Larry Summers holds forth on subjects he doesn’t know about

Last night Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, spoke against the academic boycott of Israel to a sold-out audience at the Center for Jewish History in New York. It was a bravura performance. Summers is funny, at times mocking himself, and he has a restless mind that makes connections between diverse topics. During the Q-and-A he took great interest in people’s questions, often considering them for a time with the microphone sitting in his lap. And when he said that people who don’t like capitalism have few opportunities for employment in America outside academia, it was a genuine insight.

But overall the appearance was surprising, even disturbing in its degree of intellectual dishonesty and arrogance. Summers several times stated that he was not an expert on the topic that he was holding forth on. He is an economist who studies interest rates and economic growth and jobs and production, he said. He doesn’t know much about international relations or conditions in Israel and Palestine. At times this glibness was excusable. When he flicked off a question about the Iran deal, saying that he knew very little about it except that it was a “bad deal,” but better than the alternatives, as it would have been impossible to maintain sanctions on Iran going forward or to continue to isolate the nation — OK, fine; this wasn’t a talk about the Iran deal. But when he said that he knew nothing about the long history of anti-semitism, it exposed the glibness of his chief pronouncement: professors who want to boycott Israel are anti-Semitic, “in effect if not in intent.”

What does that mean anyway? How can you express hatred of Jews and discriminate against them if you don’t intend to do either? Is anti-semitism some miasma in the atmosphere that, set in motion by an innocent action, suddenly settles over Jews? But Summers coined the effect-if-not-intent formulation 13 years ago, as he said last night, and was proud to repeat it, even if he’s never given serious thought to the confused ideas it entails.

The same hubris came through when he said that he doesn’t study the West Bank or Palestinian conditions. No, he allowed, Palestinians can’t vote for the government that has ruled them for half a century – but to call it apartheid is “grotesque” and “appalling,” as his fellow Ivy president Lee Bollinger put it. (The actual quote is “grotesque and offensive.”)

Why should anyone be convinced of this? Summers told us his wife had recently lectured at Hebrew University, but it doesn’t seem as if he has ever even set foot in Palestine. The whole evening had an insular atmosphere, of Jewish-cloud-cuckooland; aside from the Iran reference, there was nothing in Summers’s comments on the conflict that couldn’t have been said 10 years ago. The 400 older Jews in the audience also evinced little knowledge or concern about the conditions that gave rise to the Palestinian call for boycott of Israel. One man in the audience said that the boycott call was potentially as dangerous as some of Hitler’s statements in the early ‘30s. Summers said it wasn’t quite that bad. Another man said that “Arab money” has corrupted the American political process. Summers smiled patiently and said that if the fellow, a choleric old gentleman sitting in the second row, went to an AIPAC meeting some time, he wouldn’t feel that way. And anyone who looks at the composition of the Supreme Court or the Federal Reserve chairmanship or the Senate wouldn’t say that anti-semitism is the climate for US Jews today, Summers said.

But the audience’s ignorance was less concerning than the speaker’s. He said that he had heard that some pro-boycott literature featured swastikas. He’d heard. Is that really the case? Should you throw around such allegations in a talk on such a serious topic without being sure? After all, Summers is schooled in the field of social science that claims the highest degree of factual rigor: economics.

Or Summers twice said that Israel/Palestine conflict was one pitting one “country” against another. That is a mistake, and not a little one. The fact that Palestinians were promised a country 68 years ago in the United Nations and have never gotten one surely goes as far to explain the endurance and soreness of this conflict as any other fact. It was a bit sadmaking to see Jonathan Brent, the scholar who heads YIVO institute for Jewish Research, jollying Summers along as he made such slapdash comments; but Summers’s wife is on Brent’s board, so he has his reasons.

