Columbia's Jewish problem.(Notes & comments: March 2005)(Brief Article)

Meet Joseph Massad. He is a professor in Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. As has been widely noted (see, for example, James Panero's report on our weblog at www.newcriterion.com), Massad is accused of asking one Israeli student who had served in the Israeli army, "How many Palestinians did you kill?" Sol Stern and Fred Siegel, writing in The New York Sun, reported that at a recent panel discussion at Columbia on conflict in the Middle East, Massad used the phrase "racist Israeli state" more than two dozen times and argued that Yasser Arafat "was in effect an Israeli collaborator for even talking about compromise." The rash of anti-Semitic incidents at Columbia--best symbolized, perhaps, by the creation of an Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies (which is almost as good as the Alger Hiss Chair in the Humanities at Bard College)--has received national attention. So has the response by Lee Bollinger, ...