Robbed Of Palestine - The Ivy League Scurries To Find Another Distraction

Esther Pilchman, great granddaughter of Shmuel Pilchman, labor organizer on the West Side, confidant of Samuel Gompers, granddaughter of tenants' rights activists, and daughter of a Distinguished  Professor  Emeritus of Political Philosophy at Columbia University.

 

Abraham Pilchman was a well-known scholar who had transformed the department from a carrel-bound dry, academic one to the center of progressive activism.  His seminal paper 'Irreducible Rights - Palestine And The Right Of Return', a seminal, ironic, bitter takedown of Jewish legitimacy over an Arab homeland, won his plaudits from the Columbia faculty, earned him invitations to speak at Harvard and Yale, and provided the intellectual foundation for the recent violent pro-Palestinian campus uprising. 

Pilchman was particularly listened to because he was Jewish.  The idea that such a prominent Jew could defiantly reject the claims of Israel and denigrate, humiliate, and intellectually disassemble the arguments of Israeli intellectuals and historians, made him an academic hero. An unsullied, undisturbed, and long Jewish lineage - Jewish blood pulsing strongly in his veins - did nothing to mitigate his passionate demands for a Palestinian state, the right of return, and sovereignty over Jerusalem and the Temple Mount; and he had to be taken seriously.

His daughter Esther, growing up in such a devoutly progressive home, could only follow in the footsteps of her forbears, and when the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel campus movement began to mature, she was one of its leaders. 

Unlike her father, Esther was a firebrand who condemned Israel from the top steps of Butler library, a banshee; a ferocious, possessed, prophetess.  Wild-haired, glaring, saluting, and imploring, she howled for justice.  The Israeli genocide of Palestinians must be met with a countervailing force - the State of Israel must be obliterated and every trace of it expunged, and washed into the sea.

Like her father, because she was Jewish she was listened to more than the many gentiles that joined the cause.  While there were some who dismissed her as an imposter, a Jew-hating Jew - a caricature of the Christianized Jew who exchanged Miami Beach for St. Bart's, mink coats for Armani, who dabbled in Hayekian economics, and who called themselves Muffy and Brent - but such bitchy allegations were quickly and easily dismissed.  Esther, her distinguished father, and all her ancestors never dismissed their Jewishness, but never once let it interfere with social justice. 

The campus was set aflame, and Esther was always the first to set it alight.  She was everywhere, waving a Palestinian flag, wrapped tightly in a keffiyeh, brandishing a torch, and howling 'Down with the Jew!' until she was hoarse.  Only once or twice when memories of the prayerful, intimate, profoundly spiritual seders of her mother's family came unexpectedly into her head, did she hesitate in her virulently anti-Semitic speeches. 

Her grandmother who read to the young girl from Kings and Samuel, was more than a bubke, but the keeper of the flame, a sanctuary from the secular world, a calm, centered, and warm woman; and Esther hated to think of what Rebecca would think of her granddaughter now.  Yet the cause of the oppressed Palestinian people was a strong enough firewall for irritatingly persistent words of her grandmother. 

The demonstrations on the Columbia campus became more defiant and more violent.  The University administrators as invested in the Palestinian cause as the students did nothing to stop what had become mayhem and which had turned from peaceful pro-Palestine protests to violent anti-Israel ones, and from there to rabid anti-Semitic torchlight parades. 

 

Using his administrative authority, Arthur Goldberg, Associate Dean for Student Affairs, a Jew, but as militantly pro-Israel as any IDF sabra, called in Esther for an 'academic review', cover for an opportunity to confront the young woman on her virulent anti-Semitism.  Goldberg kept his own counsel, necessary as a spy in the enemy camp, but felt this was one time his Jewish patriotism could not be kept in check. 

'You are a Jew, Esther', he calmly but resolutely began. 'Does that mean nothing?'

At those words Esther was ready to stand up and spit in his face.  The audacity, the chutzpah to think he could pull the Jewish card on her, berate her for unassailable political positions, and try to change her mind, get her back to temple, to the Wailing Wall, to join the IDF and murder, rape, and eviscerate little Gazan children. 

But the dean was an imposing, authoritative, and intimidating man, and when he raised his hand to stop an unfortunate outburst from the young student, she demurred and began to listen. 

The dean reminded her of Jewish history, the proto-Jewish Semitic tribes from Arabia, the imprisonment in Egypt, the glorious march to Canaan and Jericho, the thousands of years of community, belonging, cultural strength and reverence.  

 

From there the elision to modern Israeli history was easy - the UN, the Jewish State, the creation of a long-awaited and necessary homeland, the spontaneous, untoward, and hateful reaction from the surrounding Arabs; the victorious Israeli wars, and the persistent, noxious, bilious hatred of all Jews by the Palestinians.  Had they simply acknowledged Israel's right to exist, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would be living in the same modern, forward-looking, rich environment as Israel's.  Instead they chose to remain a failed state, a dismal, backward, Paleolithic society ruled by venal opportunists. 

