My husband, Prof. Steve Tamari, is out of the hospital. He will need surgery on his hand, and he is in pain from nine broken ribs. We are asking for time to rest and heal. We will not be taking media interviews at this time. Here is Steve's statement and ways you can support.

“We don’t know for certain if [ICC] arrest warrants are imminent,” says one Israeli official. “What is certain is that Netanyahu thinks they are—and he’s in a panic.” economist.com/middle-east-an…

As she tried to break free, one UCLA student journalist said, she was punched repeatedly in the chest and upper abdomen; another student journalist was pushed to the ground and beaten and kicked for nearly a minute.
latimes.com/california/sto…

Highly recommend reading this profile of a leader of nonviolent protest in the West Bank nytimes.com/2024/05/01/mag…

Here is a good piece about free speech on campus from The Atlantic. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Columbia faculty: We “have spent the day offering our help to defuse the situation on Columbia’s campus and have been rebuffed or ignored.”
Says administration + Trustees “will bear responsibility” for any injury that may occur in looming police action.

This seems… a substantive result for protests that a lot of “free-speech” people have been searching for ways to condemn

I'm jealous I didn't write this, but I would have had trouble maintaining a professional remove in the presence of Albert Brooks. Also: go see 'Modern Romance' and rewatch 'Broadcast News'

Worth watching, to see Bret’s cliches patiently and effectively confronted. Every time Jewish faculty or students who support the protests get a chance to speak for themselves, they make clear how hysterical the current panic over antisemitism is

This is the type of comment I’ve been getting a lot for this piece: Always from self-regarding liberals who never want to grapple with the fact that the civil rights protests of the 1950s and 60s – the legacy of which they surely want to claim – clearly violated those principles.

“The only reason we didn’t descend into violence that day was that the students remained calm. They were the only adults in the room.” —Nadia Abu El-Haj on the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia go.nybooks.com/4ddotM7

It’s very weird how people just make up the history of activism and social change

You can go look at newspaper coverage of lots of protests from history! People (moderates especially) were not happy about them until afterwards!

I don’t think you should use this meta-reasoning

I cannot overstate how dangerous this is. If you think that the US government should treat these students the way they are treating Hamas and Hezbollah, you are basically saying there is no level of violence that is off-limits.

I will write about this at greater length elsewhere but—and this does not excuse any antisemitism at protests—the idea that students are motivated by hatred of Jews as opposed to hatred of what they're reading in the news each day is pretty deliberately obtuse.

A depressing conclusion here to today’s abortion arguments at the Supreme Court

…or it could be the widely documented reality that institutions both public and private have shown a years-long, now-amplified tendency to punish expressions of this viewpoint. Who can say?

So to review: a protester accidentally poked a right-wing provocateur in the face with the spherical tip of a small flagpole, resulting in no injury, and multiple media outlets reported it as a Jew being stabbed in the eye.

Meanwhile tens of thousands of Palestinians are dead.

I'd urge people to watch the linked video not just as an illustration of how these protests in particular are being covered, but of how events on campus are covered by the press generally speaking.