ALGEMEINER
By Edward Alexander
May, 19, 2014
To those of us old enough to remember the first Israel Independence Day, in 1948, it stands as one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame, one of the greatest affirmations of the will to live that a martyred people has ever made. It has turned out to be much more than the thinly veiled form of assimilation that many of the orthodox at first mistook it for, or a solution to a personal identity crisis for people who felt no longer able to be “Jewish.” It has emerged, through much struggle, as integral to Judaism and not just to that melange of habits, tendences, and cultural styles called “Jewishness.” Cynthia Ozick has rightly described Zionism as the modern flowering of a great series of diverse intellectual and pietistic movements, all of them rooted in the yearning for human dignity symbolized by the Exodus from slavery that has characterized Jewish civilization for thousands of years. The creation of Israel just a few years after the Holocaust was, in the words of Ruth Wisse, the most hopeful sign for humanity since the dove returning to Noah from the primeval flood holding an olive branch.
Of course, you would never learn this from the typical college course on the subject of Zionism or Israel or the (misnamed) “Arab-Israeli Conflict.” At Vassar, for example, the chairman of Jewish Studies gives a course that openly boasts of its lack of objectivity and its full allegiance to the Arab “narrative”; at Indiana University a “chaired” professor in Jewish Studies offers a course on the subject in which the writings of Judith Butler and Jacqueline Rose are included among “Zionist” writings. (This is analogous to a school of medicine offering “Euthanasia 101″ in its curriculum of “Life-preserving strategies.”) At Stanford you will be told by a political science professor (and former head of MESA–the Middle East Studies Association) that he makes no pretense at impartiality, and that “the state of Israel has already lost any moral justification for its existence.” For such instruction (frequently delivered by unkempt professors dressed in sweatshirts and blue jeans) about Israel and Zionism (to say nothing of what remains of world literature, history, and philosophy in the present curriculum of elite colleges and universities) you may well be paying up to $65,000 a year.
As an alternative I would like to recommend a new website offering elegant narration, scrupulous history, scholarly conscience, and an abundance of film material selected from archives around the world. It is entitled “Zionism 101″ and is the work of two brothers, David and Raphael Isaac…..
ArchitectGuy on Israel 