Category: Criminal Justice

This week’s parashah has some famous stories: the sale of Esau’s birthright for a stew; Jacob’s deceitful procurement of his father’s blessing. But I found something that spoke to me in a less-known wrinkle in the plot: the story of Isaac and the wells. Isaac lives near Gerar, in proximity to Avimelekh’s people, and to avoid being killed by people who might lust for Rebecca he does the same trick his father pulled twice: he pretends Rebecca is his sister. The jig is up, eventually, and Avimelekh orders his people not to touch Isaac. But people living in proximity and fighting over scarce resources during a famine is not a recipe for peace and harmony. Here’s what happened next (Genesis 26: 12-22):

Isaac sowed in that land and reaped a hundredfold the same year. יהוה blessed him, and the man grew richer and richer until he was very wealthy: he acquired flocks and herds, and a large household, so that the Philistines envied him.

And the Philistines stopped up all the wells which his father’s servants had dug in the days of his father Abraham, filling them with earth.

And Abimelech said to Isaac, “Go away from us, for you have become far too big for us.” So Isaac departed from there and encamped in the wadi of Gerar, where he settled.

Isaac dug anew the wells which had been dug in the days of his father Abraham and which the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham’s death; and he gave them the same names that his father had given them.

But when Isaac’s servants, digging in the wadi, found there a well of spring water,

the herdsmen of Gerar quarreled with Isaac’s herdsmen, saying, “The water is ours.” He named that well Esek, because they contended with him.

And when they dug another well, they disputed over that one also; so he named it Sitnah.

He moved from there and dug yet another well, and they did not quarrel over it; so he called it Rehoboth, saying, “Now at last יהוה has granted us ample space to increase in the land.”

Genesis 26: 12-22

Shortly after Trump was elected, I remember talking to two of my neighbors. They’ve been together forever, through the fight for gay rights and AIDS widowhood and the horrid deaths around the Castro and the murders of Milk and Moscone and the fight for equality. Tough guys, and at the same time full of joy. And what they said was, “we’ll just have to do all that…. AGAIN.”

I found their courage and perseverance inspiring–just as I find Isaac’s tenacity in digging wells, again and again. He didn’t sit by the well and bemoan his victimization. He didn’t deconstruct Philistine supremacy. He got to work. And I think those of us in the diaspora, encountering noxious views, hatred, ignorance, and violence, have to resign ourselves to the same task: unclogging old wells, digging new ones, and finding fresh water.

Apparently, my essay about antisemitism in academia has been making the rounds, and I’m getting lots of supportive reactions, but to my dismay many of them are compassion for my supposed victimization. This was not at all my intent when writing it. It’s natural for my Israeli and Jewish students to complain that the endless compassion for, and alliances with, any oppressed group have passed them by. But I would be very upset if the upshot of all this, the measure of success, were to be an inclusion of this additional voice in the petulant choir of victims.

Isaac didn’t sit and cry to God about how he was a victim of oppressive well-clogging. He didn’t petition the Philistines to recognize his disenfranchisement. What he did do was fight like hell. Some of those fights he lost, and he called those wells what they were: monuments of hatred. But he got straight to work and unclogged other wells, or dug up fresh ones. He and his servants took the trouble to dig deep, until they were sure they were provided for.

I’m already dreaming up ways to dig wells and keep their waters from getting rancid. I want to invite you, readers, to do the same. Here are some things I have found inspiring this week along these veins.

First thing, rather than sit and weep as people clog your wells, is to stand up to them and refute their claims to the water. Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s excellent essay The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False is an excellent, historically informed rebuttal to the usual claptrap one hears on campuses these days. Only last week, a grown, educated man stood up in an auditorium at my workplace and, in front of 200 people and apparently completely unashamed, chalked up the horrid, irrefutable facts of the horrid massacre to “Israeli disinformation.” He also regurgitated the usual ideological package, which Sebag-Montefiore’s summarily dismisses as follows:

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Simon Sebag-Montefiore, “The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False”, The Atlantic, October 27, 2023

Montefiore proceeds to unpack the roots of the crisis. He does not shy away from strident critique of Israel’s policy, of the occupation, and especially of the disastrous Netanyahu government. And he also does not shy away from taking apart, and disproving, both the “settler colonial” idea and the “genocide” tag.

