Editorial Article
Other Schools - Another star from the lunatic fringe in
Israeli academia: Daniel Boyarin of UC Berkeley
By Lee
Kaplan,
www.isracampus.org.il
His resume
is quite impressive, because he is a Talmudic scholar and has
written copious works about Judaism, its history and scripture. A
citizen of Israel, he once taught at Ben Gurion University and
Hebrew University and is currently a professor of Near East Studies
at UC Berkeley. Since UC Berkeley is a campus that, although it has
a large Jewish population, also is home to many anti-Israel Arab
academics in the United States, one might not be surprised that
Daniel Boyarin has a negative opinion of Israel’s self-defense
as is found among so many of Israel’s intelligentsia working in
Arab dominated US Middle East Studies programs. But Daniel
Boyarin is particularly notorious for how he displays a virulent
hatred for the Jewish people of Israel whose Talmud he studied for
so many years, particularly Israelis who practice self-defense
against Arab irredentism. In addition, Boyarin’s overlooking of
anti-Semitism and his embracing of anti-Semites at UC Berkeley make
him particularly difficult to comprehend for most rational people,
given his academic background.
Incredibly, Boyarin describes himself as an
Orthodox Jew but
Ahavat Yisrael hardly seems part of his ideals. But,
then again, Daniel Boyarin is a very conflicted man.
Not even the clowns in the
Neturei Karta, an obscure sect of Orthodox Jewry that accepts
money from the PLO to curse a Jewish state and assist anti-Semites
in their work, are quite like Daniel Boyarin. Some of the NK’s
justify their work for the Arabs as their particular interpretation
of scripture, but their leadership is on the Arab payroll. Not so,
for Boyarin, who
has been described as a “purple-faced anti-Zionist” whose
cursing of Israel is done for free. Boyarin has compared Israel’s
treatment of the Palestinians with the Nazi treatment of Jews during
the Holocaust, an inaccurate but repetitious Big Lie of the
anti-Israel propagandist crowd. The Palestinian population isn’t
shrinking but growing and Israel continues to release terrorists who
kill Jews again, but nothing Israel does appears to be acceptable to
Boyarin who also considers Zionism as inherently “violent.”
Boyarin’s objections to Israel and Zionism is predicated on a notion
that Jews are inherently weak and Jews who choose to defend
themselves (like Israelis) rather than bury themselves in books all
day like Boyarin are plagued by an Oedipus complex and desire to
kill.
Let’s face it, Boyarin is just a weird egg, and
what he says and does is frequently not in the realm of reality or
reason, just as the passionate mantra of the Arabs to dismantle
Israel by any means necessary something his allies on the UC
Berkeley campus call for regularly.
Boyarin hails from a family of avowed
communists/Marxists, and is what is sometimes referred to as a “red
diaper doper baby.” His brother, Jonathon Boyarin, is also an
avowed Marxist communist and was the Robert M. Beren Distinguished
Professor in Modern Jewish Studies at the University of Kansas
where, like Daniel, he interspersed Talmudic study with communist
Marxist doctrine. It could be said in this case the family that
supports anti-Semitic totalitarianism together, stays together.
Jewish communists today play an enormous role
in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute by keeping alive Stalinist and
communist doctrine against a Jewish state. The International
Solidarity Movement is replete with such Jews. There have always
been Jewish communists, even those who were oppressors of other
Jews, but there is really no such phenomenon as “Jewish communism”.
The problem lies in the religious zeal by which such Jewish
adherents to communism embrace such radical socialist ideas to be a
replacement of the Jewish faith. The groupthink of communism
contributes to anti-Semitism among Jewish communists because they do
not rely on common sense to promote their views, but on an
established dogma that includes anti-Semitism.
And this for an “intellectual” like Boyarin,
his Judaic Studies served more to promote his anti-Semitism and
justify his ditzy behavior rather than to promote Jewish ideals. As
a younger man, Boyarin, made aliyah to Israel in the 70’s where
later on he began to recognize the stirrings of homosexuality within
himself. Today, his writings almost always intertwine Judaism with
homosexuality. But as an Orthodox Jew, Boyarin is married to a woman
and has fathered children. Such a conflicted soul no doubt is very
angry with the world which might explain his virulent dislike for
the ideas behind Zionism as a means of Jewish self-determination.
After all, homosexuality is considered anathema in Orthodox Judaism,
despite all the attempts of Jewish homosexuals to mainstream the
sexual orientation.
