NEW YORK – The World Jewish Congress, United States (WJC-US) today condemned the Modern Language Association (MLA) Delegate Assembly for adopting a one-sided and biased resolution blaming Israel for its “denials of entry to the West Bank by US academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.”
Rabbi Joel H. Meyers, chairman of WJC-US said: “We are deeply disappointed that the MLA Delegate Assembly would single out Israel, holding it to a double standard. This biased resolution fails to recognize that many countries, including Israel, have visa requirements, and that Israel must take extra care regarding border security, considering the constant attacks on its civilians from Palestinian areas.
The resolution also fails to acknowledge the academic freedom that is the hallmark of Israel.” The MLA is the principal American organization for academics who teach language and literature. The resolution was adopted by a 60-53 vote today at the MLA convention in Chicago and now needs to be considered by the MLA Executive Council before it is submitted to the entire membership for a vote.
The resolution is widely seen as a stalking horse for the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which scored a victory last month when the 5,000 member American Studies Association (ASA) voted to adopt a boycott. The victory, however, prompted a backlash: Since then, more than 100 American universities have denounced the ASA boycott.
The MLA’s leadership seems keen to take up the BDS issue. While an emergency resolution supporting the ASA boycott brought forward at the MLA convention today failed to make it to a floor vote, the chairman of the MLA Executive Council said that the Executive Council would consider the resolution later. On Thursday, the MLA convention featured a “roundtable discussion” proposing a boycott that included no pro-Israel voices. The MLA declined the request of Hillel International and the Israel Campus Coalition to hold a counter session on academic freedom in Israel at the convention.
WJC has spoken out forcefully against BDS. World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder reacted strongly to the ASA boycott vote, saying: This vote to boycott Israel, one of the most democratic and academically free nations on the globe, shows the Orwellian anti-Semitism and moral bankruptcy” of the ASA.
“We’d like to think that higher education leads people to reject bias, but history teaches us that is not so,” Lauder wrote on 7 January on his WJC blog. “Nazism and Communism, built as they were on racism, hatred, mass murder, and destruction, were movements spearheaded by intellectuals. The BDS thrust borrows its animus toward and doublespeak about Jews and the Jewish state from those older intellectual phenomena; in effect, it’s a creepy little echo of the 20th century totalitarianisms, which also involved anti-Jewish boycotts at various times. But we defeated those larger, lethal movements, and we will defeat BDS, too.”
