Observer » Brandeis University

Rosenquist on Canceled September Rose Museum Show: “It’s a Big Mess”

Julia Halperin — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 22:17:22 -0400

James Rosenquist announced that he will cancel his September show at Brandeis University's beleaguered Rose Art Museum. The artist told the Boston Globe late last week that his decision had nothing to do with the controversy surrounding the museum, but rather a 2009 fire that destroyed much of his home and studio and about $18 million worth of art.

The pop artist appeared utterly overwhelmed in his interview with the Globe, saying, "This is a total outside thing that's driving me crazy. If it was a small show or something else, OK. But no way. It's a big deal. I just can't do it."

Rosenquist said he told Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz he would consider showing with the museum in the future, "if things get resolved." He added, "But I don't want to deal with it, really. It's a big mess."

Rosenquist isn't the first artist to pull out of the September exhibition slot. Earlier this summer, Bill Viola, Eric Fischl, and April Gornik—whose work was scheduled to appear in a fall show at the Rose—requested that their work not be shown until Brandeis agreed never to sell artworks from its collection.

The Globe reports Rosenquist recently resquested a similar binding promise from the University, and says the administration has not ruled it out.

And Rosenquist isn't the only one overwhelmed. Responding to the pop artist's announcement, Brandeis spokesman Andrew Gully sounded like he, too, felt like he was swimming aganst the tide. He told the Globe: “We will still have a show this fall. I don’t know what it will be at this point. But we are clearly making every effort to have a vibrant Rose Art Museum. That goal remains.’’

Jimmy Carter Is Still Passionless (but Soulful)

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 13:20:11 -0400

A couple of times now, I've posted items imagining Jimmy Carter as being motivated by a spiritual debt to Anwar Sadat. Carter made Sadat stay at Camp David in 1978 when he wanted to leave; and Sadat gave his life for the accords he signed there. Now Carter is making up to his old friend.

Well I'm finally reading Carter's book, and I'm wrong. Carter is passionless (as James Fallows told us many years ago). He describes Sadat as the closest friend he formed in all his presidential meetings, but Sadat's 1981 assassination is dismissed in a couple of brief references. No tears are shed, no guilt expressed. Carter is utterly impersonal. His speech the other day at Brandeis was that way too—he dropped a few (Jewish) names, like Stu Eisenstadt and Stephen Breyer, but there wasn't really a friendly word about anyone. Compare him to Bill Clinton's tearful speech at Terry McAuliffe's book party at Four Seasons the other night—they're night and day.

It's worth remembering that Carter was a submarine commander who trained at Annapolis and the Georgia Institute of Technology. He's a technocrat, and a Christian. His motivation in writing his bombshell book is largely technocratic: there's a big problem here, I'm going to try and fix it. The prose in this book is dry. Carter saved his emotional moments for NBC News and Brandeis. The most emotional moment I've come to is when he's running in East Jerusalem with two Israeli soldiers accompanying him and one runs ahead and kicks the newspapers out of the hands of some Arabs who are sitting and reading the papers, to make sure they're not hiding guns. Carter goes over to apologize. He's still offended by that behavior, as he should be.

Congressional Junkets to Israel: A Key Tool of the Rightwing Lobby

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 01:35:02 -0400

One of Jimmy Carter's most powerful points at Brandeis Tuesday was a challenge to Brandeis to organize its own trip to the Occupied Territories to find out whether he was exaggerating the horrible conditions that Palestinians face. "See for yourself." That's an important issue. Today's Christian Science Monitor has a strong piece by former S.D. Sen. James Abourezk talking about the Israel lobby's use of congressional trips to sway political opinion to the view that one side has the moral high ground in the unending cycle of violence there.

According to the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper, congressional filings
show Israel as the top foreign destination for privately sponsored
trips. Nearly 10 percent of overseas congressional trips taken between
2000 and 2005 were to Israel. Most are paid for by the American Israel
Education Foundation, a sister organization of the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee, the major pro-Israel lobby group.

New rules require all trips to be pre-approved by the House Ethics
Committee, but Rep. Barney Frank (D) of Massachusetts says this setup
will guarantee that tours of Israel continue. Ron Kampeas of the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency reported consensus among Jewish groups that "the new
legislation would be an inconvenience, but wouldn't seriously hamper the
trips to Israel that are considered a critical component of
congressional support for Israel."

These trips are defended as "educational." In reality, as I know from my
many colleagues in the House and Senate who participated in them, they
offer Israeli propagandists an opportunity to expose members of Congress
to only their side of the story. The Israeli narrative of how the nation
was created, and Israeli justifications for its brutal policies omit
important truths about the Israeli takeover and occupation of the
Palestinian territories.

