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Yale Chaplain Who Blamed Jews for Anti-Semitism Resigns

(Tablet) Yair Rosenberg - Rev. Bruce Shipman, the Episcopal chaplain at Yale, has resigned in the wake of a New York Times letter he wrote suggesting Jews were collectively culpable for Israel's actions and for subsequent rises in global anti-Semitism. In his letter, written in response to Deborah Lipstadt's op-ed about rising European anti-Semitism, Shipman claimed that "the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel's patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu." Bard College's Walter Russell Mead responded: "No, the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be a realization among cretins that 'the Jews' are a group of people with very different opinions and desires, that they do not act in concert, and that individual Yale students, for example, of Jewish descent who are American citizens have zero responsibility for any policies of the government of Israel." Tablet editor Mark Oppenheimer also questioned Shipman's moral calculus: "By your reasoning, why wouldn't one write - perhaps after a Muslim was beaten up by white-supremacist thugs - 'The best antidote to Islamophobia would be for radical Islam's patrons abroad to press ISIS and al-Qaeda to just cut it out?'" Hopefully, this episode will serve as a reminder that the "best antidote" to bigotry is always to fight the bigotry, not call on its victims to somehow attempt to appease their despisers.
2014-09-10 00:00:00
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