ICYMI: Newsletter Special: Joshua Katz and Cancel Culture
David Shasha
Please note: Many of the articles cited in this introductory essay are included in full in the special newsletter. Check the TOC below.
While it might seem that my intense concern for Bari Weiss and The Rufo Institute verges on obsession, in reality my writing on the matter is re-active rather than pro-active.
I hope that does not make me a reactionary!
It is clear that Christopher Rufo has become the poster boy for the New White Privilege and the Trumpist dogma that criticism of racism is a violation of Free Speech:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/mQI0Y88qBZ8/m/1gLBmgqLAQAJ
Predictably, he has become a fixture on FOX News in its Tucker Carlson Great Replacement Theory victim mentality:
I have simply been following and reacting to the ongoing assault against the emergence of a new Anti-Racist Consciousness that has important ramifications for Sephardim as an oppressed minority, and for Jews more generally, as we assert our need for multiculturalism and pluralism within White Christian European culture.
We should however note that reactionary Jewish academics like Robert Alter and the “New Talmudists” led by Daniel Boyarin and Christine Hayes have allied themselves to the Eurocentric forces that have stymied the forward progress against such racism:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y5_qZRLaE3uCbQHew66ekpAPh5fCm9UkFMRO9mRbiyE/edit
The New Talmudists have firmly rejected the hermeneutical tenets of Post-Modernism and the Open Book of Scripture in a doggedly literalist attempt to undermine the Jewish system of Law and Midrash, which is reflected in the Post-Modern conceptuality:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPbxxP_kkV536tPTvMpsUE9feBgoBSa7QEP8iXXDHIk/edit
Central to this process is the pernicious role of The Tikvah Fund and the insidious way in which it has promoted Neo-Con White Jewish Supremacy rooted in the extreme Anti-Democratic values of Leo Strauss:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y8UrV67wrZUghBRZimf_5PeQTkQbzXsufntJtD6Y1EM/edit
I have recently addressed the matter again, and provided all the internal institutional connections that link Tikvah to other reactionary Neo-Con groups, in my article on Aryeh Tepper and his attempt to grossly distort the work of the great African-American author Albert Murray to suit those purposes:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/oUhqdKyoyew
Prominent figures in this Neo-Con radical alignment are Bari Weiss and Glenn Loury, who have sought to affirm a dying White Supremacist status quo, which has been resurrected with a murderous vengeance by the revanchist Alt-Right Trumpists:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/wl0lG1tSMh8/m/OiJVsGdAAQAJ
My work as a Sephardi intellectual-activist has been to monitor these developments as I continue to promote the Lost Cause of Sephardi continuity.
I have attempted to raise awareness of a contemporary Jewish institutional world whose academic proponents have marginalized Sephardic culture and sought to mark “serious” Jewish thought as exclusively Ashkenazi.
In my article “Modern Jewish Philosophy as White Jewish Supremacy” I detail this ongoing process:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mjPboUYJIFK3e5HeU0xUzvMcdlpcLxoQdRwqFI3guuw/edit
More specifically, in the Orthodox world I have shone a light on the prejudice of figures like Haym Soloveitchik, who has advanced this racism by simply denying Sephardim a place at the Modern Jewish Table:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NBCYyz07l0iTs34hfKZuCZ9croAiB8Mb-JK4Gx9BOFE/edit
Soloveitchik’s father discounted the Sephardic heritage as not being authentically Jewish; an idea that goes back to the reactionary Orthodoxy of Samson Raphael Hirsch:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1osm0botpWsc_L-yS0ZvOOD-FPmIY75vb7T83BjQI9wE/edit
In the context of this pernicious Ashkenazi racism, I have sought to deploy the work of the late Jose Faur in order to provide an alternative means of processing the Jewish tradition:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T5hwSK5C4N8Vd50UYMptCy1jmk5LSyJbIUEh-Lq6_s8/edit
It is critical to note that Faur was one of the first Jewish scholars to deploy the work of Jacques Derrida and the Post-Modernists in the context of Rabbinic Judaism, as we saw in his seminal 1986 book Golden Doves with Silver Dots:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXQnNIeEJ3aGdSSjQ/view?ths=true
Faur’s use of the Neapolitan professor of rhetoric Giambattista Vico as a means to counter Enlightenment absolutism and racism is critical to his understanding of Jewish Humanism:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXeTMtSjJWWEZfT1E/edit
I have made note of this Vico connection in my attack on Trumpscum Jew Yoram Hazony and his reactionary Hegelianism:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aU5eUG3_dui2ugm1oANVkWLh1-TgH4dtlqCruef7pCo/edit
Hazony has become a fellow Tucker Carlson White Nationalist traveler:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DxHkOp4KpryDXxhnRSzmWg3McaUV0CcsWPvAmV7uJpo/edit
And a proud Trump advisor:
https://www.vox.com/21355993/trump-israel-yoram-hazony-nationalism-tikvah
It should be remembered that Faur’s battle for Vichian Religious Humanism and cultural pluralism is also central to the work of the late Edward Said and his own brand of activism, as can be seen in Mauro Scalercio’s excellent 2016 article “The Italian Job: Giambattista Vico at the Origin of Edward Said’s Humanism.”:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16JAAqSfuMbMg5YWW9W9o8wL47oI7vYsq/view?ths=true
This is the conceptual-political background of my work on Weiss, Rufo, and Cancel Culture, which seeks to find a place for Sephardim in the contemporary discourse on Judaism and general culture.