Abourezk doesn't know about the journalists. The journos who have taken one-sided junkets to Israel don't have to declare them...

I Visit a German-Jewish Relative

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 16:48:54 -0400

When I was a kid, my parents had an expression, WASPy Jews. It was based in part on our one German-Jewish relative: Trudy (a pseudonym). Trudy was cold, straightforward, and wealthy. German Jews and Eastern-European Jews used to be the Sunnis and Shi'ites of American Jewish life. Having lately visited Trudy, I wanted to record some impressions.

Trudy grew up in the 1930s in Westchester, in a big house with a 40-foot living room. Her father was a German who emigrated at the turn of the century to open a branch of a family business. He was worldly. He went skiing in Switzerland in natty attire, he flew airplanes, and his attitudes were typical of assimilating Jews of his generation. He told his daughter that Judaism was a religion, it was not a nation. So he was anti-Zionist. Once Trudy asked her father who the two pretty blonde girls were in the photograph in the living room. "Those are your cousins; they died in the war," he said. Along with many other relatives or hers, in concentration camps. But the word Holocaust was not used.

In Trudy's family, they did not make giant distinctions between gentiles and Jews. Trudy's family went to temple. Their friends were other Jewish families. And the four kids all married Jews. But some Jews were felt to be "too Jewish." This attitude was not so different from what Columbia historian Fritz Stern, a baptized Jew whose family fled Germany in '38, describes in his recent book Five Germanys I Have Known as "harsh" comments his family sometimes made about Jews.

Trudy raised two baby-boomer children without a strong sense of Jewishness. A little Hebrew school, a bar mitzvah. The social distinctions that my family of Eastern European Jews trafficked in--WASPy Jews, Jewishy Jews, religious Jews, and Christians, were not a big deal in Trudy's more privileged household. Her daughter married a gentile, then another. Her son married 1, 2, 3 Jews. The son is much more Jewish-identified. My outmarrying cousin moved into the American heartland. My inmarrying one stayed on the east coast. The results are what you would expect: Trudy's grandkids are Jewish-identified on one branch, "American nothings" on the other.

A few comments.

Trudy's two children are representative of my generation. About half of us married out, half stayed in. The Israel lobby derives its power from the second half. These Jews had tribal allegiance. They cared more about being Jewish, and Jewishness in our generation came to be defined not as a religion, but a faraway country: Israel. I think my inmarrying cousin gives real money to a cause his grandfather rejected... I must say, I find my outwardlooking girl relative a lot more fun and interesting than my inward-looking boy relative.

Trudy's father's attitudes were typical of assimilationist Jews'. Many of them supported the anti-Zionist cause (per Thomas Kolsky's superb book, Jews Against Zionism). They were made uncomfortable by Jewish nationalism, they saw a risk of dual loyalty. A crucial development in American Zionism was the defection of just such a German Jew, Louis D. Brandeis, who after caring nothing about things Jewish converted to Zionism in 1912, or so, in his late 50s, following a meeting with a disciple of Theodor Herzl's. The cynical view (offered but not endorsed by Peter Grose in Israel in the Mind of America) is that Woodrow Wilson overlooked Brandeis as Attorney General in 1912 after leading Jews told Wilson that Brandeis was not "representative" of American Jewry—which over the last 25 years had become largely eastern European and Russian (my ancestors). Brandeis became representative by embracing a creed of the pogrom-fleeing new-Jews: Zionism. Wilson appointed him the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice in 1916.

Brandeis's adopted creed is now the creed of American Jewishness. Back then, before the Holocaust, the non-Zionist or anti-Zionist assertions—Jewishness is a religion, not a nation, and Jews are NOT homeless—were openly and widely expressed among Jews. Many Jews worried about charges of dual loyalty if the Zionists held to a political agenda—forming a state—rather than a strictly cultural agenda, Let's move to Jerusalem. Today all Jews in America are supposed to embrace the political agenda, the Jewish state, and if you raise an issue that leading Jewish critics of Zionism raised again and again (as did Balfour, Truman, and Carter), "Have you figured out a fair answer to the fact that Arab people are already living there?" you don't count. Other concerns of the assimilating Jews' have also been suppressed. And so you have a top aide to George Bush, Elliott Abrams, writing that Jews must segregate themselves socially from gentiles and that Jews are essentially homeless outside Israel, and statements like this have fueled wide but largely subterranean suspicions that Jews have pushed a foreign policy that is more in Israel's than in America's interests. The New Yorker and the Times dismiss these suspicions as "conspiracy theories," without even fully describing them.

