This Week in the David "Columbia Unbecoming" Bernstein White Jewish Supremacy CHUTZPAH (11/7)
David Shasha
Cancelling the Cancel Culture: David Bernstein Wants You to Know What He Wants You to Know!
Indeed, there is no end to White Jewish Supremacy CHUTZPAH.
I have been speaking a good deal about Bari Weiss’ mentor David Bernstein of late:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Pbnyb57TZMs/m/rZ7GHrMSAgAJ
Bernstein not only decided that he needed to speak for the benighted Arab Jews, but that needed to cancel Columbia University’s Middle Eastern Studies department!
Given that, unlike his far more successful protégé Weiss, he does not have that Substack gelt coming in, he has thrown in his lot with the Bret Stephens crowd:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/4FRto3Kgn80
He now runs a Cancel Culture WOKE group duplicitously called the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values:
Naturally, he participated in the all-Neo-Con Jazz Against Democracy program, organized by Tikvah ASF Aryeh Tepper:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/oUhqdKyoyew/m/0VrbDBWIAQAJ
As we can see from the following article, he is adopting the Rufo Model and making it all about Cancel Culture:
https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/341665/cancel-culture-jewish-educators-style/
The complete article follows this note.
This is all quite rich, because Bernstein’s career has been about cancelling other viewpoints he does not like, and making sure that only his approved voices get to speak at the Adult Jewish Table.
I was particularly struck by the following passage in his Jewish Journal article:
The author of one recommended article states, “I strongly feel that de-assimilation and the dismantling of whiteness is critical to both the eradication of racism and the survival of the Jewish people.” While we do not have a problem with students reading an article calling for the “dismantling of whiteness,” where is the counterpoint? By neglecting to provide such an alternative perspective, the school is leaving students with a single, highly contentious view on the matter. Indeed, there is no mention in the Student Resource of a single Black heterodox thinker, such as Glenn Loury, John McWhorter or Coleman Hughes, offering an alternative perspective on race and racism. How can students possibly “respect divergent thinking to engage people of diverse backgrounds” if they are presented with a single ideological frame of reference rather than a range of opinions and views? Where is the school’s hallmark commitment to viewpoint diversity?
Bernstein, like his Neo-Con Jewish allies, does not at all reflect “viewpoint diversity,” as we saw in his tendentious “Forgotten Refugees” documentary.
What he wants is for the reactionary Neo-Con viewpoint to be the institutional default, and for other viewpoints to be suppressed.
That is what “Liberal” means to David Bernstein.
David Shasha
Cancel Culture, Jewish Educators Style
By: David Bernstein
Two weeks ago, I co-wrote an Open Letter to the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in the Washington, D.C. area raising concerns about the school’s “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice” (DEIJ) program. Like so many others, the school’s diversity program does not provide alternative perspectives to the typical “anti-racist” point of view. My co-author and I, both of whom had children graduate from the school, regard this “pedagogy” as a form of indoctrination.
I decided to post this Open Letter on JEDLAB, a Jewish educators Facebook group with 12,000 members. I was active in the early days of JEDLAB, a space where innovative educators shared and discussed cutting edge ideas and approaches often at odds with the Jewish educational establishment. I loved it so much I even interviewed the founder in eJewish Philanthropy.
It seemed a perfect forum for generating interesting and important discussion about emerging diversity programs in Jewish educational settings.
https://jewishjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/bernstein-facebook-395x858.jpg
Apparently, however, DEIJ initiatives in Jewish schools are not open for discussion.
Almost immediately, a member of the Facebook group pronounced the post “racist.” The member said I had no business posting my views there. Several others piled on, also calling the post “racist” and urging its immediate removal. Not a single person took exception or came to my defense (except, of course, in private messages). The comment from the member accusing me of promulgating racism had numerous “likes,” including one from a mainstream Jewish professional who is a self-proclaimed moderate on the subject. His vote of support for this vitriol suggests otherwise.
https://jewishjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/bernstein-facebook-response.jpg
About an hour after posting, the post was removed without explanation by the administrators of the group. There are two possible explanations:
https://jewishjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/bernstein-removal.jpg
The first is that the administrators agreed that raising concerns about the “anti-racist” perspective being taught to kids is inherently racist. Ibrahim X. Kendi has spoken, and we must all fall in line.
If that’s the case, I despair over the future of Jewish education.
A second possibility is that the administrators received complaints that my ideas make the space “unsafe” for participants. This, of course, meant that the administrators had to silence someone with a different point of view. This is the “heckler’s veto”: a few shrill voices who protest a particular viewpoint get spineless institutions to stifle debate.
If that’s the case, I again despair over the future of Jewish education.