But such a conflict has paid Boyarin well. UC
Berkeley’s Middle East Studies Center was catching heat from the
local Jewish community because the Saudi funded department was
pushing the false Arab diatribe of Jews ethnically cleansing Arabs.
Then one millionaire Jewish donor donated five million dollars to
the Department to lend more balance to the Jewish and Israeli point
of view. The Arab Chair chose Daniel Boyarin to head his new Jewish
studies department and with good reason. He could say he had
appointed a Jew, so could not be accused of bias, yet he knew Daniel
Boyarin was the type of Jew who would push the Arab agenda against
Israel like the Arabs do themselves.
As a reporter, I first came across Daniel
Boyarin when I was also guiding a group of Jewish students on the
Berkeley campus organized to present a strong pro-Zionist image of
Jewish Berkeley students in support of Israel. On a visit to the Cal
campus for the Shoah Memorial that year, the Jewish students were
surrounded by screaming pro-Palestinian students with bullhorns
calling for a commemoration of what they described as the
Deir Yassin Massacre. Many had been bussed to the campus from
nearby San Francisco State and UC Santa Cruz for the event.
Surprisingly, a good number of those dressed as “Palestinians” with
keffiyahs
were in fact Chicanos, from Mexican irredentist groups against
the United States, like La Raza and
La Voz De Aztlan. For that day they were “Palestinians” to the
unknowing in the zoo that made up the Berkeley audience. Still,
there were plenty of members from the
Students for Justice in Palestine from that campus present also,
including
some radical Jews from radical socialist, communist and anarchist
groups on campus, most linked to the
International Solidarity Movement.
As a volunteer, I was reading the names of the
dead from the Holocaust in a
yizkor service
when I was asked by a member of the campus Hillel to not participate
because I had an Israeli flag on my jacket. “It upsets the Jews for
Palestine,” I was told by the sincere young woman from Campus Hillel.
At UC Berkeley, being Jewish is no guarantee someone is pro-Israel
or pro-Zionist any more. In fact, some of the biggest campus
anti-Semites are Jewish at UC Berkeley. Later that same day, the
Students for Justice in Palestine
rioted and entered a building where Jewish students were also
commemorating the Holocaust injuring a policeman and getting the
campus club banned for a year by the administration. Boyarin, of
course, leapt to their defense.
I first learned exactly who and what type of
man Boyarin is when a 22 year-old Cal student, Susanna Klein, a
young Orthodox Jewish woman, called me. She was taking an advanced
class in Arabic at UC Berkeley and the instructor, Abbas Khadim, an
Iraqi ex-pat,
told the class that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was
a genuine book that had been written by “the Jews.” Susanna had
first tried complaining to the Near East Studies Department where
Boyarin was the Dean, but was completely ignored. However, Boyarin
immediately began a smear campaign against Ms. Klein stating in
an email to the local Jewish newspaper that "This complaint has been
investigated by the deans and they have concluded that it is a
lie....The department has no need to go anywhere from here, except
perhaps to consider disciplinary action with respect to a
slanderer."
In fact, Boyarin, never even interviewed the
student or did any investigation at all, openly calling her “a liar”
in the campus and community newspapers and threatening to have her
expelled from campus as one would expect in the most totalitarian
Arab society. The instructor, Khadim, was never disciplined, nor did
he change his view that the Protocols were probably genuinely of
Jewish authorship, nor was he even instructed not to report
anti-Semitic propaganda as historical fact. Some of his students in
Susanna’s class after being interviewed in the campus paper after
the brouhaha also professed that the Protocols could have been
written by Jews thanks to Boyarin’s dubious concern for scholarly
truth. Susanna Klein eventually graduated and moved on. But Daniel
Boyarin stayed on to teach other young minds.
The next I heard of Daniel Boyarin was when
former Israeli PM Ehud Barak came to speak on campus. Anti-Israel
groups on campus were out in force trying to prevent him from
speaking and heckled him throughout his speech declaring he offered
the Palestinians “nothing at all.” Boyarin, who helped lead the
demonstrators outside, many proclaiming themselves Jews for the PLO,
called Israel’s most decorated war hero, “a bad man, a violent man”
and objected to his speaking on the Cal campus calling him an “evil
racist and liar.”
It would seem a habit of Boyarin to call people
“liars” if they do not fit his agenda.
