasis on publishing *as a grad student* as a desirable quality in post-grad job applicants, and given and the structure of academia in general. The best of these displaced students will find a home in a programs that paint with a broader brush – such as Philosophy, or Political Science. Perhaps they will have to leave Yale to do it; or sadly, they may have to frame their research differently, as more universally applicable, to be appealing to faculty in the programs where they apply.

    It’s a shame, but a sad reality of the self-replicating system that we call higher learning. Hopefully, when the faculty and students move forward, they can start specialized journals, because getting published in The American Journal of Sociology is much more difficult, than getting published in the sub-specialty journals available to many other students, or the journals available to students who choose to conduct research around paradigms, rather than phenomenon.

  • The Anti-Yale

    Let’s talk turkey here.

    REPARATIONS not scholarly publications
    is the reason the Yale Initiative for Interdisicplinary Studies of Anti-Semitism
    ought to remain at Yale. For decades during Yale’s WASP heyday, Yale itself engaged in Anti-Semitic QUOTAS in its admissions formuli.

  • phantomllama

    Can we please be paid reparations for having to read Paul Keane’s posts every time we log on to this website? The man’s opinions on every single issue are inherently predictable, and it’s amusing that he uses Yale’s name both in his username and in his ceaseless reminders that he has a degree – a sign of insecurity, since he knows he would be nothing without the institution he so childishly hates.

    I can’t help but think that he was overlooked for a place on a higher degree course at Yale, and has never got over it.

  • The Anti-Yale

    Sorry to disappoint

    I’m not Gary Hart or John Danforth: I didn’t use the Divinity School as a back door to a higher degree or to the law school.

    In fact, I took the divinity degree for personal satisfaction. My parents had named me for their youth group leader who was professor at the Divinity School for 40 years: Douglas Macintosh. His colleague, Roland Bainton, was still at the Divinity school in his early 80′s when I arrived in ’76, and he took me undder his wing asa kind of adopted grandson.

    The Yale degree has never had any practical application in my life or career. In fact it is a liability and suspect of elitism in the egalitarian world up here the Green Mountains.

    My M.A. from Bread Loaf School of English (Middlebury ’97) is much more impressive.

    PK

    PS It is Anti-Yale as in Anti-Pope — you know Avignon and all that.

  • The Anti-Yale

    PS:

    “having to read Paul Keane’s posts every time we log on to this website? The man’s opinions on every single issue are inherently predictable”

    “HAVING to read?” Are you bound and gagged and forced to rivet your eyes to my postings? Simply skip them.

    “PREDICTABLE”?
    My blog The Anti-Yale http://theantiyale.blogspot.com is hardly predictable in its 475 posts. Its 18,000+ hits in the last 12 months indicate anything but predicatbility.

  • attila

    PK sure gives the 1st Amendment a workout — talking nonsense nearly non-stop. And since he only has one topic — autobiography — it gets tiresome. Just be glad you don’t have to interact with the man in person.

  • The Anti-Yale

    phantomllama and atila:

    What kind of masochist reads posts to the point of finding them “tiresome”?

    Just ignore them—–skip over them !

    The real source of your irritation may be peeking out from under your authoritarian toga.

  • phantomllama

    “PREDICTABLE”? My blog The Anti-Yale http://theantiyale.blogspot.com is hardly predictable in its 475 posts. Its 18,000+ hits in the last 12 months indicate anything but predicatbility.”

    I am sure your F5 button gets a great workout, what with you pressing it 50 times a day…

  • The Anti-Yale

    I wondered if Google analytics was recording my own entries into my blog, so I entered the blog ten separate times in a row to see if it changed my tally. Didn’t do beans. Apparently those 18,000 are actual discreet visits. Not bad for a nobody from Vermont.

  • attila

    PK: do you have any idea just how crazy you are?

  • The Anti-Yale

    According to Google Analytics, I am THIS crazy:

    In the last 12 months from 148 countries and every state in the USA http://theantiyale.blogspot.com has had :

    21,907 visits

    32,533 page views

    1.49 pages per visit

    90.19% new visits

    19,767 visitors

  • attila

    I rest my case.

  • The Anti-Yale

    Well, I don’t know about you, but Poor Richard and Tom Paine would have been quite happy to have
    folks reading their prose.
    I gladly plead guilty to that crime.

  • attila

    So PK is a combination of Ben Franklin and Tom Paine?

  • The Anti-Yale

    PK is a self-publisher.

  • The Anti-Yale

    “Pamphleteer” is more accurate.

  • The Anti-Yale

    Attila:

    Your question prompts me to reflect. Here are projects I have created and pamphleteered about over the last 43 years:

    • NAABP (National Association for the Advancement of Bearded People) 1968, Ithaca, NY

    • Teach-In on Racism, 1969, Ithaca, New York

    • Kent State Petition for a Federal Grand Jury, 1971-73, Kent State University and The White
    House

    • Pop’s Snow Squad 1971-73, Kent, Ohio (Charles Kuralt “On the Road” , CBS Evening News,
    12/ 25/ 72)
    • Douglas Clyde Macintosh Centennial at Yale, 1977

    • Holy Smoke: Opinionation from Holy Hill, Yale Divinity School, 1976-83

    • Thornton Wilder Memorabilia, Mayor’s Bicentennial Commission, Hamden, CT 1976-85

    • AIDS Information Dissemination Service (A.I.D.S.) 1981

    • First Documented Heterosexual Transmission of AIDS uncovered at Yale-New Haven Hospital
    ( 60 Minutes, 1984)
    • The Anti-Yale (and 50 other blogs) 2009 – present)

  • attila

    “Reflecting” implies asking questions of ourselves about why we do what we do. If you did that, you might stop the endless auto-biography and self-promotion.