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

If the “settler-colonist” narrative is not true, it is true that the conflict is the result of the brutal rivalry and battle for land between two ethnic groups, both with rightful claims to live there. As more Jews moved to the region, the Palestinian Arabs, who had lived there for centuries and were the clear majority, felt threatened by these immigrants. The Palestinian claim to the land is not in doubt, nor is the authenticity of their history, nor their legitimate claim to their own state. But initially the Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland.” In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. The conflict today was not inevitable. It became so as the communities refused to share and coexist, and then resorted to arms.

Sebag-Montefiore also persuasively argues that this “decolonization” narrative is the worst thing that can happen to this conflict now:

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Oslo Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

Some sources tie these narratives to the flow of Qatari money into U.S. universities. A new NCRI report follows the money and correlates its sources with (1) the erosion of free speech and (2) the increase in antisemitic incidents on campuses.

Second order of business is to see who is actually unclogging wells, as opposed to shifting blame and whining, and support them. Unsurprisingly, these are the folks who stood day after day, shoulder to shoulder with my parents to protest the decay of the country. Since I mentioned the Netanyahu government, it is worth shining a light on the fact that, in the same way that Hamas is not Gaza, Netanyahu is not the Israeli people, and support for his government, which was already tenuous, has plummeted. Yair Rosenberg has a superb article in The Atlantic in which he unpacks what happened, and how the scorned, maligned lefties who led the anti-government protests in the last few months and proving to be more capable, dependable, and courageous than the government, to the point of supplanting it:

As Israel’s crony-filled Netanyahu government flailed and its security services faltered, ordinary citizens—many of them dissenters against the current ruling coalition—took charge. Crisis tends to separate the poseurs from the professionals, and the deadliest day in Israel’s history did just that.

Rosenberg gives some examples: the heroism of Yair Golan and Noam Tibon, who, as the army dawdled, were already on the ground rescuing people; Eylon Levy, who stepped up to do international outreach after the official minister of outreach, who is a nincompoop, quit her job just when she was actually needed. In general, he says,

Within Israel, relief efforts have been dominated not by government officials but by volunteers, many of whom come from the organized anti-government protest movement. Hamas’s massacre left thousands of southern Israelis traumatized, orphaned, and homeless, in need of food, shelter, and mental-health care. The subsequent Hezbollah attacks in the north have forced entire towns to evacuate. In total, about a quarter million Israelis have been displaced. Many others are struggling to cope after family members were called up to join the fighting.

Faced with these gaping social needs largely unaddressed by the government, the largest civil-demonstration movement in Israeli history repurposed itself overnight. Working out of the Expo Tel Aviv convention center, 15,000 volunteers began distributing food and supplies to refugees, finding accommodations for thousands of families, and matching psychologists with patients. Some, led by the information scientist Karine Nahon of Reichman University, used AI tools to identify victims and hostages, sorting through hours of video footage from the assault. Others helped rescue 120 pets. In Jerusalem, another group of 4,000 protesters, overseen by Michal Muszkat-Barkan, a movement leader and professor at Hebrew Union College, has provided 30,000 hot meals, run daily blood drives, and recruited 200 mental-health professionals. Across Israel, the activists derided by Netanyahu and his hard-right ministers as leftist traitors have become the country’s rapid-response team.

Yair Rosenberg, “The Day After Netanyahu”, The Atlantic, November 10, 2023.

Finally, here’s a dose of tough love as we pick up the shovels. I know my students are grieving and shocked–not only about the horrid massacre and the unfolding outcome, which is disastrous for both Israelis and Palestinians, but also about the loss of their friendships and footing in the world. It feels like gaslighting–one loses grasp of reality and of one’s own convictions. But as I said to a couple of people this week, “people your age have left families at home and gone to serve in the reserves. You found out you have shit friends? Make better friends.” I was comforted to read similar words from Batya Ungar-Saron:

So do not cast your lot as a competitor in the oppression Olympics. Instead, reject that entire way of looking at the world.