You are not demonstrating for a poor, oppressed people, but for a nasty, hateful, murderous population that wants death, destruction, and the genocide of the Jewish people.  'You are on the wrong side, Miss Pilchman'. 

Of course Esther dismissed everything that the Dean had said out of ignorance, distorted patriotism, and racism; but like her grandmother's words, the Dean's kept niggling their way into her consciousness.  Could he be right? she wondered late one night when the campus had finally quieted down.  

It was a moot question, for Donald Trump quickly sued the University, withdrew hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid and assured the administration that unless they took unequivocal steps to rid the campus of anti-Semitism and to expel those who were fomenting violence, they would be called before judge and jury. 

The frailty and febrile politicization of Columbia was exposed in a matter of days.  We believe in the cause of the oppressed Palestinian people, the University said, but they are not worth $400 million. 

Nature abhors a vacuum, and without Palestine to howl over, something had to replace it - something to justify the privileged education of Columbia; something to show that students were not just wealthy brats with no social conscience, but as committed to social reform and universal justice as anyone. 

And so it was that the protesters took up the cudgel once again for the black man and gay and transgender rights, slightly old, mildewed chestnuts by now, but given the racist homophobe in the White House, important to put back on the fire.  

Old queens, Bernal Heights bull daggers, and an avant garde of transgender wannabes (there were simply not enough real chopped and channeled transgenders to make a phalanx) led the new protests for gender fair play.  Not only was the new movement righteous, there were no legal pitfalls.  The White House could care less about a bunch of prancing fa--ots, and would leave the university alone.  

The university, stung by the White House reprimand, and bound and determined to show that they had not been intimidated by this conservative Anschluss, backed the demonstrators to the hilt.  'We are for diversity, inclusion, and equity' no matter what'; and with that raised the gay pride and old Black Lives Matter flags high above the library. 

'Enough is enough', said wealthy Columbia alumni and the flow of generous donations slowed to a trickle; so slowly but surely students returned to their classrooms.  Not that that mattered much since the curriculum had been so politicized that learning anything substantial or important was moot; but at least it was a beginning. 

'The Ivy League?', was now a meme.  'Who needs it?' 

The Ivy League Or Aggieville State? Yale Goes Ghetto, Balaclava And Gender-Queer

It wasn't supposed to be this way, the decline of a once great institution into an intellectual miasma, but there it was losing ground to Aggieville State and other two-bit public schools in the Midwest. Elihu Yale and John Davenport were turning over in their graves at the sight of a once patrician, intellectually elite college founded on solid Christian principles and right behavior becoming a dismal educational sinkhole, its reputation scuttled, its premier status relegated as it opened its doors to all comers. 

 

Dean Inslee Clark was the first to declassify Yale - or in his words to 'democratize' it and let in all those Brooklyn Jews with SATs off the charts and violins to boot, and make some space for them by winnowing out all the legatees, children of the Cabots, Lodges, Hamiltons, and Trowbridges who were as dumb as stones but let in because of breeding and future endowment.  

Yale did not become a Jewish place like some others and certainly graduated far more geniuses than ever before, but lost that special aristocratic veneer that most characterized it - the ethos of noblesse oblige, good manners, Renaissance learning, and a full, rich, and romantic life.  

In other words, they let the grinds in and the swells out.  In a matter of a few decades Yale had become as plebian, unwashed, and as basically untutored institution as Chillicothe A&M. 

New Haven in the old days was a very Italian American city, overwhelmingly so, and Italians from Wooster Square were the janitors, dishwashers, garbagemen, and laundresses of Yale.  Not one was admitted as a student until the aldermen of the New Haven city council demanded that their people should forthwith stop serving strawberries and start eating them.  It was high time for Italian Americans from New Haven to join the Jews from Brooklyn, and they nominated what they thought was an ideal candidate, Lorenzo Puzzi, a young man of talent and promise. 

Yale refused, insisting that Puzzi was a fluke. Unfortunately for Yale, with the arrogance and disdain that characterized Yale Town-Gown relationships up until the mid-Sixties, its politically naive spokesmen were more than candid and public in their pronouncements. "Mr. Puzzi", an Assistant Dean told the Journal-Courier, "may be a champion of his people, but he is certainly not a champion of ours".

The townspeople howled until Yale listened.  To avoid further roasting in the press and increasing political pressure from Connecticut and national politicians, Yale made a generous proposal to New Haven: it would take a minimum of two New Haven residents per year, would make a public apology for the "our people" interview, and would recruit up to five Italian Americans from Connecticut per year if and only if they were the most exceptional candidates. 