Summers’s only reason would seem to be pride, the belief that he’s the smartest one in the room. The readiness to speak on matters he hasn’t considered produced (his boffo exit from the Harvard presidency and) his biggest blunder of the evening, one that undermined his whole presentation. Someone asked about Harvard Hillel’s policy of censoring speakers who call for boycott or who demonize Israel. Summers said it was all right with him. An English department has the right not to present French speakers; that’s just not its department. Astronomy departments boycott astrologers; philosophy departments boycott Ayn Rand followers, he’d pointed out earlier; and we all accept those redlines.

So someone wants to call for the end of the Jewish state? Well, Hillel’s mission is to support the Jewish state. Leave that free speech to another organization on campus, Summers said. Though of course Hillel has to make room for someone like himself, who criticizes Netanyahu.

We say this is his greatest error because Hillel’s mission is actually to promote Jewish life on campus. That’s its sole responsibility. It has chosen to merge that mission with a Zionist mission, but for an intellectual like Summers to go along with that is to assert that Judaism is Zionism. So it follows that any refusal to accept Israel as the Jewish state — maybe because it’s practicing apartheid, as The Nation, Jimmy Carter, and many leading Israeli journalists have said, but Lee Bollinger hasn’t — makes one an anti-Semite. That’s crude thinking, merging a 3000-year-old religious community with a narrow political project of the last century.

But again, Summers hasn’t really thought it through. He probably hasn’t even looked up Hillel’s charge: to challenge students “to explore, experience, and create vibrant Jewish lives.” Many young Jews who are doing just that have come out against Zionism, or want to hear the argument against it. You might even say that Summers’s formulation is anti-Semitic; he’s saying that to be Jewish means to support a state that doesn’t give non-Jews equal rights. That’s a pretty negative identification, in the eyes of many young Jews.

That was the best thing about the presentation. There weren’t any young Jews in the room. Young people don’t buy what Summers is flogging. Both of us are over 60 and we were at the low end of the demographic. It doesn’t take an economist to know that in the short run a lot of us will be dead.

Source Article from http://mondoweiss.net/2015/10/summers-subjects-doesnt

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Larry Summers holds forth on subjects he doesn’t know about

Last night Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, spoke against the academic boycott of Israel to a sold-out audience at the Center for Jewish History in New York. It was a bravura performance. Summers is funny, at times mocking himself, and he has a restless mind that makes connections between diverse topics. During the Q-and-A he took great interest in people’s questions, often considering them for a time with the microphone sitting in his lap. And when he said that people who don’t like capitalism have few opportunities for employment in America outside academia, it was a genuine insight.

But overall the appearance was surprising, even disturbing in its degree of intellectual dishonesty and arrogance. Summers several times stated that he was not an expert on the topic that he was holding forth on. He is an economist who studies interest rates and economic growth and jobs and production, he said. He doesn’t know much about international relations or conditions in Israel and Palestine. At times this glibness was excusable. When he flicked off a question about the Iran deal, saying that he knew very little about it except that it was a “bad deal,” but better than the alternatives, as it would have been impossible to maintain sanctions on Iran going forward or to continue to isolate the nation — OK, fine; this wasn’t a talk about the Iran deal. But when he said that he knew nothing about the long history of anti-semitism, it exposed the glibness of his chief pronouncement: professors who want to boycott Israel are anti-Semitic, “in effect if not in intent.”

What does that mean anyway? How can you express hatred of Jews and discriminate against them if you don’t intend to do either? Is anti-semitism some miasma in the atmosphere that, set in motion by an innocent action, suddenly settles over Jews? But Summers coined the effect-if-not-intent formulation 13 years ago, as he said last night, and was proud to repeat it, even if he’s never given serious thought to the confused ideas it entails.

The same hubris came through when he said that he doesn’t study the West Bank or Palestinian conditions. No, he allowed, Palestinians can’t vote for the government that has ruled them for half a century – but to call it apartheid is “grotesque” and “appalling,” as his fellow Ivy president Lee Bollinger put it. (The actual quote is “grotesque and offensive.”)