Critical to my mission is not only the value of Anti-Racism, but the ways in which it must be situated in the larger context of a pedagogy that remains open to critical methods that allow for multivocality and pluralistic ways of seeing Western Civilization.
And this leads us to the fascinating case of Joshua Katz.
I must admit that I was not aware of Katz’s case until he published his article “My Confessions” in the radical Trumpist Catholic journal First Things:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/10/my-confessions
When I received that daily First Things e-mail newsletter, I wrongly thought that Katz was just another Jewish Neo-Con Tikvah type who was making the link between the Neo-Con Straussians and the Neo-Con Ratzingarians, as has been the case with Michael Wyschogrod and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, both of whom have been deeply embedded in what I have called the New Convivencia; a union of radical Jews and Christians in the fundamentalist world of religious atavism:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vkNZusv09KazmHUp3BNcBGIe9TEZEMcKsZXfbBFMm4Q/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_fs8wonYLfhONdKPKTgFt_aoi6GPoJ2uhDFcWOfKuTk/edit
But Katz’s case is somewhat different, as he admits in the article:
Today I write also in faith. I grew up with no faith, no creed, the child of a nominally Lutheran mother and a nominally Jewish father, for neither of whom religion is of any interest. I didn’t regret not going to church or synagogue. I knew the Bible—I would later discover that I knew it in some ways better than the religious people I met—but I knew it as literature and history and culture, not as religion. Only when I moved to England at twenty-two did I begin to attend services regularly, usually at my Oxford college, Christ Church, and this I did not for the sake of the Kingdom but for the power and the glory of the music that makes an Anglican rite one of life’s transcendent experiences. My return to the United States marked the end of that habit, though on visiting England in years to come I would sometimes be free at the right hour and go to Evensong. Doing so always left me fulfilled—musically, for sure, but looking back now I can say spiritually as well, though at the time I did not recognize it.
Katz is that very dangerous religious figure: the convert who moves from unbelief to fanaticism.
And it is in the First Things article that we see how his Cancel Culture case is unique among the current crop of Rufo-Weiss specimens.
Once I read the First Things article, I was curious to learn more about his case and why it was that I had never before heard of him.
In spite of the fact that he has been deployed by Moscow Mitch in the Trumpist manner from the very well of the Senate:
https://twitter.com/princetonian/status/1285972263485964290?lang=en
The whole thing started in July 2020 when Katz decided to buck Princeton convention by publishing an article attacking the New Racial Consciousness in Quillette:
https://quillette.com/2020/07/08/a-declaration-of-independence-by-a-princeton-professor/
This so-called “Declaration of Independence” was the opening Culture War salvo from a man who sought to protect by any means necessary his own White Privilege, institutional power, and sense of natural entitlement.
Indeed, this is likely the reason why Bari Weiss has not written specifically about him, though she does seem to have struck up a personal relationship with him:
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-great-unraveling
As we can see from the articles in this special newsletter, Katz’s defiant sense of umbrage and, ironically, miserabilist sense of grievance, have been produced by an elite academic system that is finally seeing itself subjected to the sorts of criticism and inspection that have characterized the breakthroughs of Me Too and Black Lives Matter.
Accountability can be a very painful thing when it finally comes!
After publishing his shrill Quillette manifesto denying the right of academics to monitor their guild for racism, he moved straight to The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page; arrogantly asserting that he had defeated Princeton’s Cancel Culture:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-survived-cancellation-at-princeton-11595787211
The article was widely distributed by the usual suspects, and from a Jewish perspective begs the question: What if Katz was defending the rights of Anti-Semites?
We will of course recall Weiss’ article “Everybody Hates the Jews”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/PxOQ3eF7PU0/m/rS59jM2MAQAJ
I presented that hysterical – and quite inaccurate – article with the title: “All Hail the WOKE Ashkenazi Jewish Genius! Rufo Institute Tikvah White Supremacist Bari Weiss Presents Her Very Own CRITICAL RACE THEORY.”