Here’s the thing: it’s good to be unpopular with a mob whose worldview has done away with the concept of right and wrong and decided, with a Nazi-like commitment to racial ideology, that you are Jewish and therefore you are white and therefore you are bad. It is good to be unpopular with people who spent the weeks after October 7 on the hunt for Jewish exaggeration, Jewish lies, Jewish crimes. It is good to be unpopular with people who cannot separate evil from power and virtue from skin color. (Unpopularity, for now, is your fate, unless you are willing to cosign your own humiliation and join the left’s token “good Jews” who advocate against Zionism from the comfort of the diaspora for plaudits from the Squad.) We don’t answer to them; we answer to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Rock of Israel and its Redeemer.

The good news is: it may not feel like it, but this country is on your side. College students are in one of vanishingly few spaces in America that sides with Hamas. Your professors will live and die in irrelevance, signing their names to their silly little letters and coming up with new jargon with which to defend terrorism while nurturing their grandiose hero complexes. Most of your peers will grow up and abandon their radical chic commitments. The progressive movement has taken a big hit, having shown its true colors to a nation that knows what is good and what is right, that can separate barbarism from civilization. 

But for now, remember this: to be a Jew is to refuse to kneel and refuse to bow. The stakes of standing upright have never been clearer than they are today, in this post–October 7 world. It’s good to have these people as your enemies, because the world will always have people who oppose what’s right and what’s good, and it is our destiny to fight them. Do it with pride.

Batya Ungar-Saron, “The Antisemites Scream. And I Stiffen My Spine.” The Free Press, November 7, 2023.

Dig up the clogged wells and name them what your ancestors named them. Dig fresh wells. Fight for them. If you win, drink deep. If you lose, dig new wells.

Shavua Tov.

It’s not news to me that my line of work is an antisemitic Petri dish. For a profession full of folks of Jewish descent, it delivers plentiful opportunities to realize how alienating and silencing the progressive conversation in the field is to Jews and especially to Israeli Jews. This stuff often masquerades as anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism, but it looks, walks and quacks like what it is. My entire career in the United States, starting with the first year at Berkeley as a grad student, was suffused with antisemitism. In 2001, fresh in the United States for grad school, I rode a bus from campus to my home, and Students for Justice in Palestine took over it and shook it. The whole bus. They took over the Wheeler building. On Holocaust Day.

That same year we brought in a new roommate from Taiwan – a PhD student – who was surprised that my nose wasn’t bigger and that I didn’t look like the people from Fiddler on the Roof.

A few months before I took my current job, in 2007, someone who would be my colleague for over a decade published an op-ed calling to expand the boycott of Israeli academics to the United States. That colleague was later asked by the person in charge of my tenure file to sit in my class and write a report of my pedagogy for the file. I was the one who had to go to that person and, politely smiling and with a friendly tone, advise him to be more cautious as they could end up with lawsuits on their hands due to carelessness. “You people are so political all the time,” was the response.

Students whom I taught using diagrams from a human rights report from B’Tzelem about outrageous torture in interrogations of Palestinians contacted the dean and the chair of my tenure committee, lying that I “trivialized Palestinian suffering with a cartoon.”

My first, award-winning book Cheap on Crime, which has nothing to do with Judaism or Israel, has lots of excellent reviews on Amazon… and one bad review. The bad review, written by a man who doesn’t know me or my opinions about Israeli politics and has not read the book–he saw an ad for a talk I gave, which had a short bio of mine–is titled “Israeli militarist on the loose.”

I’ve had to sit through countless panels in which anyone cheering Palestinian terror is met with snapped fingers and applause.

I’ve had a law review editor ask me to excise my military service from my CV, so that his friends might agree to publish my paper.

I’ve had to listen to people with graduate degrees and publications espouse ignorant, sophomoric opinions about a conflict on which they have no expertise, that were drilled into them, using the right vocabulary and getting the right nods.

I’ve seen colleagues who are Jewish authoring earnest op-eds extolling the virtues of rude and violent students to make their campuses inhospitable for their Jewish and Israeli colleagues.

I’ve had to endure idiotic explanations by fashionable anti-Zionists, many of them Jewish, who have no idea what Zionism is, are utterly unacquainted with its many strains, and cannot name a single Zionist philosopher or thinker.

I’ve had to sit through a hiring meeting and listen to a colleague who insisted that we have no one on the faculty from the Middle East. When a colleague and I said that we were from the Middle East, she explained that she meant “real Middle Easterners.”

