Scholatic Wisdom at Columbia University

Todd Gitlin writes in the Columbia Spectator (In 1963 and 1964, Gitlin was president of Students for a Democratic Society):

Now, it’s the habit of many American Jews to overlook, feel defensive about, apologize for, downplay, and explain away the awful, embarrassing, and infuriating direction in which Israel’s bankrupt political leaders are steering...

But the question for a Jew is finally: What does it mean to be a Jewish state? Does Israel really want to be judged by the standard of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran?...It was for this that the Jewish people persisted, against long odds, through centuries of exile?

Jewish Israelis, like Americans, have never freed themselves of the burdens of chosenness...Jews are gripped by an all-too-standard tribal impulse...

Gitlin, now a professor of journalism and sociology and the chair of the doctoral program in communications at Columbia, offered this at the Columbia Spectator as a piece of "share[d] scholastic wisdom readers won’t find in lectures".

Is this level of "wisdom" is what we can expect from the new Center of Palestine studies?

- - -