Weiss, like so many of the other whiny Tikvah Neo-Cons, is quite upset with the New Anti-Semitism, even as they follow the Trump line in most things:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SxkLo73G_WmdoQeRsZbS0ZCKOOSDPUl5yl6BxOaxObQ/edit
We will recall that her first published book, her only published book, is on that very subject:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/616727/how-to-fight-anti-semitism-by-bari-weiss/
I suppose that it is all well and good to fight Jew-haters, but not Black-haters, or Sephardi-haters.
That would be a step too far!
Getting back to Katz, one of his most vociferous defenders is the bomb-throwing radical reactionary Rod Dreher, who himself is a great admirer of the New White Nationalism as embodied by Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orban:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/who-is-viktor-orban/
Like his pal Weiss, Dreher is very concerned with keeping the racist status quo as it is.
In his American Conservative article, “Persecution & Propaganda At Princeton,” he enters into the Culture War battle over how we read the Classical Western tradition:
If this doesn’t terrify you, you’re not seeing it for what it is. These scholars believe that the Classics field should exist only for the sake of its own destruction! It is completely perverse. My kids attend a school where everybody studies Latin, and there’s a lot of reading in the Greeks and the Romans. If any of my children fell in love with the Classics and wanted to study them, I would have to discourage them from going into the field, which is committing suicide.
He derisively cites Princeton Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta:
Moreover, as part of the same freshman orientation program, Princeton has produced this video, in which woke professors talk about — what else? — racism. At the 38:38 mark, Prof. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who, as a Classics student, was mentored by Joshua Katz, but who has now turned on him, says that he’s in favor of free speech, but only to advance “social justice” and “antiracist social justice.” He says faculty help students with this, not to help them “assimilate,” and think well of Princeton, but “to provide them with the tools to tear down this place and make it a better one.”
Peralta was recently the subject of a much-discussed New York Times profile that detailed his critical vision for Classics departments:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.html
It would not be inappropriate to see Peralta’s work as a continuation of the Edward Said Orientalism legacy, via figures like Cornel West and Eddie Glaude, Jr.; the latter also the object of Dreher’s White Supremacist opprobrium:
This is jaw-dropping stuff. Princeton University is in effect accusing a sitting professor of being an anti-black racist. The university directs incoming freshmen to read that website, in which Prof. Katz is introduced to them as one of the most evil people on campus, while the revolting race-baiter Eddie Glaude is held up as an aggrieved victim of Katz. I hope Katz has contacted a lawyer about this.
The question of Woke coming to the study of Greece and Rome should be fascinating for Jews, given that we did not fare so well under their tyranny!
And someone might remind Dreher that Jesus was actually Jewish, and that the Romans crucified him for sedition. But Dreher apparently has his Western Supremacy story, and he is sticking with it.
Katz, however, presents himself differently in an interview with Shilo Brooks conducted at the University of Colorado:
I am a great believer in the power of the humanities to enlighten, comfort, and entertain. I believe that there are core works of literature and art that everyone in our society ought to know. I also believe that it is important to have a strong acquaintance with the literature, arts and ideas that lie outside of this core and outside one's own society. And I have spent my career teaching and writing on subjects, both traditional and untraditional, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to religious texts of ancient India, to classical Latin poetry, to medieval Irish law, to the Native American languages of Southern California, to 21st century experimental literature in English.
It is certainly a laudable statement, but one, pace the Padilla Saidian critique, that does not engage the problem of White Supremacy and Eurocentric racism in the Classics field.
The activism of people like Glaude is about, as Weiss is doing with Anti-Semitism, identifying the culprits and seeking redress for past wrongs.
Is Katz capable of such self-critique?
As we have seen in his pompous White bloviating in WSJ, Quillette, and The Witherspoon Institute, the answer would be an emphatic “no.”
I have frequently pointed to an important encounter I had with a racist Neo-Con Jew named Daniel Ross Goodman over what inclusion and pluralism means in a Jewish context:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oIFQyhk6TzxrqZVZfx7XBgARKoAxgsOBHERrwH4BuvE/edit
Even when he was still a graduate student at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, Goodman understood the intrinsic sense of institutional power wielded by White Jewish Supremacy, which he translated into an Anti-Sephardi racism rooted in a monocultural understanding of Judaism and Culture.