I should note that I'm a Jewish-identified "American nothing." As an assimilating Jew, I hope to make room for a wider definition of Jewishness than the narrow diaspora-nationalist one we're stuck in now.

Brandeis: Jimmy Carter Can Come, If He Does a Dog-and-Pony With Dershowitz

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 13:21:19 -0400

M.J. Rosenberg has a terrific piece on TPM about his alma mater Brandeis saying that Jimmy Carter can only speak there if he's balanced by Alan Dershowitz.

It is with real pain that I note that Brandeis is yielding to what amounts to an academic boycott of a former President for criticizing Israel.... We look like mini-Joe McCarthys and we are all being hurt by this...

Israelis themselves just laugh. How is it, they ask, that they can debate Israel-Palestine with absolute freedom but we Americans are afraid to...

Invite Carter to speak. Alone. Like any other speaker. Your students can handle it. Trust me. Trust them.

The Boston Herald reports that the Dershowitz act was dreamed up by Brandeis trustee Stuart Eizenstat, a former Carter adviser, along with Brandeis Prez Jehuda Reinharz. Just like when the New York Theatre Workshop decided it could only put on Rachel Corrie's show last spring if it was suitably "contextualized," with pro-Israel voices. These paroxysms speak to the same lesson: the Israel lobby isn't a control room in Washington, it's a general climate of fear about Israel's future that clouds the minds of goodthinking liberals who are empowered—with the ability to shut off debate. Even a former president lacks standing.

But watch out. The success of Carter's book, the contract to Walt/Mearsheimer, the Corrie run at the Minetta Lane, the Iraq Study Group's hail Mary to Syria—the world is changing.

Marty Peretz on Louis Brandeis and Walter Lippmann

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 12:59:02 -0400

I've been thinking about something Marty Peretz said at Yivo Institute last week.

Following Niall Ferguson's talk about Jews & Money, a lady in the second row asked whether the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government committed itself to a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, arose from a need by the Brits to gain the support of "influential Jews in the United States," who might help determine the outcome of World War I. Ferguson didn't know the answer, but that didn't keep him from offering insights into Lord Rothschild (to whom Foreign Sec'y Balfour's declaration was addressed) and the Germans and Muslims and other issues. (And I'm not going to try and answer the question here; I don't know, though it's intriguing...)

At one point, Ferguson noted that The New Republic was established by Walter Lippmann during that era, in 1914—if I heard him right, in part out of Zionist concerns—and from the audience Peretz, the grand vizier of the New Republic and chairman of Yivo's overseers, piped up that Louis Brandeis had also helped start the magazine.

My sense is that Peretz misspoke. The usual nutshell on The New Republic is that Lippmann and Herbert Croly helped start it along with the young Felix Frankfurter. I wonder if Peretz meant that future Jewish Supreme Court Justice, not Brandeis?

I'm interested because I happened to have with me at the event a splendid book I just got, The Family Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, family letters, edited by David W. Levy of the University of Oklahoma. Brandeis was the father of American Zionism, and he's fascinating. He was assimilating until he was close to 60, and then, apparently stunned by the Dreyfus case and influenced by an associate of Herzl's with whom he became close, Brandeis grew fearful about the place of the American Jew, pushing the cause behind the scenes even when he got on to the Supreme Court in 1916 (following an antisemitic uprising against his appointment). He was never able to convert Lippmann completely, though the Levy book reveals that Brandeis lobbied for Zionism with the financier Eugene Meyer, Katharine Graham's father, who bought the Washington Post in 1933; and that Meyer kicked in large sums for the cause, $25,000 on one occasion. And yes, Brandeis met with Croly and Lippmann around the time the New Republic began. Maybe what Peretz is referring to.

The letters also show that after the Balfour Declaration, Brandeis was among those who lobbied his friend the President, Woodrow Wilson, to echo the British commitment. As Wilson did in 1918, thereby defying his own State Department. Brandeis subsequently visited Palestine with Frankfurter and a man called Rudolph Sonneborn, the son-in-law of the great American banker Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb. And Sonneborn in 1947 supplied arms to the fledgling state of Israel thru a fictitious entity, the Sonneborn Institute.

All this is from David Levy's fine book.

I go on this historic bender to make a point. Powerful American Jews have played a crucial role in the Zionist cause, often behind the scenes. Marty Peretz knows something about this history. The world of Louis Brandeis and Eugene Meyer and the White House—Peretz, who is a friend of Al Gore's, knows its later incarnations in his fingertips. And how regrettable it is that from the moment that Walt and Mearsheimer addressed the idea of Jewish influence, Peretz's response has been altogether defensive and vituperative, seeking to blacken these scholars as antisemites. There is a great Jewish scholarly tradition that seeks answers to important questions, not obfuscation. What an education it would be to hear Peretz's thoughts on Washington and Israel. Though yes, we got a peep out of him the other night.

