Americans watch the academic community in the United Kingdom adopting boycotts of Israel as a means of involving themselves in the Middle East, and we reassuringly tell ourselves that it can’t happen here. Aside from the occasional eruption at Berkeley or the emergence of student-driven anti-Israel demonstrations on the campuses of various American colleges and institutions, we’re fairly certain that the misguided actions of the British academic establishment is not something we will soon see emerging on our shores in any meaningful way.

Now, however, the American Studies Association (ASA), which is billed as “…the nation’s oldest and largest association devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and history,” has voted to recommend an academic boycott of Israel. Of course, the unanimous vote of the ASA’s 18-member National Council has to be approved by the organization’s membership; nonetheless, the orientation of this group’s leadership is worrisome.

As mentioned above, there are always elements on campus who wish to lash out at Israel but it is usually student-driven or aided by Arab groups on campuses or living nearby. We also get the feeling that most of this support in academia for anti-Israel activism is broad and not deep. Homegrown students and faculty are involved, but seem less likely to be preoccupied with this kind of activity.

However, this call for a boycott of Israel by a national faculty group active on many campuses changes that notion.

Rather than rebutting the ASA’s position, we’ll rely on local activist Jay Bergman, a professor of Russian history at Central Connecticut State University, who recently sent an excellent letter to the ASA’s misguided leadership. We reprint that letter here.

-nrg

Dear Professor Marez,

Your support of the resolution of the American Studies Association to boycott Israeli educational institutions gives new meaning to the word “hypocrisy.”

You claim to be concerned for the academic freedom of Palestinian Arabs.  And yet you are mute — totally mute! — about the millions of Syrian children denied their right to be educated by a civil war, fought next-door to Israel, in which over 125,000 persons, many thousands of them students, have been killed.

Nor does your resolution say a word about the Coptic Christians in Egypt who have been denied places in Egyptian colleges and universities.  Or about the homosexuals and Bahais in Iran who not only can’t receive an education but are stoned to death.

Instead, you attack only Israel, which treats its Arab minority infinitely better than Arab countries treat their ethnic and religious minorities.

The resolution you support is a moral outrage and clear evidence that the American Studies Association inhabits a moral and intellectual sewer.

Sincerely,

Jay Bergman 
Professor of History 
Central Connecticut State University 
New Britain, CT