I raise the issue of Goodman because he, like Katz, is a proud Witherspoon contributor:
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/author/daniel-ross-goodman/
In “My Confessions” Katz lays bare his conversion experience in a way that is related to this reactionary religious understanding:
Because religion is still new to me, and because I grew up with the New York Times, which in the guise of news now instructs those aptly dubbed by John McWhorter “The Elect” to despise religion, I find it remarkable—though I shouldn’t—that many of the people who have worked so hard to keep me going are religious. Not all, to be sure. One is aggressive about his atheism, which is just fine with me. But it is undeniable that I owe my sanity largely to a couple dozen churchgoing Christians and synagogue-attending Jews: people who understand sin, redemption, and faith, both in theory and in practice.
He follows this admission up with a revealing tell on the Schneersohn-Christ and Opus Dei, the most radical of religious sects:
I have been inspired by religion. But let me say something direct. It is not easy to bare one’s sins to a distinguished conservative Catholic colleague, or to a member of Opus Dei, or to one of the most famous Jews in the world, or to a phalanx of Episcopalians who supported you a year ago but must now be wondering whether they were wrong to do so. It is not easy to know that your upstanding students, some of them associated with Chabad or the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship, are reading horrible things about you on social media. It is not easy to write a confessional piece that will be read by God knows how many of your friends and God knows how many of your enemies. It is not easy to know that your greatest sin, now publicly revealed, will forever be part of what defines you, and that it will likely overshadow all the many things you did that are meet and right.
We will recall that Princeton is also home to Meir Solovechik’s Tikvah Straussian mentor Leora Batnitzky:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/uODidN91g0c
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/XidD6MJ87Dg/m/wkm6Nt63HjAJ
Batnitzky’s work has provided arguably the most vigorous defense of Leo Strauss and his debased nihilism:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691144276/idolatry-and-representation
In her book on Levinas, she actually forces a Straussian reading on a figure who was one of the primary representatives of Jewish Humanism in the 20th century.
I have written about Levinas and his Jewish Liberalism, as understood in the primacy of the ethical relation:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ciS0cT5sXHfq07oTwMv1wRNSxqxeAmDzm-6LNbS9p44/edit
The Batnitzky method is very much tied to the ongoing concern over the New Racial Consciousness and a more critical approach to the study of history, politics, and culture.
In addition to Batnitzky, Princeton also hosts Professor Robert George, frequent sparring partner of Cornel West:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Wd3wMp5fgjE/m/BJqOF2E_CAAJ
The following article from The Daily Princetonian presents George as himself a practitioner of a form of Right Wing Cancel Culture, which also provides a link to Katz:
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/12/just-leave-us-alone-robby-george
The following article presents George’s own Trump Evangelical apologia, which itself is mired in a Catholic PILPUL:
In his words:
Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump (and my own views about the President’s delinquencies are well known) surely it’s not hard to understand why large numbers of Evangelicals and Catholics favor him over any of the Democrats seeking their party’s nomination (despite the fact that many Evangelicals and Catholics aren’t happy about the President’s character, coarse rhetoric, and some of his polices). There is the fealty of every single one of the Democratic nominees–every single one–to the abortion and sex lib lobbies. If you believe, as Evangelicals and Catholics believe, that abortion is the unjust killing of innocent and defenseless members of the human family, then it is nigh impossible to imagine circumstances under which one could support a politician who pledges to work night and day to deny unborn children any legal protection against the lethal violence now visited with impunity upon nearly a million of them each year. And that is precisely the pledge every Democratic candidate makes to Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the entire base of their party. But that’s only for starters.
George, like New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, represents the views of many Right Wing religious intellectuals and activists, who are not nearly as disturbed by Trump and Trumpism as they are over the Liberal “revolution.”
For them, having Whore of Trump Coney Barrett sitting alongside Rapist Kavanaugh and Pornographer Thomas is a good thing indeed!
https://twitter.com/mccormickprof/status/1012071238422941703?lang=en
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/07/the-diversity-nominee
https://www.newsweek.com/case-amy-coney-barrett-opinion-1534064
ROE MUST GO!
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/07/roe-must-go
ROE WILL GO!
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/10/roe-will-go
George is of course a member in good standing of The Federalist society:
https://fedsoc.org/contributors/robert-george
And it is in this Right Wing legal context that perhaps the most interesting, and maddening, part of the Katz case comes to the fore.
One of the privileges of the White institutional elite has been a pass when it comes to personal behavior.
We have of course witnessed the sickening display of petulance by Rapist Kavanaugh and his own sexual shenanigans:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/hYB-7I4krKg/m/5OT4moS3DQAJ
We have seen his enablers, the usual reactionary Neo-Con suspects:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/pM4uQVcQwu0/m/7Ogi35-hAwAJ
Including Professor George himself:
https://twitter.com/mccormickprof/status/1029345823912587264?lang=en
https://nypost.com/2018/10/03/the-obscene-abuse-of-brett-kavanaugh-is-feeding-a-volcano-of-outrage/
Once Katz exposed his own vehement opposition to racial accountability in academia, Princeton students sought to examine his actions as a member of the pampered White Privilege class:
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2021/02/alumni-allegations-princeton-joshua-katz
It was in these articles that the matter of Katz’s sexual-romantic proclivities related to his students were put under a critical microscope:
But an investigation by The Daily Princetonian has uncovered allegations that Katz crossed professional boundaries with three of his female students.
