http://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/20/realestate/streetscapes-blumstein-s-department-store-black-boycott-opened-employment-door.html
Back in 1962 I was a sixteen year old Jewish red (well, maybe pinkish red) diaper baby son of an ex but not subjectively anti Communist World War Two combat veteran father who was a low wage worker who lived in Ravenswood Projects. That summer my family spent two weeks at the World Fellowship family summer camp in New Hampshire which was a project of a far liberal Protestant minister named Willard Uphaus.(You should google his name, he was a fine and courageous soul) It was cheap staying at World Fellowship, we slept in a tent and almost everyone there was to some extent in the orbit of the Communist Party.
Besides the green beauty of the place, the mosquitos, and an overnight hitch hiking to the Maine Shore I remember the anxiety among the flock when a copy of Liberation Magazine showed up with a photo of the iconic Blumsteins Department Store on 125th Street in Harlem and the headline "Semitism In The Ghetto".Wow, was that a breath of fresh air It brought into a moldy basement of Judeo zio communism or was it the divisive provocation my father saw it to be.I don't remember a word in the article. Probably it didn't need more than that cover.
So now we have Laura Adkins a young aspiring AIPAC macha and a student at New York University trying to rain discipline on the heads of some pro Palrstinian kids who distributed this "eviction notice" in a dormitory that might or might not have more than a random number of Jewish kids residing there. The Jewish kids were made to feel all sorts of bad feelings. The line of defense seems to be one of modified free speech that insists that no more than a random proportion of these flyers ended up in Jewish hands.
I love the kids who put this flyer out. It's about what Jews are doing to Arabs in Palestine. Why it should not be given to Jewish students specifically but only randomly so long as a correct proportion of non Jews also got the flyer perplexes me. Clearly Jewih students need to see the flyer.
I think this flyer is an excellent educational aide specifically for Jewish students as would be a course that takes up the writings of Israel Shahak and also the work of Israel Shamir regarding "Blood Libel."
