Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

Posted on by

Max Cleeland, the quadrapeligic veteran who was ousted as Democratic Senator from Georgia after a well-funded campaign painting him as unpatriotic for questioning Bush’s plans for a Homeland Security Department, said today of Bush’s refusal to release vital documents to the 9/11 commission:

It’s obvious that the White House wants to run out the clock here…It’s Halloween, and we’re still in negotiations with some assistant White House counsel about getting these documents — it’s disgusting.

He’s among a slew of prominent Democrats and Republicans on the Comission who expressed indignation today in the Times.

Slade Gorton, a Republican member of the panel who served in the Senate from Washington from 1982 to 2000, said that he was startled by the “indifference” of some executive branch agencies in making material available to the commission. “This lack of cooperation, if it extends anywhere else, is going to make it very difficult” for the commission to finish its work by next May, he said.

Timothy J. Roemer, president of the Center for National Policy in Washington and a former Democratic member of the House from Indiana, said that “our May deadline may, in fact, be jeopardized — many of us are frustrated that we’re still dealing with questions about document access when we should be sinking our teeth into hearings and to making recommendations for the future.”

Who’s unpatriotic now?

Posted on by

The most telling part of this piece in today’s Times is the end:

And even some who oppose the union drive acknowledge that both sides bear responsibility for the current climate.

James Terry, president of At What Cost?, a campus group opposed to the union, said that the university had grown increasingly inflexible on labor issues and that he was among many on campus who have been alienated by the stubbornness and language of union organizers.

“They have some intrusive recruitment tactics,” Mr. Terry said, adding that a graduate student he knows was approached by organizers about membership nine times after she initially refused. “I don’t think that Yale is treating us so bad that we need to compare ourselves to Birmingham in 1963,” he said, “and that’s what GESO will do, and I find that personally offensive.”

Still, even union opponents like Mr. Terry see some cause for alarm in the suggestion that some students, rightly or wrongly, feel threatened if they speak out. “There is reason to be concerned,” he said. “The academy runs on different precepts. Differences of opinion have to be respected. If even one of these cases should be true, that’s something people at all universities should be concerned about.”

Terry’s first comment sets forth the tired dichotomies that GESO opponents of all backgrounds have relied on: between a historical epoch in which real injustice existed and a modern period of mere political differences; between poor sympathetic workers who have the right to organize and wealthy sheltered ones who don’t. But his more interesting contribution, following At What Cost’s line before the Academic Labor Board, is his politically smart refusal to defend the intimidation tactics of Yale’s administration. AWC has also declined to endorse Yale’s stonewalling through refusal to meet with GESO and refusal to agree to acknowledge even the results of an NLRB election. As long as AWC wants to frame itself as a grassroots operation interested solely in democratic deliberation (a difficult mantle to take on, even if all the charges nationally of faculty members making illegal contributions to such groups are true, simply because AWC is benefiting in fighting GESO from the pressure power of the entire University apparatus), it saves face better this way. But it leaves the Yale administration, in its most aggregious violations of its own principles – intimidation of students and refusal of the right to a vote – without any semblance of student support.

Posted on by

Read about the clerical strike at the University of Minnesota here. As at Yale, the University is claiming large numbers reporting to work; as at Yale, it looks like administrators are seeking numbers complementary to an ideology which makes working people disappear. As at Yale, hundreds of classes are moving off campus, and students are deeply involved in solidarity with the larger community to call for a resolution to the crisis and a better future. As one wrote:

Bruininks and the University administration are trying to pit students against striking workers. With media complicity they’ve attempted to paint the strikers as isolated and weak, while in reality student, faculty, and community support has been growing exponentially in the last week. Come show the administration, the media, and especially the clerical workers how much support they really have! Come demonstrate that students won’t fall for divide and rule tactics, and that we understand unity between students and workers is necessary to confront an arrogant administration trying to make us shoulder the burden of the budget crisis.

Amen.

Posted on by

Earlier this week, William Sledge, from his perch as Master of Calhoun College – a spot that puts him in loco parentis for one twelth of Yale’s student body – having already donated $250 to Ward 1 Aldermanic candidate Dan Kruger, took to the pages of the YDN to vilify current Alderman Ben Healey for supporting the removal of arrest powers from the constables at Yale – New Haven Hospital, who are accountable not to the city but to the Hospital Board, in response to a pattern of that Board using the constables not to protect patients but to arrest leafletting staff. Sledge, who serves as Medical Director of YNHH’s Psychiatric Hospital (that he serves as Calhoun Master while otherwise employed not by the University but – since it was subcontracted last year – by the Hospital further disproves the argument that the two institutions are discrete), argued that Healey’s move to defend patients and workers from illegal, counterproductive, and unjust abuses of the constable power,

reflected a strong bias towards meeting the goals of the union and indicate that his activity as an alderman is driven by an ideology that is so strongly pro-labor that it overwhelms matters such as the security of those he represents. This bias gets in the way of clear thinking and inhibits the political and administrative imagination required to work out creative solutions.

