anti-racism

LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Anti-Racism Can’t be a Pretext for Anti-Semitism

By |

To the Editor:

On September 7, a group of professors, graduate students and staff published an open letter to President Martha E. Pollack and Provost Michael Kotlikoff, listing the measures they deem necessary for an “anti-racist Cornell.” Buried within this set of proposals was the curious request that the University address “Cornell Tech’s involvement in the gentrification of Queens and, through its institutional partnership with Technion Israeli Institute of Technology, the military occupation of Palestine.”

Naturally, the authors fail to elaborate further on the nonexistent connection between the Technion and race-related initiatives at Cornell. Perhaps they are unsure themselves. Nor do they request that the University address any of its other international partnerships. Instead, they choose to single out the world’s only Jewish state for opprobrium. The decision to gratuitously target Israel and simultaneously ignore Cornell’s actually questionable international relationships raises serious doubts about the intentions and motives of the authors.

Columns

LIM | Four Questions

By |

A couple of years ago, a friend introduced me to a series of four MBTI-style questions meant to analyze personality traits and preferences. They ask about our choices regarding the following: Favorite color, favorite animal, favorite body of water and reaction to being placed in a doorless, windowless room. This last one came up in a recent conversation with renewed meaning in this time of Coronavirus. Identical as our circumstances of self-isolation might seem, everybody’s experience has differed vastly – in ways that location, socioeconomic status or other concrete factors don’t seem to fully capture. As an international student studying abroad, there was a point where I felt like I had more doors, windows of opportunities than I knew how to responsibly choose between.

baking

Goodbye Gingerbread, Hello Hamantaschen

By |

Hamantaschen (noun): Jelly or chocolate filled, triangular shaped cookies that crop up around this time of year, and are obviously the superior holiday cookie. As a certified cookie expert (a.k.a. a product of the elusive freshman fifteen), I can assure you that cookies come in all shapes and sizes, and many are very similar. However,chocolate chip cookies, gingerbread and snickerdoodles all pale in comparison to hamantaschen. In early spring, there’s the Jewish holiday of Purim, celebrating the Jews triumph over a mass genocide. In addition to having a celebratory feast, we’ve also narrowed in on the triangular shaped cookie market.

Columns

GUEST ROOM | When Will Cornell Students for Justice in Palestine Stop Endorsing A Terror Organization?

By |

On Tuesday, Jan. 28, Cornell Students for Justice in Palestine shared a post on Facebook from the Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists page. The post read, “This is how you respond to Trump and Netanyahu’s calls for ‘negotiation’ and ‘peace talks’ based on their plan for permanent apartheid” and included a video interview with Ghassan Kanafani entitled “A Conversation Between the Sword and the Neck – Ghassan Kanafani”. Ghassan Kanafani was no ordinary Palestinian leader: he was one of the leaders of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine, a group that has conducted hundreds of terror attacks against innocent civilians since the late 1960s. This includes PFLP’s responsibility for numerous suicide bombings, airplane hijackings and other attacks on Israelis.