Here are some of those details:
Clara, who attended Princeton after Jane graduated, told the ‘Prince’ that Katz pursued her while she was a student. For over a year, she alleges, he brought her gifts, commented on her appearance, and paid for expensive off-campus dinners.
“I would say that in my own experience, ‘repeated boundary violations’ characterizes the relationship I had with him,” Clara said.
The third student, Bella, said that Katz asked her on what she understood to be a date while she was a student in his class, and paid for their dinner and wine at an upscale restaurant in Princeton during that semester’s exam period.
And, of course, the institutional sandbagging cover-up:
The ‘Prince’ could not confirm whether the report to the residential college dean or Clara’s complaint yielded any action, and the dean and the three professors declined or did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Years after these alleged events, Katz took a leave of absence from the University in the academic year 2018–19, according to records obtained by the ‘Prince.’
The absence was Katz’s second consecutive leave after a sabbatical in the 2017–18 academic year — back-to-back leaves that two faculty members described as highly unusual. The ‘Prince’ was unable to confirm the basis for Katz’s extended leave of absence.
The University declined to comment on the reasons for Katz’s second leave. Chang said, speaking generally and not in connection to specific allegations, that any complaint of inappropriate conduct by a faculty member “is investigated thoroughly and, if appropriate, discipline is imposed — regardless of the amount of time that may have passed before a complaint was made.”
The article then provides an idea of the massive institutional power that Katz wields:
Katz has wielded greater influence over students’ academic futures than most faculty, in part because of his leadership roles on fellowship and award committees. Elizabeth Butterworth ’12, a classics alumna who as a student knew of fellow students’ concerns about Katz’s alleged conduct toward women, said the role the University played in elevating him to positions of authority was “really troubling.”
“The University put him forward so intensely as one of their great undergraduate teachers and nothing has been done to retract that,” said Butterworth, a Rhodes Scholar and salutatorian who previously criticized Katz for his description of the BJL. “You feel like you’re being gaslit by the University because you come in being told that this person is so great and cares so much about mentoring young students.”
According to the article, though Katz and his lawyer have refused to formally address the charges of sexual malfeasance and inappropriate behavior, Katz’s “Confessions” provide some tantalizing hints at the charges:
In 1998, five years after leaving Oxford, I landed a job at Princeton University. Successful as a teacher, researcher, and administrator, I rose through the ranks, earning tenure in 2006 and ultimately being appointed to an endowed professorship. Early in my career, however, I made a grave mistake, by which I mean something beyond the bounds of “merely” bad behavior, something sinful: I had a relationship with a student whom I was at the same time teaching. It was a consensual relationship between adults; it took place at a time when Princeton’s rules permitted students and faculty to engage in sexual contact, provided there was no pedagogical or supervisory conflict; and there was no Title IX violation. Still, it was a sin.
It is a sin I lived with every day. It ate away at me. But I lived with it alone. Alone, that is, until weeks after the #MeToo movement took off in late 2017, when an anonymous complainant—not the woman herself—informed Princeton about the more-than-a-decade-old affair. The result was an internal investigation, which culminated in a one-year suspension without pay.
Reading these words, it is apparent that Katz wants to mitigate his “sinful” actions, and frame them in religious terms in the most exculpatory and magnanimous way possible.
It is always interesting to see how religious people act all holier-than-thou when it comes to others, but when their own wrongdoing is exposed, they hide behind hollow platitudes.
In Katz’s case, these platitudes have no critical effect on his morality, or lack of it, as the basic idea is to keep punching away at the paragons of Political Correctness:
The hideousness shows no signs of abating, though thanks to the Academic Freedom Alliance and many individuals around the world who have reached out to me, I have this year gained more, and better, friends than I lost. Perhaps someday I will have more to say about this. For now: Though my faith in academia, which had been waning for years, is now largely gone, my faith in the power of God’s mysterious ways is ascendant.