Alek Felstiner, who witnessed the arrests last year, ably and resoundingly refutes the argument here.

Posted on by

Andrew Sullivan, rightly blasting Bill Bennett’s attack on gay rights, concludes with a telling indictment:

It’s not an argument. It’s the rhetorical embellishment of a privilege. Conservatism has always been prone to such a trap.

Perhaps Sullivan, one of the strongest proponents of driving a wedge between civil rights and economic justice as ideologies and as movements, should take his own words to heart.

Posted on by

Jason Maoz of The Jewish Press wastes a good deal of ink trying to figure out for David Horowitz’s readers why more Jews haven’t come around to the Republican ticket, but can offer only insulting, patronizing theories to the effect that those backwards semites (Maoz et al excepted) just don’t know what’s good for them:

…the arrival of the Eastern European Jews who crowded into the big cities at the turn of the century and quickly learned that their very livelihoods were dependent on the good will of those Tammany-like political machines, which were invariably Democratic and invariably corrupt…

…Jewish socialists and communists left a seemingly indelible stamp on the collective political identity of American Jew…

…Whether Roosevelt or Truman was deserving of such Jewish support is a question most Jews were reluctant even to ask…

…Adlai Stevenson, a one-term governor of Illinois whose persona of urbane intellectualism set a new standard for the type of candidate favored by Jewish liberals…

…Jews still feared that pulling the Republican lever would cause their right hands to lose their cunning…

…Official” Jewry – that dizzying network of committees, councils, conferences and leagues staffed by liberal flunkies whose Holy Writ is the platform of the Democratic Party and whose daily spiritual sustenance comes from New York Times editorials – was represented in the McGovern campaign…

…it was a combination of old habits and a religious-like devotion to dogmatic liberalism that drove the majority of Jewish voters, not any primary concern for Israel or narrowly defined Jewish interests…

…a conservative Republican, which for most Jews in 1980 (and to a somewhat lesser extent today) was akin to an alien life form: an altogether unfamiliar species…

…Jews were drawn to Mondale for a number of reasons – his Humphrey connection, his New Deal liberalism, and the simple fact that he wasn`t Reagan, to whom most American Jews never took a liking, despite a dramatic improvement in U.S-Israel relations since Mondale`s old boss had been thrown out of office…

…But Clinton would have defeated Bush and Dole even if each had sworn to immediately move the White House to Jerusalem, for the simple reason that Israel has never been the determining factor in how most Jews vote. If it were the determining factor, Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1980 and 1984 would have received a far greater share of the Jewish vote…

…a not inconsiderable number of Orthodox Jews found themselves to be just as susceptible as their secular brethren to the fatal Clinton Mystique…

There are a few basic premises here:

We Jews (besides Maoz) are easily swayed by personality, image, and kitschy references that make us feel important.

We Jews (like Maoz) would oppose attempts by the US government to pressure Israel to behave in the way dictated by Jewish values, or to undertake policies with any hope of bringing closer a just compromise – but (besides Maoz) fail to reward the hawks who are laboring to support the Likudniks because we’re too short-sighted to notice.

We Jews (like Maoz) are wealthy, and we validate that laissez-faire capitalism works, and so our support (contra Maoz) for government policies concerned with social justice must demonstrate some combination of confusion, conformity, pressure, and paranoia.

Starting from there, it’s not surprise that the intrepid reporter, after 7,000 words down and 70 years surveyed, is forced to conclude that

while each of the explanations we`ve cited may have its own degree of merit, and while taken together they may provide an interesting glimpse into the collective psyche of the American Jewish community, the Great Mystery of Jewish voting habits remains just that

At the beginning of his piece, Maoz throws out the idea that there’s resonance between liberalism and Jewish tradition, identity, or values, on the grounds that if that were true, Orthodox Jews – who everyone knows are the real ones – would be the most liberal. Perhaps if Maoz checked out Isaiah – or Exodus, or Jeremiah, or Genesis – he’d find something to at least offer a clue as to why, in his words,

the American Jewish community, the most affluent subgroup in the country, still votes as if it’s one step ahead of the bread lines and the evict notices.