    Being endlessly fascinated with ones self is a normal phase of life… for an adolescent.

  • The Anti-Yale

    Note the 25 year interstice between the last two projects. Self-promotion is a complete waste of time at the end of one’s life. It is a relief to be well past retirement age. The Anti-Yale is little more than a digital mirror, a kind of vox clamantis is deserto before I expire.

    I’ll leave self-promotion to your age group. Enjoy.

  • Yale12

    lollll at PK imply Bread Loaf is somehow less elitist than Yale…

  • The Anti-Yale

    Bread Loaf is IN Vermont. Yale is NOT .

    To Vermonters, that makes all th difference in sniffing out an elitist.

    Vermont was at one time a separate nation: the Northeast Kingdom.

    It still behaves as if it remains separated from the United States: the first state to outlaw slavery; to have a Jewish, woman governor; a socialist Congressman; Civil Unions—-and soon, a single payer health care system.

    You have to do time in Vermont to understand.

    Vacations, tourism, won’t aren’t enough.

  • jnewsham

    trolololololing at this entire thread

  • The Anti-Yale

    If its trolling, why would you read it? Or comment?

    If you want to get back to the article, Yale should keep YIISA. They owe it to the Jewish members of the community as reparations for a half century of now uncovered and admitted blatant anti-semitism in Yale’s admisssions (“Jewish maximum “) quota policy.

  • attila

    Setting aside my other objections to the verbal diarrhea coming from PK… this latest comment shows just how clueless he is. YIISA has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It is thinly-disguised Islamophobia and nothing more. The question of whether YIISA sponsored high-quality research is easily answered; it sponsored NO research, because that was not the point. The point was to portray Islam and Muslims as a monolithic danger to the Jewish people and to the West in general.

    (This approach should sound familiar, in a creepy way, to anyone with an historical sensibility.)

    Yale has no business tolerating an entity which exists just to publicly hate Muslims.

    And even if the Jewish people wanted “reparations” from Yale, this would not be the way to do it. Judaism is not about hatred, no matter what the current ADL leadership would have you believe.

  • The Anti-Yale

    Evidence?

  • The Anti-Yale

    BTW:

    Unlike Islamophobia, which is a relatively new version of superstition and irrationality, Anti-semitism has been the hobby of statesmen and intellectuals as well as the rabble for hundreds if not thousands of years, all based on the superstitious humbug of misreading the New Testament fables about a Jewish traitor among the Twelve Disciples. (They were ALL Jewish, including Jesus for heaven’s sake.) This superstitious idiocy has an equal precedent in the Old Testament: 3000 years of racism based on the story of Ham’s sin of viewing the nakedness of his father Noah and the subsequent punishment by Yahweh of creating Ham’s offspring with black skin.

    What rubbish.

    What fools these mortals be.

  • The Anti-Yale

    CORRECTION: Anti-semitism preceded even the christian fable, viz. Cicero. However, the christian fable fanned the resentment into a simmering hatred among the masses.

  • The Anti-Yale

    “Reflecting” implies asking questions of ourselves about why we do what we do. If you did that, you might stop the endless auto-biography and self-promotion.
    Being endlessly fascinated with ones self is a normal phase of life… for an adolescent.

    Attila:
    Ross Douthout in today’s NYT puts a finger on your irritation. My self-absorption in these posts and The Anti-Yale blog is a groteque exaggeration , a prescient warning, of what your generation will become as it turns into botox-worshippping wrinkle-bags:

    OP-ED COLUMNIST
    The Online Looking Glass
    By ROSS DOUTHAT
    Published: June 12, 2011
    According to a variety of sociologists (San Diego State’s Jean Twenge, Notre Dame’s Christian Smith, and others), younger Americans are more self-absorbed, less empathetic and hungrier for approbation than earlier generations — and these trends seem to have accelerated as Internet culture has ripened. The rituals of social media, it seems, make status-seekers and exhibitionists of us all.

    This guy gets PAID? I said this in a post here for free YESTERDAY!
    . “The Anti-Yale is little more than a digital mirror, a kind of vox clamantis is deserto before I expire.”

    PK
    (paid knothing)

  • saybrookblog

    i think this program will be good in the future.. lets hope to give support..

    saybrookblog.com

  • Arafat

    one can always count on Yale to not give a sh*t while claiming it’s a very thspecial place filled with caring, brilliant humanitarians.

    http://frontpagemag.com/2011/06/15/yale%e2%80%99s-distressing-decision-to-shut-down-yiisa/

  • Arafat

    Yale,

    Look in the mirror:

    http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=6889

    Do you like what you see?

    You’re living up to your unspoken heritage. Congrats.

  • The Anti-Yale

    See Jean-Paul Sartre “Anti-Semite and Jew”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semite_and_Jew

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