Naturally, it is the fault of those investigating him:
For by that time the vitriol directed against me was staggering. As I would later learn, after the publication of my original piece in July 2020, two reporters at the main student newspaper spent seven months digging into my private life. Surmising that I had been suspended, they published an article about me in the first week of February that “threw away basic journalistic standards” (in the words of Princetonians for Free Speech) in its reliance on hearsay, innuendo, and hostile anonymous sources. The result was predictable. Large numbers of students and colleagues, at Princeton and elsewhere, took to print and Twitter to renew their calls for me to be fired. The paper continued throughout the semester to publish hit jobs. My employer, despite initially indicating that it would observe its standard practice of not commenting on personnel matters, pressed me to put out a brief, university-approved public statement, indicating that it would do so if I didn’t. The message to my colleagues was clear: Don’t dare to challenge campus orthodoxy.
In his Witherspoon article “Coming Out of Our Burrows: Anti-Fundamentalism, Free Speech, and the Academy,” he provides a tantalizing hint of his move to fundamentalist Christianity and the way it has affected his scholarly understanding:
The chapter in Minds Wide Shut on religion—really on the beliefs of two peoples of the Book, Jews and Christians—is, in my eyes, the weakest. Having taken on politics and economics in earlier chapters, Morson and Schapiro continue here their project of discouraging people from fundamentalism, which, as mentioned above, can have a number of features that we might think inherent in, or at any rate near the core of, religious observance, including textual infallibility and profession of a doctrine that provides certainty. But how are we to distinguish between fundamentalist religion and what they would consider the good kind?
Their answer is wishy-washy: doctrine should indeed not be fixed, but change should “come slowly, . . . reflect[ing] not the enthusiasm or irritations of a moment, but a long process of consideration and reconsideration.” I don’t disagree. What I do find vexing, though, is that they come close to apologizing for their holding some traditional views about religion: “[s]ome of what does not change in sacred texts will run counter to our taste, but that is why they can speak to us from somewhere beyond our tiny island of the present moment.”
Speaking to the Witherspoon audience, Katz knows that the primacy of religion is something that one must be defensive about when navigating the perilous waters of the Woke academy.
Not unexpectedly, at the close of the article, he presents the usual Right Wing reactionary attack on critical views of the Western tradition and the New Racial Consciousness:
There will be those who ignore such demonstrations on the grounds that the very notion of “great” literature is somehow racist, classist, jingoistic, or the like. But such “missionary nihilis[ts]” won’t appreciate anyway Morson and Schapiro’s understandable and damning lack of attention to contemporary literary theory and criticism. (On this topic, I recommend a simultaneously wickedly funny and deeply depressing short opinion piece by James Campbell.) The star in their critical universe is Mikhail Bakhtin, on whom Morson is an expert: no surprise, since Bakhtin is famous for his theory of dialogue.
This is buttressed by his attack on Post-Modernism as relativistic and truth-denying in the Shilo Brooks interview:
SHILO BROOKS: Thank you, Joshua. Thanks for bringing your intellectual insights to that. And also thank you for your courage. I don't say that lightly. Feel free everybody to post questions. We've got a good period of time for them. And what I'll do is read them off to Joshua, you know, as many as we can get to and he'll answer them as best he can. So the first one is a question about the state of the academy. Lauren asks, has there been a permanent decline in probity in the academy, especially at the most elite levels. And if so, if there has been some decline in probity, what's the relationship between, he calls it the rise of post-modernism or historicist attacks on reason, and that decline? What's the cause of the potential reduction of probity?
PROFESSOR KATZ: Well, the word probity is awfully strong and it's a little hard, I would think to get my head around that. I mean, is the question here, probity, as what's normally called truth? I mean, I'm now throwing this back at you. I'm a little uncomfortable using the word probity because it sounds very, I guess legalistic, but if I were to convert that into truth, well, it is no secret that most people now have a much more relativistic view of the world. I mean, most people in the American academy, in the western academy have a much more relaxed attitude, well, to set truth than they used to. And to some extent, in fact, I would say to a very large extent, that's okay. I mean, it's a good idea to contest received wisdom. It's a good idea to wonder that the truths that one has learned may not in fact be entirely correct, but the idea that there is no such thing whatsoever as truth out there in all sorts of subjects from English to physics is, shall we say, highly contestable at best? So yes, I would say that this has contributed. I would say that well, roughly speaking postmodernism has contributed to the decline in the idea of truth or call it probity in the academy, but I'm not going to go as far along that line, as some people will. I'm not against the idea of questioning the truth and I'm not against the idea that there are fuzzy areas that can be looked at from multiple perspectives as some people are.
It is of course highly ironic that it is not the Post-Modernists in the Trump era that are responsible for denying the truth, but the Right Wing reactionaries themselves.
I have previously cited my article on the Daniel Boyarin “New Talmudists” and the great historian Timothy Snyder, which provides an indication of the problem:
Boyarin’s idea is to negate the Open Text of Post-Modern Judaism and its evolutionary pluralist-democratic systemology, and replace it with a hermetic reading of the Talmudic tradition steeped in Social Science theory and the isolationism of the documentary source-critical approach of the German Idealist tradition of Hegel and his followers.
