“Being Anything Pro-Israel is Considered Like a Cardinal Sin,” Israel at Yale; Yale Professor on Faculty Free Speech, Burke, and Shakespeare

Pod and Man at Yale

In the newest episode, Trevor MacKay ’25 and Avi Feinsod LAW ’24 discuss the way pro-Israel speech is treated on campus and how pro-Palestinian voices are constantly complaining that their free speech is being suppressed, then putting in every effort to shut down other speech:

• MacKay: “If you truly do believe in the value of a liberal arts education and the value of education at all, you should want to be uncomfortable with the things that you learn.”
• Feinsod: “Right now, being anything pro-Israel is considered like a cardinal sin. And, if you’re doing that, it’s the same as doing all of these terrible things. Being pro-Israel is associated with being genocidal, being racist, supporting an apartheid state.”
• MacKay: “That kind of hypocrisy is part of the reason why especially people on the right are so annoyed and angry at the institutions of the universities. Because they see instances like the Christakis incident or other instances throughout the last decade of people who don’t toe the party line and they are punished for it…”
• Feinsod: “They can do events without being stopped. And still yet, they invoke, ‘people are stopping our speech,’ as they try to stop other people from speaking.”

Yale Sterling Professor David Bromwich discussed free speech on campus, a new faculty effort called Faculty for Yale that is hoping to restore it, Edmund Burke, and William Shakespeare:

• Bromwich: “I think there’s been a tendency at universities … to make sure that speech is of a kind that all students and all faculty feel comfortable with. That’s a mistake about the nature of free inquiry and the nature of speech, which isn’t all polite conversation, isn’t all about comfortable.”
• Bromwich: “Faculty for Yale means to reassert the importance of free inquiry, the search for truth, and the transmission of knowledge as what’s essential to university life.”
• Bromwich: “What was remarkable about the scene of higher education [in the 60s and 70s] including Yale University and UCLA – I took courses at both places – is that universities seemed the freest places with the most wide-ranging and controversial discussion that you could find in the United States. I don’t think anyone would argue that they are that now.”

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