It was just another blip in the endless sequence of campus controversies, but for me it was a first. Earlier this month, as the culminating event of Palestine Awareness Week at Stanford University, the Jewish cartoonist Eli Valley was scheduled to give a talk. His work, featuring images depicting in the most obscene way Jews whose politics he despises, and non-Jews like Meghan McCain who support such Jews, had been plastered all over campus.
I didn't relish spending my last weeks in law school arguing about anti-Semitism and Israel. But I had something to say, so I composed an op-ed for the college newspaper. In it I wrote that Valley's work was "rude and disgusting, and its ceaseless recourse to Nazi imagery is matched only by its slavish devotion to the age-old tropes of Jewish caricature." Indeed, so rude and disgusting are Valley's cartoons that the co-sponsors of his talk, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), semi-apologized to Stanford's Jewish community for having disseminated them "out of context."
My op-ed gained some traction, and the response was ugly: hate on Twitter, Jewish friends who refused to look me in the eye, and similar examples from the barrage of vitriol that regularly greets Jewish writers who proudly identify as Zionists.
Read Full Article »