Our kids must be educated in a culture and sensibility that values Makhloket Leshem Shamayim—arguments for the sake of heaven. This sensibility welcomes—even encourages—debate among people with different points of view. The Jewish tendency to question and engage in intellectual discourse is one of the great qualities of the Jewish tradition. Why would anyone, least of all Jewish educators, try to blot this out? Don’t we want our kids to be critical thinkers and challenge the status quo?
https://jewishjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/bernstein-support.jpg
Of course, there are many Jewish educators and parents who do value discussion among people with different viewpoints. A headmaster of a pluralistic Jewish school direct messaged me on Facebook and thanked me for raising the topic. One prominent professor called to say “I wanted to kiss you.” Numerous Jewish day school teachers reached out to me and my co-author of the Open Letter, thanking us for giving a voice to their concerns. These teachers cannot speak publicly themselves because, well, they fear they will be cancelled, just like my Facebook post.
How is that good for the Jews?
David Bernstein is the Founder of Jewish Institute for Liberal Value (JILV.org). Follow him on Twitter @DavidLBernstein
From The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, October 22, 2021
An Open Letter to the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School
By: Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky and David Bernstein
We are writing out of concern for the recently introduced CESJDS Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice (DEIJ) Learning Framework. Both of us have had children who attended and graduated from CESJDS. Both of us are thankful for the in-depth secular and Jewish education our children received while at the school. Both of us appreciate the school’s commitment to critical thinking and Jewish values, which our children have taken with them into college and beyond.
Yet both of us were taken aback at the lack of critical thinking and intellectual openness evident in the CESJDS DEIJ Framework. The school has laudably embraced a commitment to racial justice and to ensuring that its students are committed to related Jewish values, such as “K’dushah (Holiness), V’ahavta L’rei-akha (Loving your Neighbor), Kehillah (Community), and pluralism.” We support the school’s dedication to empowering students to overcome our nation’s legacy of racism and to make the school community fully inclusive.
But we believe that the DEIJ Framework as currently written sacrifices critical thinking and rigorous debate at the altar of “anti-racism,” a specific set of explanations for racial disparities. The underlying ideology holds that there is only one acceptable explanation for racial disparities — systemic or structural racism — and crowds out any alternative explanation. In addition to being intellectually stifling and inimical to critical thinking, the ideology fuels antisemitism on the left, which we saw on full display during the conflict in Gaza this past May. By insisting on an oppressed versus oppressor binary, the ideology sets up Jews and Israel to be portrayed as oppressors and generally erases the Jewish narrative. While Jewish organizations that embrace such a framework don’t intend to reinforce such a binary that harms Jews, the insistence on linking privilege to identity does just that.
In the long term, our country can only lift up marginalized populations and make strides on overcoming racism by living up to our liberal principles, which encourage free inquiry, argument, dissent and critical thinking in education.
The DEIJ Framework starts off by acknowledging the importance of critical thinking and open discourse: “Students will learn to respect divergent thinking to engage people of diverse backgrounds and beliefs in thoughtful discussion.” But then the Framework contradicts the very possibility of open discourse by stating that “Students will recognize that power and privilege influence relationships on interpersonal, intergroup, and institutional levels and consider how they have been affected by those dynamics while identifying figures, groups, events, and a variety of strategies and philosophies relevant to the history of social justice around the world.”
This second statement cited above dictates that teachers impart and students embrace a belief system about power and privilege. There is no mention in the Framework of any other factor that might also explain contemporary social dynamics and disparities. We want to be clear that we are not arguing that the school shouldn’t teach about slavery, reconstruction and Jim Crow in historical context. We wholeheartedly endorse such a curriculum. Rather, we are concerned that the DEIJ Framework embraces a set of hotly contested theories of our current social problems. In other words, the Framework presents opinion as fact. These explanations for disparity should be debated by students, not handed to them as doctrine.
We’d be inclined to give the school the benefit of the doubt that it will, in fact, encourage such open discourse but for the “Student Resource” list that follows on the DEIJ webpage. Every article, every website and every video in the Student Resource reinforces the same basic ideological contention about power and privilege.
The author of one recommended article states, “I strongly feel that de-assimilation and the dismantling of whiteness is critical to both the eradication of racism and the survival of the Jewish people.” While we do not have a problem with students reading an article calling for the “dismantling of whiteness,” where is the counterpoint? By neglecting to provide such an alternative perspective, the school is leaving students with a single, highly contentious view on the matter. Indeed, there is no mention in the Student Resource of a single Black heterodox thinker, such as Glenn Loury, John McWhorter or Coleman Hughes, offering an alternative perspective on race and racism. How can students possibly “respect divergent thinking to engage people of diverse backgrounds” if they are presented with a single ideological frame of reference rather than a range of opinions and views? Where is the school’s hallmark commitment to viewpoint diversity?
CESJDS and, indeed, all our educational institutions have a choice: they can expose students to a variety of perspectives about what diversity means for society, or they can prescribe a particular set of theories and explanations for why our society is the way it is. They can teach students how to think or they can teach students what to think. But they can’t do both. We fear that in embracing this particular DEIJ curriculum, CESJDS has signed up for the latter. There are alternatives.
David Bernstein is the Founder
of Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (JILV).
Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky is a social worker, writer, researcher and advocate.
She is a JILV board member.
From The Washington Jewish Week, October 13, 2021