There is something incongruous about a man like
Boyarin who would declare a career soldier who fought to protect the
people of Israel from Arab groups that call openly to murder Jews a
“bad” and “violent” man, yet support some of the most cutthroat
organizations in history that engage in Jew-killing today. An
absolute pacifist is easy to understand; someone who takes no sides
in a violent dispute, but Boyarin’s passion against Israel and
cozying up to the anti-Israel forces on the Berkeley campus knows no
bounds.
If one were to listen to Boyarin, there is no
anti-Semitism at UC Berkeley either, one of the most anti-Semitic
campuses in the United States.
UC Berkeley’s Middle East Studies Center was set up by Saudi
Prince Bandar when he was Saudi Arabia’s head diplomat in the US.
The funding foundation for the MESC at Cal had on its board of
directors a Saudi sheik
named al Jeraisy who was involved in funding al Qaeda and many
of those involved in the foundation were sued in a trillion dollar
lawsuit by the victims of 9/11. Perhaps such an atmosphere explains
why Boyarin panders to the anti-Israel political base on campus. The
Helen Diller Foundation donated $5 million dollars to UC Berkeley to
set up a Jewish studies program in the MESC department only to have
its Arab Chair hire every anti-Israel anti-Zionist Jew he could get
his hands on with the money. The national divestment program from
Israel that today is found on 150 US campuses was begun at UC
Berkeley with Boyarin’s hearty support. He commits his own type of
violence in a more subtle way than any decorated soldier by his
support for boycotting and divesting from Israel, a violence that
makes many of the elderly and children in Israel eat in soup
kitchens and go to bed hungry at night. Of course, divestment from
Jews was the first action taken by the Nazis in 1933, so what a
comfort that 75 years later the same tactic is being practiced by
the former Nazi allies, the Arabs. The only difference is today it
is being done with the active help of Jews like Daniel Boyarin at UC
Berkeley.
Boyarin also spouts all the classic anti-Israel
propaganda, particularly that Israel is an “aparthied state.” The
following is a quote from Daniel Boyarin, found among similar quotes
in The Arabic News,
an Arab propagandist website, replete with accusations by other
anti-Israel “Jewish” faculty at Cal that are largely ignorant of
historical or scholarly truth:
"During the 1970's and 1980's a very successful
divestment campaign was waged in the US and Europe which undoubtedly
had an effect on the end of Apartheid. The Israeli occupation of
Palestine and destruction of human rights and democracy is at least
as severe as that of the South Africans. A similar moral and
political response is in order at this time."
- Daniel Boyarin, Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, UC Berkeley
So the Talmudic scholar, Daniel Boyarin ,
says that Israel, the only state in the Middle East that is not an
apartheid state is worse than South Africa’s worst days of the
racist practice. Boyarin voices this view in cooperation with the
Students for Justice in Palestine on the Cal campus whose platform
openly calls for Israel’s destruction.
Boyarin’s inanities include a commendation on
the dust jacket of Norman Finklestein’s book on Holocaust denial and
Jewish opportunism Beyond Chutzpah that accuses Jews
of making a business out of the Holocaust. Finklestein is another
Jewish “academic” who recently lost his job at De Paul University
for poor scholarship.
Boyarin apparently sees himself as the promoter
and self-protector of the anti-Semites on the Cal campus. A recent
expose by writer Anneli Rufus
that gave a true perspective of anti-Semitism at UC Berkeley
drew Boyarin’s ire as he wrote a
letter in rebuttal to the newspaper that ran the feature in
which Boyarin accused a Jewish student interviewed in the article as
being part of the Israel lobby and claimed that a Jewish student was
arrested on campus for spitting on a Palestinian.
Just as with his complaints about Israeli
apartheid, Boyarin had it wrong. The student was not arrested, but
had in fact been ganged up by Palestinian students during a
counterdemonstration, surrounded and pummeled. The Palestinian
students then ran to a campus cop and claimed one of them had been
spat on. When the truth came out, the charges were dropped. This
type of untruthful behavior is common on the Cal campus and the
administration does little to discourage it.
And who was the Jewish student Boyarin leveled
his false accusations against?
Susanna Klein.
There’s nothing like someone who declares
himself an Orthodox Jew beating up on an Orthodox Jewish woman to
help out the supporters on his campus of the likes of Hamas, Fatah
and Islamic Jihad. But, to Daniel Boyarin, it’s all in a day’s work
bashing Israel on the UC Berkeley campus.
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