One would think that by now the German 19th century, which led to the disastrous German 20th century in myriad ideological-conceptual ways, would be rejected by scholars, especially Jewish ones. But the tragic lessons of the past have surely not been learned when we look at the “New Talmudists.”
In a recent article “The War on History is a War on Democracy,” Snyder sharpens the point:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/3fpwrnUmLVE/m/daLqMUJgBgAJ
In his trenchant words:
Democracy requires individual responsibility, which is impossible without critical history. It thrives in a spirit of self-awareness and self-correction. Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is infantilizing: We should not have to feel any negative emotions; difficult subjects should be kept from us. Our memory laws amount to therapy, a talking cure. In the laws’ portrayal of the world, the words of white people have the magic power to dissolve the historical consequences of slavery, lynchings and voter suppression. Racism is over when white people say so.
The New Racial Consciousness adheres to these ideas of critical historicism and truth-telling, as it rejects the reactionary racism of what until recently has been the academic status quo.
For reactionaries like Joshua Katz, and his many Neo-Con allies, such a critique comes as a shock, which serves to disrupt the old business-as-usual approach that has become so central to the White Racist Nostalgia-mongering of the FOX News Tucker Carlson crowd:
It is worth noting that the ADL has called for Carlson’s cancellation:
On Thursday, in response to Carlson’s latest segment, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt renewed his calls for Fox News to dump its biggest star.
“It cannot be overstated enough,” Greenblatt said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “For Tucker Carlson, host of one of the most-watched news programs in the country, to use his platform as a megaphone to spread the toxic, antisemitic, and xenophobic ‘great replacement theory’ is a repugnant and dangerous abuse of his platform.”
Greenblatt added: “If it somehow wasn’t clear enough before to the executives at Fox News that Carlson was openly embracing white nationalist talking points, let last night’s episode be case and point. We reiterate our call to Fox News and Lachlan Murdoch: Tucker Carlson must go.”
In a National Review article, the new Jews for Jesus CEO Dennis Prager defended the Orange Pig with all his might:
Here was the ADL response:
https://www.adl.org/news/media-watch/adl-response-to-dennis-prager
In the cogent words of Kenneth Jacobson, ADL Deputy National Director:
Our concerns about anti-Semitism in America are real and based on fact. Dennis Prager, in making his claim of hysteria, ignores the data and chooses to mischaracterize our statements.
We made clear, reflecting ADL’s most recent poll of the American people, that the American public at-large was not becoming more anti-Semitic. We also made clear that we did not believe that President Donald Trump was anti-Semitic.
What we did say was that anti-Semitic incidents, such as harassment, vandalism and physical assaults, in the United States were dramatically increasing. Statistics, which Prager conveniently omits, bear that out. In 2016, there was a 34 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents over the year before. And in the first two months of 2017 there was a 31 percent increase (this excludes the many bomb threats against Jewish institutions that so terrorized the community). Hate crimes against Jews in New York City doubled in 2017.
We also said that President Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign was a factor in this phenomenon and we stand by that. His comments about Muslims, Latinos, the disabled and women have given license to some hate-filled individuals and groups to now act upon them. Not surprisingly, among them were anti-Semites, who now felt emboldened to express their anti-Semitism.
One more thing that Prager ignores: we have long said that anti-Semitism has no ideological monopoly. It comes from the left as well as the right. We work to combat it, such as in our efforts against the anti-Israel boycott movement on campuses, no matter where it comes from.
Mr. Prager should not diminish the real concerns about anti-Semitism in America.
Cancel Culture is something of vital importance to those of us who are fighting racism and prejudice. It means that we must all look critically at what is happening around us, and how that is related to the way we understand and interpret what has come before us.
The case of Joshua Katz presents us with a vital example of what is at stake in the Me Too movement and in the continuing fight of Black Lives Matter.
Current Trumpublican legislation in the Confederate states has put into question all the efforts at protecting Women and Blacks in this country, through the institution of abortion bans and voter suppression laws:
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/18/texas-heartbeat-bill-abortions-law/
https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-voter-suppression-in-2020/
And with Traitor Joe, it is impossible to see any way for a Democratic Congress to change any of this by removing the Filibuster:
As they continue to eat away at what is now left of our democracy, these Trumpublicans have found compliant allies in the elitist anti-Woke crowd.
Katz’s petulance thus reflects his own sense of entitlement and White Privilege, which has been translated into the terms of the ongoing battle against Wokeness and Cancel Culture that is embodied by Tikvah stalwarts like Bari Weiss, and which is being deployed to political advantage by her ally Christopher Rufo.