Class traitors? It’d have to be one of the lighter insults we, as a people, have suffered. Could be that Jewish community and tradition offer – for some at least – an imperative to have a stake in being part of a just, free, and democratic community, and to work to build such a nation.

Or maybe it’s just those Jewish grandmothers kvelling when Bill Clinton says “mensch,” and worrying that if he doesn’t get their vote he’ll sick one of those Democratic Party Machines on them.

Posted on by

Gregg Easterbrook’s recently found himself at the center of a controversy around charges that comments he made on his site about movie violence and Jewish studio executives demonstrated antisemitism. As I made clear in an exchange with Josh Cherniss this summer, I tend as a Jew to try to cultivate a healthy
skepticism of that charge – it’s an ugly one, those who deploy it too easily risk both defaming those who don’t deserve it and lessening the weight of the charge against deserved targets. This looks to me pretty clearly like a case of choosing words poorly and missing the implications they held for someone else reading them. But what struck me in this case is not the unfairness of the charge, but one particular and problematic line used in defense:

From Josh Chafetz:
GREGG EASTERBROOK IS MOST EMPHATICALLY NOT AN ANTI-SEMITE. It would be impossible to work at TNR and be anti-semitic…

From Andrew Sullivan:

He has worked for many years at The New Republic, testimony in itself that he is hardly anything even close to anti-Semitic.

I’m not sure which problematic argument is being advanced here:
That someone who works for an “enlightened,” respectable publication could not be antisemitic?
That someone who works with many Jewish coworkers could not be antisemitic?
That someone who works for a magazine that staunchly supported the war in Iraq could not be antisemitic?

Lemme know what I’m missing. Otherwise, it seems to me that Sullivan and Chafetz reached the right conclusion for awful reasons. This brings me back to Norman Podheretz’ execrable argument that under the Talmudic principle of bitul b’shishim, Pat Robertson’s advancement of the theory that Jews had collaborated with free masons and Illuminati to cause every war in American history by controlling the international monetary system could be excused because of his support for the Israeli Government – and the ADL‘s decision to give Robertson an award. I have no reason to believe that Pat Robertson couldn’t have gotten himself a gig with the New Republic in his heyday if he really wanted one – or that if he did, he would become any less prejudiced.

Posted on by

The Academic Labor Board convened last month to discuss intimidation and unfair labor practices surrounding graduate student unionization here at Yale has made public its conclusions – check out its statement here.

As reported in the Times:

Members of the panel, headed by the former chief counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, said a dozen graduate students told them at a public forum last month that faculty members had threatened to hurt their academic prospects for supporting a union.

Several graduate teaching and research assistants also said faculty members or the campus police had ordered them to stop discussing the union with fellow students in places generally open to public discussion.

“The fact that so many students reported threatening and intimidating experiences, including in relationships with their immediate academic supervisors, itself raises a serious concern,” the panel wrote.

Posted on by

Speaking of sending up David Brooks, consider which is the more trenchant social commentary – his,

So when you go to a game at Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park you will see lawyers, waiters and skinheads sending off enough testosterone vapors to menace the ozone layer. If a Martian came down and landed in the stands of a Yankees-Red Sox game, he would get the impression that human beings are 90 percent men and 10 percent women in tight T-shirts, and that we reproduce by loathing in groups.

It’s interesting, for example, to turn and watch Yankee and Red Sox fans as they watch a game. As the game goes on, they almost never display pleasure, contentment or joy. Instead, during the game they experience long periods of contempt interrupted by short bursts of vindication.

…We know that our region is not the future. Every year, people move out of the Northeast to Scottsdale and other places where it is considered fashionable to coordinate your toenail polish with the color scheme of your Lexus.

Those of us who are left here know we will never be happy. If God had meant for us to be happy, he would have had us born in Aspen. We know that every year the political center of gravity in this country moves farther south and west, because most voters do not appreciate the importance of sarcasm when selecting their leaders…

or hers?

