JEWISH-AMERICANS AGAINST FREE SPEECH AND INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM
Rapid response assembles Jewish turnout at CMU for anti-Zionist speaker,
By Adam Brandolph, Pittchron.com (The Official Web Site of the Jewish Chronicle of Pittsburgh)
"Jewish community members showed up in large numbers for Norman Finkelstein's appearance at Carnegie Mellon University, thanks to efforts by the United Jewish Federations to recruit community members to, as one person in the audience said, "put warm bodies in the seats." Jewish Pittsburghers were called upon at synagogue, the Jewish Community Center and by e-mail to raise awareness and to support Jewish students at Finkelstein's lecture Monday evening at CMU. Finkelstein, an assistant professor of political science at DePaul University in Chicago and author of "The Holocaust Industry," and the forthcoming "Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History," was brought to CMU under the University Lecture Series and the Palestinian Awareness Series, and sponsored by the Arab Student Organization, the Muslim Student Organization, the Pittsburgh Palestine Solidarity Committee, and Students for Justice in Palestine. He is the third speaker in five weeks to speak negatively about Israel and/or Judaism at CMU. Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, (and frequent co-lecturer with Finkelstein) and Malik Zulu Shabazz, national chair of the New Black Panther Party for Defense, spoke at CMU last month. Unlike those events, the Jewish community was well represented at the Finkelstein lecture, with dozens of senior citizens waiting in line one hour before its 5 p.m. start. The first in line were Mordecai and Sibyl Treblow of Squirrel Hill. They said they came to show their support for Jewish students on campus. With a strategy devised by Hillel JUC Director Aaron Weil, as supported by the UJF, a rapid response team of more than 200 people trained in Israel advocacy were sent an e-mail about the event. Another 200 people from the UJF Board of Delegates were also e-mailed, according to UJF Director of Community and Public Affairs Jeff Cohan. Those efforts produced a turnout that included more than 200 people, many of whom were from outside the university. In spite of the large turnout, Cohan stressed that no CMU students were denied access to the event, and in fact, there were empty seats in the hall. As Finkelstein began his speech, "Legitimate and Illegitimate Differences and Disagreements on the Israel-Palestinian Conflict," the soft-spoken New Yorker immediately introduced himself as being the son of survivors of Auschwitz, which he used as a badge of infallibility throughout the lecture. Calling Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman "the current grand wizard of the ADL" (an allusion to Ku Klux Klan-like behavior), he said that whenever Israel comes under scrutiny from the rest of the world, the ADL calls it anti-Semitism ... Cohan said it was the success the community had in turning out its supporters that prompted Finkelstein to tone down his remarks. "We are pleased with the fact that we put so many Jews in the seats that [Finkelstein] dramatically changed the content of his lecture," he said. However, the student groups that sponsored Finkelstein's lecture were not as pleased. They produced a letter, a copy of which was placed on each seat, suggesting that students were turned away from the lecture "because the seats are filled with people who don't want you to hear an alternative point of view." |
