I think the way you are characterizing Summers' position is misleading. Here's the entire text of Summers' speech:
>>Address at morning prayers
Memorial Church
Cambridge, Massachusetts
September 17, 2002
I speak with you today not as President of the University but as a concerned member of our community
about something that I never thought I would become seriously worried about -- the issue of
anti-Semitism.
I am Jewish, identified but hardly devout. In my lifetime, anti-Semitism has been remote from my
experience. My family all left Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. The Holocaust is for me a
matter of history, not personal memory. To be sure, there were country clubs where I grew up that had
few if any Jewish members, but not ones that included people I knew. My experience in college and
graduate school, as a faculty member, as a government official -- all involved little notice of my religion.
Indeed, I was struck during my years in the Clinton administration that the existence of an economic
leadership team with people like Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Charlene Barshefsky and many others
that was very heavily Jewish passed without comment or notice -- it was something that would have been
inconceivable a generation or two ago, as indeed it would have been inconceivable a generation or two
ago that Harvard could have a Jewish President.
Without thinking about it much, I attributed all of this to progress -- to an ascendancy of enlightenment
and tolerance. A view that prejudice is increasingly put aside. A view that while the politics of the Middle
East was enormously complex, and contentious, the question of the right of a Jewish state to exist had
been settled in the affirmative by the world community.
But today, I am less complacent. Less complacent and comfortable because there is disturbing evidence
of an upturn in anti-Semitism globally, and also because of some developments closer to home.
Consider some of the global events of the last year:
There have been synagogue burnings, physical assaults on Jews, or the painting of swastikas on
Jewish memorials in every country in Europe. Observers in many countries have pointed to the
worst outbreak of attacks against the Jews since the Second World War.
Candidates who denied the significance of the Holocaust reached the runoff stage of elections for
the nation’s highest office in France and Denmark. State-sponsored television stations in many
nations of the world spew anti-Zionist propaganda.
The United Nations-sponsored World Conference on Racism -- while failing to mention human
rights abuses in China, Rwanda, or anyplace in the Arab world -- spoke of Israel’s policies prior to
recent struggles under the Barak government as constituting ethnic cleansing and crimes against
humanity. The NGO declaration at the same conference was even more virulent.
I could go on. But I want to bring this closer to home. Of course academic communities should be and
always will be places that allow any viewpoint to be expressed. And certainly there is much to be debated
about the Middle East and much in Israel’s foreign and defense policy that can be and should be
vigorously challenged.
But where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary
preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding
support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking
actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.
For example:
Hundreds of European academics have called for an end to support for Israeli researchers, though
not for an end to support for researchers from any other nation.
Israeli scholars this past spring were forced off the board of an international literature journal.
At the same rallies where protesters, many of them university students, condemn the IMF and
global capitalism and raise questions about globalization, it is becoming increasingly common to
also lash out at Israel. Indeed, at the anti-IMF rallies last spring, chants were heard equating Hitler
and Sharon.
Events to raise funds for organizations of questionable political provenance that in some cases
were later found to support terrorism have been held by student organizations on this and other
campuses with at least modest success and very little criticism.
And some here at Harvard and some at universities across the country have called for the
University to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for
any part of the university’s endowment to be invested. I hasten to say the University has
categorically rejected this suggestion.
We should always respect the academic freedom of everyone to take any position. We should also recall
that academic freedom does not include freedom from criticism. The only antidote to dangerous ideas is
strong alternatives vigorously advocated.
I have always throughout my life been put off by those who heard the sound of breaking glass, in every
insult or slight, and conjured up images of Hitler’s Kristallnacht at any disagreement with Israel. Such
views have always seemed to me alarmist if not slightly hysterical. But I have to say that while they still
seem to me unwarranted, they seem rather less alarmist in the world of today than they did a year ago.
I would like nothing more than to be wrong. It is my greatest hope and prayer that the idea of a rise of
anti-Semitism proves to be a self-denying prophecy -- a prediction that carries the seeds of its own
falsification. But this depends on all of us. <<
president.harvard.edu |