On the other hand, if our Martian visitor were to venture outside the stadium, he might quickly deduce that your average Manhattan waiter is far more likely to be an extra in “Hairspray” than a Yankees fan or Red Sox hater. He might also, with the barest minimum of effort, learn that “skinhead”–far from being a lead occupational category in the Statistical Abstract’s Northeast regional profile–is an ideal-type whose flesh-and-blood incarnations are far more common in Brooks’s cherished West and Southwest. Our extraterrestrial buddy might even intuit that neither waiters nor skinheads typically have enough disposal cash at hand to score postseason Yankee tickets, and might well marvel at the fathomless condescension of someone who flies across the country to attend such a function only to ascribe the worst prole reflexes to the assembled fans in whose company he is so befuddled to be. The space traveler would be further confused to find that in a key incident –one that our social thinker fails entirely to mention — a part-time groundskeeper (and junior high special needs teacher) voicing objectionable fan sentiments was evidently whaled upon, cleats and all, by a pair of allegedly professional relief pitchers.

…he’d stumble across the curious tidbit that Red Sox pitcher Byung-Hyun Kim, whom Brooks singles out for special scorn because he apparently took his civility cues from the Fenway rabble and recently flipped the bird to booing fans, was until this season in the employ of the Arizona Diamondbacks, in that faraway land of stress-free pleasure. His curiosity roused, our enterprising Martian might further learn that those selfsame Diamondbacks were forced to release a pitching prospect this year when the young man drew a gun on his wife and attempted to strangle her when she was found too slow in responding to his urgent request for more beer. Say what you will, a promptly delivered brewski is a surefire stress-reliever!

…Never mind, I guess, that Brooks has managed simultaneously to cast the Red State masses in the role of slavish high-end consumer droids and impressionable, endlessly manipulable rubes. We know when we’re supposed to act hurt, so we’ll retire to our snide, malevolent, resentful corner of the deindustrializing Northeast. Why detain the great pulse-taker as he descries, in a baseball contest, the very stuff of our identity and national destiny? Odds are, after all, that he has a plane to catch.

Posted on by

This op-ed in today’s YDN first argues, rightly, that reasonable conservatives should be more concerned with recruiting skilled men and women to join the army than with casting them out for their sexual orientation, and then argues, wrongly, that reasonable liberals should see the JAG core’s right to Yale Law-sponsored interviews, rather than the Law School’s right to enforce it’s non-discrimination policy, as a first ammendment issue. The factual error at the heart of the piece is in the suggestion that law students and military recruiters were – up until the Pentagon’s $350 million blackmail scheme last year under the Solomon ammendment – being denied their right to association. JAG recruiters, like prospective students, Jews for Jesus, and leafletting undergrads, are free to associate with law students who want to meet with them on campus. What the Pentagon is threatening the termination of a third of a billion dollars worth of lifesaving research to demand is that the Law School sponsor those interviews through its on-campus interview program – and the Law School is right to resist the pressure. The suggestion that political protest is self-indulgent, and institutions can only be changed by the elect that’s granted membership in them, belies the history of this University, let alone the US army.

Posted on by

This editorial from the new board of the YDN repeats the usual anti-union catechism: GESO is ideologically “tainted,” dangerously “single-minded,” and suspicious for its concern with, say, the job security of graduate students. It also suggests, falsely but popularly, that arguments against casualization of academic labor – the transformation of teaching jobs into low-wage, no-security, short-term positions – are about impugning the quality of graduate student and adjunct teachers, rather than about improving their conditions, lessening their workload, and brining in more ladder faculty to contribute to the academic work of the University. Even the YDN Board, however, is forced to conclude that GESO’s new report on casualization, “Blackboard Blues,” raises urgent issues that undergraduates would do well to be aware of and speak out about, and about which Yale’s administration has been suspicously silent. As the Board writes:

TAs don’t replace good professors, and an overreliance on visiting faculty can create a revolving-door of professors that leaves students in the lurch. Visiting professors should supplement full-time professors, not replace them. These concerns warrant a critical examination of the role of non-tenured faculty, and we are disappointed the academic review did not include one. We urge the administration to expand tenure opportunities or consider ways to increase institutional support for deserving faculty. At the same time, however, the contributions of our non-tenured faculty should be recognized.

UOC undergrads and GESO grad students hosted a forum this weekend to discuss this issue with visiting parents, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. We’ll be bringing those conversations to parents’ homes around the country in fora next month. Check out the schedule here.

Posted on by

I have a piece in the YDN today on the failure of the Racial Privacy Initiative last week in California here.

Connerly has taken on for himself the mantle of Dr. King, and American conservatives have been all too eager to validate the parallel. Henry Payne, in a recent article in the National Review, hailed Connerly as a leader of the “new civil-rights movement.” The same conservatives who have invested decades in promulgating myths of a “classless society,” would like similarly to see race, and racial inequality, erased from the political discourse. But Dr. King warned decades ago against those who seek a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, before a positive peace, which is the presence of justice…