New Yorker digs up Biblical archaeology controversy which rankled academia

Here's an abstract from the current New Yorker magazine, about academic politics and old-fashioned blacklisting. Jane Kramer, in "The Petition,"recaps

the controversy over anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj of Barnard College. Writer discusses Abu El-Haj’s doctoral dissertation, which was revised and published in 2001 under the title “Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.” The book looked at the role of archeology in what was essentially a political project: the Biblical validation for Jewish claims to what is now Israel. After teaching at the University of Chicago and spending a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Abu El-Haj moved to New York and joined the faculty of Barnard College. In April of 2006, she came up for tenure there. No one in her department doubted she would get it. Over the next year, her tenure file passed the scrutiny of three committees, which recommended her for tenure. By the spring of 2007, all that remained was the approval of a fourth committee.
In August of 2007, a petition entitled “Deny Nadia Abu El-Haj tenure” was posted on the Internet. It found its way onto a number of email lists and Web sites. The author of the petition was a Barnard alumna named Paula Stern. Writer notes that Stern’s complaints against Abu El-Haj’s work were inaccurate. Stern later predicted that Barnard and Columbia were going to lose a lot of alumni money if Abu El-Haj got tenure. Writer discusses the legacy of the late Columbia professor Edward Said. Many of the attacks on Abu El-Haj made pointed reference to his influence. Tells about Rashid Khalidi, who came under attack for accepting the chair named after Said. Mentions Columbia president Lee Bollinger’s stinging introduction of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who spoke at the university last year. Gives biographical information about Abu El-Haj, who was born in New York and raised in Iran and Lebanon. She attended Bryn Mawr and later Duke, where her dissertation adviser, Virginia Dominguez, helped her focus her research on how Israel’s Jewish national “self” came to be constructed. Discusses Abu El-Haj’s work on the subject. Tells about “Columbia Unbecoming,” a film about the alleged intimidation of Jewish students by three Middle Eastern professors. A university committee that investigated the claims found no evidence of harassment, but two professors were cited for “episodes” three years earlier. One of these men, Joseph Massad, is currently awaiting word on tenure. Mentions the activities of pro-Israel advocacy groups led by David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, and Charles Jacobs. Tells about criticism of Abu El-Haj by Professor Alan Segal and others during her tenure process. On November 1, 2007, Abu El-Haj was informed that she had received tenure.
“What happened last year—it wasn’t about me. I was a cog in the big wheel of the issue of the Middle East and Israel,” she says.

Space Case:big boys with toys aim to convert cosmos to killing fields

Four years ago, a miniature Torah, once smuggled out of a Nazi concentration camp, was carried aboard the space shuttle by the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, who was the son and grandson of Auschwitz Holocaust survivors. Bits of this tiny Torah were sprinkled all over Palestine from outer space.

Palestine,Texas, that is: the historically resonant name of the Columbia shuttle crash site.

Although security surrounding Columbia's liftoff and landing had been stepped up to avert any terrorists tempted to target an Israeli officer aboard, the flight ended in tragedy because of faulty insulation.

"I'm secular in my background, but I'm going to respect all kinds of Jews all over the world," Ramon had said before the launch, and he ate only kosher meals in orbit and kept the Sabbath. Aside from the cherished mini-Torah, Ramon also had carried a small pencil sketch of a "Moon Landscape" by Peter Ginz, a 14-year-old Jewish boy who dreamed of outer space while imprisoned at a concentration camp but did not survive Auschwitz. Tragically, in spite of all the uplifting symbols, all seven Columbia astronauts died upon re-entry because of a malfunction of protective foam which exposed fuel tanks to hyper-temperatures.

Against all odds, a similar tiny Torah did make it back from space, two years later, carried by Steve MacLean, a Canadian astronaut, aboard the shuttle Atlantis.

Sadly, all these cosmic overtones of space flight and exploration now are being cast away.

Awe-struck space explorers are getting shunted aside by three-star generals with earthbound morals and sky-high budgets, and the public sits idly by. It is poignant that Neil Armstrong, the born-again Christian who was the first man to walk on the moon, told an Israeli archaeologist in 1979 that he was far more excited to walk on the same stones in Jerusalem that Jesus had trodden than to take his famous small step onto the lunar landscape.

Suddenly, after a Chinese test blasted apart a defunct weather satellite in orbit on January 11th, some world leaders insist it is time to gird for battle in space. Israeli Air Force Chief Major General Elazar Shkedy was quoted on the Jerusalem Post's front page, expounding on this topic:
“It is hard to imagine fighting a war without these [space-based] assets. Israel will develop its capabilities in space in the coming years as the connection between the military and space is growing. The Americans, Indians and Chinese are all investing huge sums of money in space....Battle in space is on our agenda, whether we want it there or not.”

Meanwhile, the name of the air force has been upgraded to reflect this change: starting this month, it is now designated the Israel Air and Space Command. And there is a growing uneasiness among the military that Tehran aims to target Israeli surveillance satellites as soon as they have the know-how. Izzy despairs that the space race has gone from rhapsodic to rapacious so quickly.