UC Irvine’s ‘major expansion’ of the program is not what it seems.
UC Irvine’s ‘major expansion’ of the program is not what it seems.
U ntil May 15, the most exciting collision of historical forces at the University of California–Irvine may have come in 1972. That’s when the futuristic campus — featuring William Pereira’s brutalist architecture — provided the setting for a violent showdown between humans and their more hirsute primate cousins in the dystopian Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.
Recent chaos on the suburban campus has followed a more familiar pattern — though with a dystopian surprise inside.
Following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, scattered anti-Israel protests erupted on the campus. Leveraging the now-familiar language of the academy, the protesters accused Israel of settler colonialism and genocide, ultimately forming themselves into an encampment in late April. Negotiations between indulgent administrators and hoodied and keffiyehed activists followed immediately. Then came May 15, by which time those talks had fizzled and frustrated protesters proceeded with the ritual occupation of a building.
Campus police ordered the demonstrators to disperse, but that was fuel on the fire. The chants went up — “Free, free Palestine,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and “Long live Palestine.” Handy leftists bolstered the occupiers’ defenses, including wooden pallets, tent poles, and eight-foot-tall walls painted with images recycled from Soviet-era propaganda: “CAUTION,” read one. “The police are not our friends. They serve the rich and powerful. Controlled by white supremacy. In the service of empire and capitalism.” “Smash Amerikan Imperialism” was painted in the colors of the Palestinian flag. “Muerte al imperialism” depicted a Molotov-cocktail-wielding, hoodied protester stomping to death an American soldier.
Predictably, that triggered an official request for “mutual aid” from surrounding police departments to support overwhelmed campus security. With the arrival of riot-geared police from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and the city of Irvine — and with news and police helicopters hovering in the gothic sky — the forces clashed, ending with the arrests of 47 protesters, including two UCI faculty members and 26 students. Nineteen of those arrested had no formal relationship with the university.
That much seemed textbook. The real drama was elsewhere — in actual textbooks.
Within days, rumors swept the campus that, never mind the Planet of the Apes–style throwdown of May 15, university officials had capitulated to the protesters after all. UC Irvine would supposedly kill Jewish Texts, a popular undergrad history course that is a requirement of the UCI history department’s Jewish Studies minor. The rumors also said the university would not renew the contract of its equally popular lecturer, Rabbi Daniel Levine.
Levine says he was skeptical about the grapevine at first. “My classes were always fully enrolled,” he says. And that class, a ten-week study of key texts spanning 3,000 years, hardly seemed provocative. He wears a kippah, and he’s a Zionist but (he’s careful to say) “a liberal Zionist.”
And that class?
“Jews are people of the book. And so what better way to express that than a class on major Jewish texts? We spend a couple of weeks in ancient texts — the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud. We go to the medieval — the rationalist movements, Jewish legal movements, Jewish mystical movements. We go to modernity — Jewish reactions to the Enlightenment, Hasidic Judaism, Zionism, Jewish secularism.”
He had heard the rumors but didn’t take them seriously.
So, I asked a university spokesman. Within a few hours, he replied by email, “The School of Humanities will post this today about Jewish Studies.”
In the May 29 press release he attached, UC Irvine’s School of Humanities and History Department said flatly, “We are certainly not eliminating the course.” In fact, the officials declared themselves “fully committed to supporting Jewish Studies” and “thus delighted to announce a major expansion of the program with the appointment of two new tenure-track faculty.”
“Major expansion” and “tenure track” sound promising. But the details turned out to be positively malignant.
Levine was gone; his contract allowed to expire. In his place, the press release went on to say that the history department had hired Rachel Smith and Margaux Fitoussi. The statement did not note that both were cosigners on an October 28 letter that accuses Israel of “genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” “collective punishment,” and “crimes against humanity.” The letter says the signers “demand” an immediate cease-fire and “the end of all U.S. funding to Israel immediately.”
Nor did the university mention that the head of the history department, Susan Morrissey, had signed a similar document published on October 24. That open letter, called “UC Statement of Solidarity,” protests Israel’s “genocidal military occupation” and is shot through with too-familiar postmodern claims, including an eye-popping blame-the-victim description of Hamas: The terror group actually was manufactured in Israel, “a result of the systematic annihilation of other Palestinian resistance groups, including the withdrawal of support for the Palestinian Liberation Organization. . . . Thus Israel is responsible for the retaliation of its own making. Without the occupation, Hamas would not persist.”
It’s hard to square those details with the press statement’s description of “a rigorous international search” conducted by an “independent committee” that was (in turn) “appointed by the dean” of the School of Humanities. That committee “followed all UC processes,” “reviewed all applications,” and “interviewed a long list” of candidates before agreeing “on a list of four for on-campus interviews.”