I’ve seen people paint Israel with a broad brush stroke, as if there aren’t millions of Israelis, me included, fighting against the occupation and against the Netanyahu government. As if my friends aren’t protecting Palestinian farmers against armed settlers. As if it is impossible to believe that Jews must have a safe place on Earth and at the same time work for the human rights of Palestinians.

But today I’ve seen colleagues sink to a new low. One published an antisemitic caricature that would not be out of place in Der Stirmer (the message was that Israel is pretending to be a victim while being the aggressor. What?) Another unabashedly is advertising an event on “Palestinian resistance” in the Law & Society group. I wrote back. She doubled down, as she’s promoting her book. I would name names, but why? You know exactly who you are and you’re not ashamed of it, apparently, because you know enough of your professional connections will cheer you on. People have made very successful careers in this field out of being shameless. I doubt that this post will earn me anywhere near that acclaim, but if that means not being invited to have coffee with antisemites at a conference, I can live with the deprivation.

I shouldn’t have to explain why this is appalling, but for those who have managed to avoid the pictures of sobbing hostages, kibbutzim burned to the ground, and terrorists celebrating and throwing candy as they mangle their victims’ naked bodies, here’s my friend Tal Guttman:

For all of my non-Israeli friends, who might think this is another round of tango between Israel and the Hamas: This is much closer to 9/11 than anything we have experienced here in Israel in the last 40 or 50 years. This was an invasion. Hamas terrorists went house to house, murdering children in front of their parents, abducting 70 year old grandmothers and 12 year old schoolchildren to Gaza. 260 people were butchered in a rave. The coverage in official news channels focuses on the big buildings going down in Gaza, but I urge you to go to twitter and read the (translated if needed) testimonials, sometimes live, of people who are tweeting from their safe rooms as the terrorists are outside, telling their kids it will be all right.

Imagine that in 9/11, terrorists would invade the US, shoot 33,000 (1000) civilians dead, wound 60,000 (2000), and abduct 3000 (100) American citizens, and held them hostage in Afghanistan. Adjusting for country size, this is what happened in Israel yesterday. This is going to lead to a long, and painful war. It breaks my heart.

I despise Netanyahu, and believe his current coalition of alt-right jewish supremacist firestarters is the worst in the history of the nation and the biggest threat to Israel’s existence. However, I hear people saying how the attack yesterday was a result of recent Israeli provocation. A coordinated, large scale and surprise attack of this kind takes months to prepare and train for. This was pre-meditated, pre planned. The Israeli provocations were only an excuse. This is what pure evil looks like.

Today I’m done with professional hypocrisy, with sitting quietly in rooms where unbelievable things come out of people’s mouths. I will leave conversations that deny my humanity, respond publicly on mailing lists to people whom I emailed privately before so as not to shame them. I will not shrug off situations that evince an astonishing level of cultural and academic gaslighting. If you have ill-informed opinions that celebrate or rationalize pogroms, that explain away rape and murder of children, women, and elderly people as “resistance”, or espouse some nonsense that tries to graft this conflict onto your parochial perspectives on race in America, I am officially done with you in any professional and personal capacity. If you cannot tell the difference between resistance and mass atrocity, your humanity is so compromised that I don’t know where to even begin to educate you. Nor would you be interested in being educated.

In the days to come, this will naturally become muddied. This war will claim civilian casualties on both sides, air strikes are already devastating Gaza, and none of this is bringing the hostages any closer to home. The villains on both sides will capitalize on it. And as we all know, the more morally questionable the retaliation, the more antisemitism will flourish online. A lot of this critique will be understandable and much of it will be justifiable. But it’s telling that the backlash started *before* the retaliation, which has exposed people’s true colors.

I honestly don’t know where to go from here in this line of work. I have zero motivation or desire to work or interact with anyone whose moral compass is so compromised, and these opinions are so entrenched in my profession that I doubt I can find an environment where I feel like I can breathe. The alternative is to go back home, to a country so degraded by Jewish religious messianism and so at risk from Muslim religious messianism that I can’t in good conscience raise my son there. Our great Yiddish authors called it: there’s nowhere for Jews to put their heads down.