Why should anyone be convinced of this? Summers told us his wife had recently lectured at Hebrew University, but it doesn’t seem as if he has ever even set foot in Palestine. The whole evening had an insular atmosphere, of Jewish-cloud-cuckooland; aside from the Iran reference, there was nothing in Summers’s comments on the conflict that couldn’t have been said 10 years ago. The 400 older Jews in the audience also evinced little knowledge or concern about the conditions that gave rise to the Palestinian call for boycott of Israel. One man in the audience said that the boycott call was potentially as dangerous as some of Hitler’s statements in the early ‘30s. Summers said it wasn’t quite that bad. Another man said that “Arab money” has corrupted the American political process. Summers smiled patiently and said that if the fellow, a choleric old gentleman sitting in the second row, went to an AIPAC meeting some time, he wouldn’t feel that way. And anyone who looks at the composition of the Supreme Court or the Federal Reserve chairmanship or the Senate wouldn’t say that anti-semitism is the climate for US Jews today, Summers said.

But the audience’s ignorance was less concerning than the speaker’s. He said that he had heard that some pro-boycott literature featured swastikas. He’d heard. Is that really the case? Should you throw around such allegations in a talk on such a serious topic without being sure? After all, Summers is schooled in the field of social science that claims the highest degree of factual rigor: economics.

Or Summers twice said that Israel/Palestine conflict was one pitting one “country” against another. That is a mistake, and not a little one. The fact that Palestinians were promised a country 68 years ago in the United Nations and have never gotten one surely goes as far to explain the endurance and soreness of this conflict as any other fact. It was a bit sadmaking to see Jonathan Brent, the scholar who heads YIVO institute for Jewish Research, jollying Summers along as he made such slapdash comments; but Summers’s wife is on Brent’s board, so he has his reasons.

Summers’s only reason would seem to be pride, the belief that he’s the smartest one in the room. The readiness to speak on matters he hasn’t considered produced (his boffo exit from the Harvard presidency and) his biggest blunder of the evening, one that undermined his whole presentation. Someone asked about Harvard Hillel’s policy of censoring speakers who call for boycott or who demonize Israel. Summers said it was all right with him. An English department has the right not to present French speakers; that’s just not its department. Astronomy departments boycott astrologers; philosophy departments boycott Ayn Rand followers, he’d pointed out earlier; and we all accept those redlines.

So someone wants to call for the end of the Jewish state? Well, Hillel’s mission is to support the Jewish state. Leave that free speech to another organization on campus, Summers said. Though of course Hillel has to make room for someone like himself, who criticizes Netanyahu.

We say this is his greatest error because Hillel’s mission is actually to promote Jewish life on campus. That’s its sole responsibility. It has chosen to merge that mission with a Zionist mission, but for an intellectual like Summers to go along with that is to assert that Judaism is Zionism. So it follows that any refusal to accept Israel as the Jewish state — maybe because it’s practicing apartheid, as The Nation, Jimmy Carter, and many leading Israeli journalists have said, but Lee Bollinger hasn’t — makes one an anti-Semite. That’s crude thinking, merging a 3000-year-old religious community with a narrow political project of the last century.

But again, Summers hasn’t really thought it through. He probably hasn’t even looked up Hillel’s charge: to challenge students “to explore, experience, and create vibrant Jewish lives.” Many young Jews who are doing just that have come out against Zionism, or want to hear the argument against it. You might even say that Summers’s formulation is anti-Semitic; he’s saying that to be Jewish means to support a state that doesn’t give non-Jews equal rights. That’s a pretty negative identification, in the eyes of many young Jews.

That was the best thing about the presentation. There weren’t any young Jews in the room. Young people don’t buy what Summers is flogging. Both of us are over 60 and we were at the low end of the demographic. It doesn’t take an economist to know that in the short run a lot of us will be dead.

Source Article from http://mondoweiss.net/2015/10/summers-subjects-doesnt

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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