“The entire faculty in both the History and Comparative Literature Departments approved these lists and recommendations,” the statement said. “As is typically the case in academic hiring situations, department chairs do not make hiring decisions.”
The details of that neutral-sounding administrative process are likely intended to soothe. It might more likely support the hypothesis that the entire institution was in on the academic sleight of hand.
Levine sees the experience as part of a larger trend on American campuses. It was hardly likely, after all, that the academic field of Jewish studies would be able to keep its head above the rising waters of postmodern philosophies that have swamped the rest of the humanities.
It’s not that those philosophies reveal nothing. Levine points to Andrew Koss, associate editor of the Jewish studies journal Mosaic. Koss says he doesn’t object to the investigation of “individuals and phenomena that ‘didn’t fit into existing categories’ or that ‘crossed boundaries.’” In fact, “investigations into neglected subjects like Babylonian magic bowls or the sexual indiscretions of wealthy Jews in Renaissance Italy can help add texture and detail to the story of the Jews, but these eccentricities of history cannot on their own convey that story,” Koss concludes. “By trivializing and fracturing Jewish history in this manner, scholars like [historian David] Biale left a void at the core motivation of the field: if there is not really any single thing as Judaism or a Jewish people, what makes Jewish history worthy of study in the first place?”
Koss’s deconstruction of the contemporary academic enterprise is a lovely and ironic flourish. Like Koss, Levine says he welcomes the new scholarship but worries about a “minority that’s just very loud and using their positions of power, whether administrative or their professorial power, to sort of bully their view top down. I think it’s a huge problem in the academy of people using their positions, not as nuanced academics, but as top-down activists.”
He says he’s uncomfortable talking this way about personalities and politics and, therefore, can’t really — or simply won’t — predict where the new professors will take the course. Unlike Levine, who was always a contract lecturer, they are fully committed activists and are likely to have all the protections of tenure soon.
Relentlessly upbeat, Levine says his “narrow goal is to get back to my chief passion: helping students critically engage with the world, understanding the nuance and complexity that underscores many of our most important questions.”
He’d like to see a re-examination of recent changes in Jewish studies. “My wider goal is to call foul on the growing trend of activism masquerading as academia which has created a hostile event for Jews on campus where the very definition of our collective identity and what constitutes hate against it is under attack.”
That revision of the revisionists can’t come soon enough. Nor will it thrive in a culture increasingly given to vile final solutions. Walking through the campus on June 5, up steps with chalk declarations to “Globalize the Intifada,” “Finish Israel,” and “Zionists = Nazies [sic],” you’d have seen once again helicopters seemingly pinned to the cerulean summer sky over yet another pro-Hamas demonstration.
But this protest is led by self-described “academic workers,” graduate-student teaching assistants organized under the auspices of the United Auto Workers. And that makes this feel more like Conquest of the Planet of the Apes — a sudden turn in the road, a historical twist toward something larger, more malevolent.
Once noteworthy for its anti-communism and support of a vigorous American military and a defense of democracy overseas, UAW’s leadership has recently followed the labor marketplace, now deindustrialized and increasingly anti-American. In December, union president Shawn Fain was in Washington, D.C., alongside representatives Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) and Cori Bush (D., Mo.), “a couple of the most badass representatives in Congress,” to call for a cease-fire and to denounce all the evils, not just antisemitism but also “Islamophobia” and “anti-Arab racism,” “all of which are growing in our nation at this moment and must be stopped.” Writing on X on May 2, he declared, “The UAW will never support the mass arrest or intimidation of those exercising their right to protest, strike, or speak out against injustice. Our union has been calling for a ceasefire for six months. This war is wrong, and this response against students and academic workers, many of them UAW members, is wrong.”
Marching to the beat of a diminutive drum corps, UCI’s demonstrators hold signs that read “UAW on strike. Unfair labor practice” — a reference to their claim that the arrest of some of them during the May 15 riot constitutes a breach of their collectively bargained labor contract.
But the chants — including megaphoned calls for “intifada” and the wearing of the keffiyeh — tell you more about the challenges to an enlightenment movement that has lasted centuries, improved the lives of billions, and now appears to have hit a dead end here at a California campus that was once the envy of the world.
Postscript: All of this might have you feeling like a guy in a loincloth who, having spied the Statue of Liberty buried up to her coppery chest on the beautiful, desolate shore of a vast ocean, is left pounding the sand and cursing those who brought us to this place. But at press time, an Orange County superior court judge had issued a temporary restraining order: The end-of-the-term strike, he said, was causing “damage to students’ education.” In California, that constitutes a reason for hope.