Lior Halperin

When Brandeis shut down an exhibit of Palestinian art last week, the organizer promptly found a new home for it across town at MIT. Then this week a group of Brandeis faculty started a petition drive to have the exhibit brought back to Brandeis. They have gotten 90 signatures, including many Jews. I've posted it below. Yes the art was censored, but it's up again, with a ton of attention.

The support underscores something Alan Dershowitz says—that universities are hotbeds of leftwing thought. I agree. The question is why? Why are leftwing ideas that are marginalized elsewhere in the culture doing fine at universities?

I think the answer is, There's nowhere else for these ideas to go; and they are less dangerous in universities than, say, in Washington. Consider the alternatives. It's virtually impossible to be a leftwing intellectual in the Washington thinktank community: you don't get funded. Yes there's George Soros, but he's the exception that proves the rule. It's fine to be a leftleaning liberal in the Maistream Media, where everyone is a Democrat who supports abortion and has murmurous questions about Iraq; but you can't be too outspoken about it, or again you'll get marginalized. Weekly opinion magazines are also not very hospitable to lefties, and it can't be easy to be a leftwing analyst in the Executive Branch staff positions that help form policy. All those Arabists at State, for instance, keeping their heads down. Colleges are the only game in town.

It is a conservative-dominated country. Big business plays a huge role in our public life. It funds the thinktanks and the media. It funds campaigns. There are tons of privileged Americans with leftwing views, but not many places for them to actually apply their thinking. The universities are deemed harmless enough. There these thinkers will only educate young people, in places far from Washington.  read more »

The sad part for the left is that its braintrust is so unengaged in the real world. Its idea-people are alienated, and don't have a practical bone in their bodies. They get to hold forth at dinner parties.

An exhibit of 17 paintings done by Palestinian children that was mounted in a library at Brandeis University last week was taken down over the weekend by the Brandeis administration. That's from Lior Halperin, a 27-year-old Israeli sophomore at Brandeis, who fought resistance from the school to put on the show in the first place. I'm waiting for a call back from the Brandeis administrator who is said to have taken the show down.

Halperin says that MIT has offered to mount the show, she'll take it there.

The show of pictures from kids in a refugee camp in Bethlehem was (shockingly) an effort by Halperin to bring the humanity of the victims of Israel's occupation to the American Jewish community. "If we are going to find a partner for peace, we have to listen to the other side," Halperin says. "These are voices who are longing for a land and longing for a home, we have to respect that."

Here, for instance, is a painting by 16-year-old Hussam Al-Azza, who says, "I want to tell the world about Palestine, and I ask them to search for the reality about our case."

Let's be clear. The show was provocative: one kid painted a flag of Palestine on Israel, almost all the kids spoke in the accompanying texts of liberating Palestine, ending the occupation, returning to their grandparents' homes in what is now Israel. But, did you notice—the Middle East is a violent mess. We need to do more listening, not less.

One unfortunate aspect of the Jewish community's rigidity on these issues is that it is shutting out evolving ideas about Israel's future from the left; and the left needs to be heard.

These days the political mainstream is all for a two-state solution. Right-wing Israelis are even for it, because of the "demographic" problem: the Arab birthrate in the occupied territories threatens to make Israel responsible for a "state" that is mostly Arab. So Israel wants to withdraw from a lot of the West Bank, and put up that big wall, and wash its hands of the Arabs forever. Can it do that? Probably not. It's just a formula for more mistrust, more violence, more separation. Especially if the border is not negotiated through an international process. And meanwhile, voices on the left—the same voices on the left that were pushing for a two-state solution 25 years ago when the mainstream said they were crazy—are now beginning to push for a one-state solution, a unified land where Palestinians and Jews live in peaceful co-existence, which is what Halperin believes. I know, that's crazy. And everyone else has such reasonable answers.  read more »