Universities: The Last Refuge for the Left

Thu, 11 May 2006 16:23:08 -0400

When Brandeis shut down an exhibit of Palestinian art last week, the organizer promptly found a new home for it across town at MIT. Then this week a group of Brandeis faculty started a petition drive to have the exhibit brought back to Brandeis. They have gotten 90 signatures, including many Jews. I've posted it below. Yes the art was censored, but it's up again, with a ton of attention.

The support underscores something Alan Dershowitz says—that universities are hotbeds of leftwing thought. I agree. The question is why? Why are leftwing ideas that are marginalized elsewhere in the culture doing fine at universities?

I think the answer is, There's nowhere else for these ideas to go; and they are less dangerous in universities than, say, in Washington. Consider the alternatives. It's virtually impossible to be a leftwing intellectual in the Washington thinktank community: you don't get funded. Yes there's George Soros, but he's the exception that proves the rule. It's fine to be a leftleaning liberal in the Maistream Media, where everyone is a Democrat who supports abortion and has murmurous questions about Iraq; but you can't be too outspoken about it, or again you'll get marginalized. Weekly opinion magazines are also not very hospitable to lefties, and it can't be easy to be a leftwing analyst in the Executive Branch staff positions that help form policy. All those Arabists at State, for instance, keeping their heads down. Colleges are the only game in town.

It is a conservative-dominated country. Big business plays a huge role in our public life. It funds the thinktanks and the media. It funds campaigns. There are tons of privileged Americans with leftwing views, but not many places for them to actually apply their thinking. The universities are deemed harmless enough. There these thinkers will only educate young people, in places far from Washington.

The sad part for the left is that its braintrust is so unengaged in the real world. Its idea-people are alienated, and don't have a practical bone in their bodies. They get to hold forth at dinner parties.

PLEASE CIRCULATE. THE UNIVERSITY HAS DECLINED OUR REQUEST TO HAVE THE
STATEMENT AND THE LIST OF SIGNATURES MAILED OUT TO THE FACULTY.

Brandeis University
May 8, 2006

To: Jehuda Reinharz, President
Marty Krauss, Provost

Statement regarding the removal of Lior Halperin's ('09) exhibit from the
university library.

A group of concerned faculty decided last night, Sunday, to collect signatures
from the faculty on the statement below. We circulated the list through
colleagues, who in turn sent it on to their colleagues. In less than 24
hours, we have collected some ninety signatures. It is our hope that the
university will very quickly find a way to do as the faculty members, who
have signed the statement, have urged, namely find a suitable way to
re-exhibit Lior's project.

We did not use a university-generated mailing list, and there may well be many
members of the faculty who have not seen the statement or had a chance to
submit their names. For this reason, we request that the university
circulates the statement and the list of signatures by email to the entire
faculty.

STATEMENT
We, the undersigned, regard the removal of Lior Halperin's ('09) exhibit from
the university library as a mistake, and we expect the university to find a
suitable way for Lior to exhibit her project.