As the struggle for human equality continues to be waged in America, there will be a great deal of contentiousness and confusion. This must not allow us to cave in to the reactionaries who seek to maintain a corrupt status quo, as they continue to demand a business-as-usual approach to education and politics.
The Katz case presents us with a vital means of addressing these issues, as we seek to promote a multicultural America in the spirit of Vichian pluralism, rejecting the Hegelian absolutism of the German 19th century, whose spirit continues to dominate certain sectors of academia.
In the words of Karl Popper in his classic book The Open Society and its Enemies:
In our own time, Hegel’s hysterical historicism is still the fertilizer to which modern totalitarianism owes its rapid growth. Its use has prepared the ground, and has educated the intelligentsia to intellectual dishonesty, as will be shown in section five of this chapter. We have to learn the lesson that intellectual honesty is fundamental for everything we cherish.
It is not surprising that Tikvah Tablet magazine recently published an attack on Popper which kind of gives the Tikvah Neo-Con Trump game away:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-open-society-prophets
In his echt-Straussian attack on Popper and Liberalism, young Tikvah warrior Blake Smith tells us much about the attacks on Wokeness and the New Racial Consciousness:
Liberals trying to articulate a vision of decent political order often invoke the concept of the “open society,” made famous by philosopher of science Karl Popper in his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, and later by the various incarnations of the Open Society Foundation of philanthropist George Soros, who was originally inspired by Popper’s work. Popper, trying to defend liberal democracy against the forces that he believed had led to Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism, distinguished open societies, in which human beings are capable of freely expressing their rational judgments about social conventions, from closed societies, in which such questioning is forbidden and uncritical obedience imposed. The division between closed and open societies is by these lights self-evident, and history is the record of human progress from closed to open in the face of periodic threats of catastrophic regression.
The outlines of Popper’s account remain part of many American liberals’ mental sketch of politics, even if they have never read The Open Society or heard of its author. Liberalism appears to its defenders as a regime founded on discussion and debate, in which free individuals participate without fear of censorship or undue moral pressure. Citizens in a liberal society are “open” to new ideas and to argument about them. They are, moreover, “open” to the influence of such ideas to reshape their lives; they are not committed to inflexible norms inherited from their tradition but are able, through their interactions with other open-minded interlocutors, to choose their own trajectories. Liberals neither receive from the past nor transmit to the future a commitment to maintain a specific set of truths, values and practices; all social and personal values are subject to ceaseless contestation and change. The open society and its members are thus open all at once to reason (as opposed to irrational prejudices binding them to convention), debate (as opposed to unspeaking conformity or the parroting of ideological scripts), and change (their personal and collective futures, which they will determine for themselves, being at present unknown).
Emphasizing rationality and human agency, however, may suggest that the open society forecloses humanity’s need for morality and religion. If society is essentially a debating club, in which individuals exchange and refine their opinions, how can the voices of either moral duty or of God be heard? As our traditions record them, these seem to speak to us not in a register of deliberation and mutual questioning but in sometimes terrifying imperatives. Illiberals of the right and left have thus long accused liberals of promoting freedom of speech, democratic deliberation, and skepticism about absolute truth as means of deafening themselves to the call of conscience. From such a moralizing perspective, the open society is open in the manner of a cloaca or a wound.
We can see in these chilling words a perverse embodiment of the Trumpderangement, and of the way in which the Katz case has situated itself in a culture that has now been forced between an atavistic stasis rooted in reactionary Conservatism, or an open, pluralist anti-Hegelian multiculturalism that demands we look midrashically at the past, whether it is the Classics or whether it is the history of Slavery and racism in America, and make real judgements about who we are and what we want to be in the future.
David Shasha
Anatomy of Cancel Culture: The Case of Joshua Katz, White Privilege, Institutional Bullying, Sexual Malfeasance, and Eurocentric Racism
By: David Shasha
A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor
By: Joshua T. Katz
I Survived Cancellation at Princeton
By: Joshua T. Katz
Katz Defends ‘Blunt Words’ in Op-Ed, as Department of Classics Removes Condemnation from Website
By: Marie-Rose Sheinerman
Alumni Allege History of Inappropriate Conduct with Female Students by Princeton Professor Joshua Katz
By: Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Evelyn Doskoch
Coming Out of Our Burrows: Anti-Fundamentalism, Free Speech, and the Academy
By: Joshua T. Katz
Joshua Katz, Cancel Culture, and its Discontents
By: Shilo Brooks
Persecution & Propaganda At Princeton
By: Rod Dreher
My Confessions
By: Joshua T. Katz