Tag: history professor
The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending
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Stacey Zolt Hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: “I’m scared,” she wrote. Her classmates at Berkeley High School were preparing to leave their desks and file into the halls, part of a planned “walkout” to protest Israel. Like many Jewish students, she didn’t want to participate. It was October 18, 11 days after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel.
Zolt Hara told her daughter to wait in her
The Worst DEI Policy in Higher Education
Attacks on faculty rights are frequent in academia, where professors’ words are now policed by illiberal administrators, state legislators, and students. I’ve reported on related controversies in American higher education for more than 20 years. But I’ve never seen a policy that threatens academic freedom or First Amendment rights on a greater scale than what is now unfolding in this country’s largest system of higher education: California’s community colleges.
Roughly 1.9 million students are enrolled in that system. Its
What Was Clarence Thomas Thinking?
Midway through his concurrence with the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action, Justice Clarence Thomas deploys one of the most absurd and baffling arguments ever put to paper by a justice.
In order to argue that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend to authorize racially specific efforts to alleviate inequality, Thomas finds himself forced to explain the existence of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was reauthorized in 1866 by the same Congress that approved the Fourteenth
The True-Crime Frenzy Surrounding the Idaho Murders
The reporters arrived in news vans and satellite trucks that trundled down King Road and colonized parking spots outside the crime scene. TV producers crowded into the Corner Club, chatting up students for tips and gossip, mispronouncing the town’s name—Mos-cow, they kept calling it, not Moss-coe. Nancy Grace, the cable-news host famously obsessed with morbid crimes, set up a table right outside the victims’ house so she could gesture at the building on air while speculating
How to Fix the Bias Against Free Speech on Campus
A recent investigation of eight abortion-rights supporters at American University, in Washington, D.C., offers yet more evidence that college administrators and diversity-and-inclusion bureaucrats—some of whom undermine free speech as if their job duties demanded it—need new checks on their power.
This matter began in May, shortly after the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked, prompting numerous law students at American to join an online chat about the impending diminution of abortion rights. One student
The Vasectomy Influencers – The Atlantic
“Men, it’s on us now,” someone said on Twitter just hours after Roe v. Wade was overturned on June 24. “Either start wearing contraceptives or get a vasectomy.” In the two weeks since, the suggestion that men can or should express solidarity with women by getting vasectomies to prevent unwanted pregnancies has proliferated online. The tone varies from flirty (“getting a vasectomy is the new 6-foot-4”) to pointed (“i don’t want to hear a peep out of anyone with a
The Controversial Marriage Book That’s Dividing Orthodox Jewish Women
The book, with its kitschy cover illustration of a red rose, has made the rounds for years. By the time I became a bride in 2015, it was status quo, passed around alongside the traditional recommended readings on ritual purity and Jewish marriage. The Surrendered Wife is a title frequently invoked among Orthodox Jewish women, quoted during mom walks with strollers and discussed in WhatsApp groups. Premarital teachers recommend the text to young brides-to-be. Rabbis and their wives preach from