Was on campus the day Hillary Clinton's guru on The Politics Of Meaning, 1960s radical and self described Rabbi Micheal Lerner ( who has no discernible rabbinical training,BTW) was on campus to give a talk.
He was accosted and shouted down by anti Semites, many of who were Islamic radicals, all of whom were shouting “death to Jews”. Lerner was completely caught off guard and stunned by the attacks. Here he was, in the bosom of the radical Anti American movements he had help nurture and that movement ad metastasize and turned against himself and the Jewish people. He was so stunned and taken aback that, to defend himself, Lerner went on a rant on he was one one of them, and anti American radical Marxist, and listed an amazing list of evil, subversive and even outright treasonous Anti American things he had organized and executed over the years as proof of radical street cred and bona fides
It was unbelievable the stuff he said to try to placate the mob and convince them he was not only one of them , he was one of their gurus and leaders.
But to no avail, he was a Jew and in their eyes, all Jews must die. I actually thought I might have to step in and help defend the POS as things were getting pretty heated.
That’s an interesting bit of history right there.
I was at columbia u in the 70’s and 80’s. My view of columbia was that its student body was mostly wasp until 1900 or so. then the student body became increasingly diverse but the wasp culture remained dominant until about the 1960’s when the culture there became liberal jewish. (but jews were never dominant in numbers—just culture.)I have not been there in a couple decades but my guess is that because of the increasing anti semitism there —the dominant culture at columbia u has become something else like woke which just mashes down everybody.
My understanding of Berkeley was that it was/is the columbia u on the west coast.
How would you characterize the cultural changes at berkeley during the 20th century. does columbia’s history match berkeley or would you say something else happened.
Why?
Those were his hand-raised monkeys and it was his circus, not yours...