The standards Yale set were so high that the Admissions Office was convinced that they would get no suitable candidates. The Connecticut politicians, a bit uneasy about the almost unattainable qualifications, felt at the same time that they could not back down on them - of course the descendants of Galileo, Michelangelo, and Bernini could meet the highest standards.

Puzzi turned out OK, needed a little remedial help but beefed up varsity football line, fit in eventually, and was soon forgotten in the still pedigreed stable of the rich and privileged that was Yale. 

The admissions door, at first ajar, was finally completely open, and what had been a legitimate talent search for the best and the brightest Paolillos, Schwartzes, and Kowalskis, was now a color fest. 'Bring me some black people', said a Yale administrator, and so it was that the university became a public school clone, its patrician, Anglo-Saxon, Martha's Vineyard-Nantucket student body now irreversibly blended, an indistinguishable potpourri. 

Before long this limited racial diversity did not satisfy, and the Admissions Office was charged to recruit the 'other-gendered'. Tentative at first and somewhat squeamish, they recruited a few straight-looking, semi-closeted, careful boys from the Main Line; but then when the DEI juggernaut rolled up to Harkness Tower, they went farther afield and went Agender Flux, Neutrois, and Winkte.  Yale in a short few decades had become a mix of the Castro, Bernal Heights, Folsom Street, Anacostia, East Baltimore, and South St. Louis, a virtual racio-ethno-quoisexual jamboree. 

The one thing these various groups shared was political idealism, that marvelously naive, innocent belief in the possibility of more verdant, peaceful, compassionate, and considerate world despite all historical evidence to the contrary.  Political choice was a matter of conviction, not logic, and classes were skipped and stadium seats left empty as students poured out in support of the climate, black people, transgenders, and the poor; and against capitalism, neo-colonialism, and predatory economics. 

Demonstrations were joyous cavalcades of unity and good will.  Camaraderie, social intimacy, and generational bonding were as least as important as the political grievances aired.  The cabal of administrators, professors, and students was a trifecta - no one opposed the transformation of the campus from a place of intellectual integrity to one of emotional hysteria. 

Along came Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinians, and virulent, violent anti-Semitism.  The Palestinians - a put-upon, marginalized, and discriminated population oppressed by the Jew - could do no wrong. It was a perfect storm - support for a non-white, non-European, non-Christian people was a defiant opposition to Jewish hegemony and an outcry against capitalist, neo-colonialist, imperialism.  

The students amassing on the Old Campus were as pleased as punch to have such a felicitous consortium of hatred at hand.  Together, singing, marching, chanting, this polyglot stew of 'diversity', long ago untethered from the rigorous academic logic of earlier days and encouraged to express their identity and their feelings, 

 

Yale, Columbia, Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League never saw Trump coming.  They had assumed that this blowhard, this imposter, this blatant racist would never again sit in the Oval Office, but there he was on a vengeful tear, uprooting the federal bureaucracy, sending cattle-car loads of illegal aliens back across the border, and putting academia on notice - stop the anti-Semitic bullshit or lose your funding, be subject to legal action, and lose any stature or standing within the university system. 

The Palestinian fanaticism was so loosely wired and so puerile in conception, that students disbanded and universities capitulated.  The fact that campuses became so quiet after one Trump threat showed how transparently ignorant were students, administrators, and faculty - the famous university cabal. 

Chastened, silenced, and finally neutered, Yale organizers returned to first principles, and a campus demonstration for Queerdom was orchestrated soon after the Trump edicts. The old race-gender dyad was alive and well at Yale, and the gathering was a New Orleans Mardi Gras and Folsom Street parade combined - an outrageous, flouncy, all get out show of burlesque queens, ghetto pimps and ho's, all doo-dadded up to beat the band. 

 

'We will be back', shouted LaShonda Williams, an affirmative action baby, putting her arms around a proudly transgender Blaise Underwood after Trump's DOJ shut the university down; but woke had had its day, and whether Yale would  regain any of its former cachet is another story.  Having become a woke caricature with a student body no different than Aggieville State, why go there?

One Old Blue, big alumni donor and Yale to the core, however, was only anxious to hasten the move. 'Fuck 'em', he said, and his millions went back to an offshore Aruban bank account where it would eventually enrich his grandchildren.  As it should be for a Yale graduate. 

Doing Good Or Having Fun? The Poor Are Satisfying, Fun Is Just A State Of Mind

Bob Muzelle had never thought twice about doing good, the principle that had guided his life ever since he was a child, but here he was, sitting on the curb of 17th and Constitution disconsolate and overwhelmed by the radical upheaval of the very institutions that were the lifeblood of American aid, compassion, and right behavior.  

The new Trump Administration and its operational arm, the Department Of Government Efficiency, had closed the doors of the Agency for International Development, and in one fell swoop consigned the world's poor to a life of continued penury and pain. 