Mark Adler (MATH)
Silvia M. Arrom (HIST)
Robert A. Art (POL)
Mark Auslander (ANTH)
Lisette Balabarca (SPAN)
Marc Brettler (NEJS)
Bernadette Brooten (NEJS)
Seyom Brown (POL)
Joan Bryant (AAAS)
John Burt (ENG)
Steven L. Burg (POL)
Mary Baine Campbell (ENG)
Anne Carter (ECON)
Stephen Cecchetti (ECON)
Bulbul Chakraborty (PHYS)
Ruth Charney (MAT)
Trenery Dolbear (ECON)
David Engermen (HIST)
Irving Epstein (CHEM)
Gordon Fellman (SOC)
William Flesch (ENG)
Dian Fox (ROCL)
Bruce M. Foxman (CHEM)
Gregory Freeze (HIST)
Richard Gaskins (AMST)
Anne Gershenson (CHEM)
Michael T. Gilmore (ENG)
Nance Goldstein (WSRC)
Jane Hale (ROCL)
Karen V. Hansen (SOC)
Erica Harth (ROCL)
Michael Henchman (CHEM)
James Hendrickson (CHEM)
Donald Hindley (POL)
Eric Hill (Theater Arts)
Eli Hirsch (PHIL)
Mark Hulliung (HIST)
Caren Irr (ENG)
Ray Jackendoff (PSYCH)
Paul Jankowski (HIST)
Gary Jefferson (ECON)
Patricia A. Johnston (CLAS)
Jackie Jones (HIST)
Peter Jordan (CHEM)
Jane Kamensky (HIST)
Edward Kaplan (ROCL)
Thomas A. King (ENG)
Jytte Klausen (POL)
Ann-Olga Koloski-Ostrow (CLAS)
Daniel Kryder (POL)
Robert V. Lange (PHYS)
Susan S. Lanser (ENG, WGS)
Richard Lansing (ROCL)
Blake LeBaron (IBS)
Henry Linschitz (CHEM)
Marya Lowry (Theater Arts)
Harry Mairson (COSI)
Jim Mandrell (ROCL)
Rachel McCulloch (ECON)
Robert B. Meyer (PHYS)
Chris Miller (BIOL)
Laura J. Miller (SOC)
Paul Miller (PHYS)
Robin Feuer Miller (GRALL)
Paul Monsky (MATH)
Leonard Muellner (CLAS)
Jeremy Ravi Mumford (HIST)
Carol L. Osler (IBS)
Richard J. Parmentier (ANTH)
Daniel Perlman (PHYS)
Gregory A. Petsko (CHEM)
Susan Sondej Pochapsky (CHEM)
Bonit Porath (NEJS)
David Powelstock (GRALL)
David Rakowski (MUS)
Michael Randall (ROCL)
Esther Ratner (COMP)
Mary Ruth Ray (MUS)
Art Reis (CHEM)
Timothy L. Rose (CHEM)
George Ross (POL)
Ellen Schattschneider (ANTH)
Gerald W. Schwarz (MATH)
Aurora M. Sherman (PSYCH)
Dawn Skorczewski (ENG)
Richard Slaven (PHYS)
Marion Smiley (PHIL)
Faith Smith (ENG, AAAS)
Jennifer Stern (Fine Arts)
Ibrahim K. Sundiata (HIST, AAAS)
Andreas Teuber (PHIL)
Cheryl L. Walker (CLAS)
David Wilson (Theater)
Aida Yuen Wong (Fine Arts)
Bernie Yack (POL)

Oh No! I’m a Self-Hating Jew!?! Mom, Tell Me They’re Lying!

Wed, 03 May 2006 18:17:36 -0400

Yesterday when I asked Brandeis troublemaker Lior Halperin whether she was Jewish, she said, "Yes. I'm what people call a self-hating Jew." I said, "I love you, Lior. Me too."

I'm not a good Jew. I'm probably a bad Jew. I don't go to shul, don't believe in the Old Testament God, married a Christian, (would have) raised my (nonexistent) kids Buddhist/nothing, and have tons of impure thoughts. Didn't serve in the Israeli Army like Lior. But it's my politics in particular that make me fishy. And truthfully, various good intelligent estimable highminded Jews say I'm a self-hating Jew; and maybe they know, and therefore maybe I am, and maybe I shouldn't fight it. So, O.K., like, let's move on, and in between crawling out from under my rock, and back to it, can I express my opinion?

This to me is one of the revelations of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper on the Israel lobby. These two profs in their 50s knew they'd get called anti-semites if they said what they believed, but they decided to go ahead and say it anyway. They didn't care. They accepted the label, as the price of saying something important. Dershowitz says they destroyed their professional reputations by saying that, and Grant Smith (of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy) says Dershowitz is right, they did destroy their reputations, in certain quarters. But not in others.

Brandeis, Continued

Wed, 03 May 2006 13:30:22 -0400

The Boston Globe put the Brandeis censorship on its front page today (and did a better job than I did of writing it up!).

More on the Brandeis Story

Tue, 02 May 2006 16:21:09 -0400

Dennis Nealon, a spokesman for Brandeis, tells me the school did take down the exhibit.

"The university had to make a decision. We were getting complaints from people that the exhibit was one-dimensional. There was no other context... It was as if someone was looking at this issue with one eye closed. People were upset and confused. Some people found the images distrubing. We had to make a decision."

Nealon says that the school hopes to mount the exhibit after all, some day, but with context.

This is, by the way, precisely what happened in the case of the Rachel Corrie play cancelled, or postponed, who knows, in February by the New York Theatre Workshop. It couldn't mount the show without more context, it said. It needed to palliate or balance Rachel Corrie's harsh words about the Occupation.

When will Americans be able to hear a differing point of view on the Israel/Palestine situation without having to explain those views away?

P.S. Lior Halperin tells me she won't let Brandeis have the show. "They took it down without asking me. I'm taking it away from this place."