For years Bob had worked for the agency, or rather for the hundreds of non-governmental organizations granted federal funds to carry out development activities in Africa.  He had traipsed through swamps and jungles; had braved the Saharan sun, choked on bush meat, and shaken with malaria all for the sake of the poor and the misbegotten, the people whom time had forgotten and who were living, desperate and forgotten, in grass huts and sisal lean-tos.  

Bob never complained, for this personal suffering was his hair shirt.  His scabies, amoebae, river fever, and angina were the scourges and whips of the Roman soldiers along the Via Dolorosa, Jesus' way to Jerusalem.  He once joined a Holy Week procession in Spain, whipping himself bloody, a crown of thorns on his head, his bare feet cut and bruised from the march to Golgotha. 

While others enjoyed the Olympic pool at the Independence in Abidjan, dined on grilled grouper and lobster in Luanda, and enjoyed the pleasures of lithe, caramel-colored Fulani women in Bamako, Bob spent his time in the bush, making his way to far-flung outposts of misery whose inhabitants, starving and destitute looked to him for aid and succor.  No, the sybaritic life was not for him and never would be.  His road to peace in salvation was here in the most miserable, benighted, forbiddingly pestilential places of Africa.

Now, the gates to this personal heaven were closed.  Donald Trump had arbitrarily announced that the poor of Africa were not his concern, that the United States would no longer finance fraudulent, inefficient, unsorted, and hopelessly fanciful and idealistic wastes of money.  Bob was out on his ear. 

In the Cormac McCarthy book, No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh says to Carson Wells, a gun pointed at his chest, about to kill him,  'If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?', a remark that applied to most of us but particularly to Bob at this moment of profound despair.  His life's work - doing good and helping the poor - had been scuttled in one half-hour.  

Not only that, the nation was rallying around the President.  It was time for Africa - and the diaspora it spawned - to man up, accept responsibility, and make something of itself.  Trump and his supporters in so many words were echoing Cormac McCarthy. 

As Bob sat on the curb watching the caravan of dump trucks hauling the detritus, the leavings from USAID, a once honorable institution to the incinerator, he recalled Chigurgh's line to Carson Wells. If foreign aid - doing good - was no longer and for all intents and purposes did not exist and never existed, then what had his life been worth?

 

While colleagues frolicked by the sea and ate lobster and foie gras flown in from Brittany and Lyon, Bob had given heart and soul to the poor.  Were memories enough to validate a monastic, abstemious life, a life of intent and purpose but without a moment's pleasure?

Epictetus and the Epicureans notwithstanding, wasn't investment valuable per se?  He had airline tickets, a passport stamped with visas from the worst places on earth, photographs of him with black people - a chronicle of doing good, not just fleeting memories. 

Yet when a thing is gone, then its antecedents are gone, and every scintilla of its past disappears.  

And so it will be for the fun enjoyed by his indifferent colleagues, Bob insisted, satisfied.  Their romps are finished as well.  However, sybarites have one distinct advantage - fun is a state of mind, unlinked to any one place or activity.  The Olympic pool at the Independence and the Fulani women of Niamey might disappear and be things of the past, but such delights are everywhere.  If not Fatima from Luxor, then Amanda from HR, martinis and oysters at the Willard, and long weekends in Miami. 

There was no getting around it. Here on the curb Bob sat, an overweight, unattractive man nearing his pull-by date with nothing to show for it but a resume worth less than a menu from a bad restaurant.  No one cared that he had done good, because the whole idea had been dismissed as so much background noise. People were responsible for their own destiny, the new meme went, and along with it any flaccid ideology of faux compassion. 

There is still Europe, Bob thought.  The EU had not yet given up on foreign assistance and helping the world's poor, but it was so flooded with unwanted African immigrants creating black slums where none had ever existed, demanding Sharia rights in countries which deplored them, taking welfare with no thought of returning the favor, that the idea of doing anything for these hangers-on, regardless of where they lived, was an increasingly distant thought.

'You can go into sales', said his wife, far less concerned with the demise of a program which she had always suspected was a waste of time and money, teasing Bob into some semblance of reality; but he was having none of it, so emotionally drawn and destitute was he.  Images of waifs and orphans clouded his thinking, disturbed his already precarious equilibrium, and left him bereft and adrift. 

He got up from the curb once the DOGE cavalcade had passed and walked up 17th Street until he got to a funkier, shabbier, but more conciliatory part of town - i.e. which had a few old-fashioned bars where you could get a shot of Wild Turkey and a beer and not be looked at - and stopped into The Blarney Stone.  

Stumbling out the door into the bright May sunlight an hour later, drunk as a skunk, but completely deadened to the depressing thought of the loss of the poor, a livelihood, and purposeful intent, he was momentarily heartened.  'Who the fuck cares?', he shouted to no one in particular, caught the N4 and headed home.