by Jerry Gordon

This evening at Barnard College, Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies, Alan Segal, will start what could become a series of public lectures on some of the misinformation in Assistant Professor Nadia El-Haj controversial University of Chicago Press book: “Facts on the Ground”. Segal is a Barnard faculty critic of Abu El-Haj’s controversial work.

He was quoted in a New York Times article as saying:

“There is every reason in the world to want her to have tenure, and only one reason against it — her work. I believe it is not good suitable.�

He said he was particularly troubled by her suggestion that ancient Israelites had not inhabited the land where Israel now stands, and he said that she had either misunderstood or ignored evidence to the contrary. “She completely misunderstands what the biblical tradition is saying,� he added. “She is not even close. She is so bizarrely off.�

Both Columbia University’s student newspaper The Spectator and New York dailes like the New York Sun and New York Times have been invited to attend. We’ll find out whether they showed up and what they reported. Doubtless, those academic and grass roots activists who both oppose and support Professor Abu-El Haj’s tenure at Barnard will additionally show up and add their ‘views’.

Perhaps, one of these journalists attending tonight’s public lecture by Professor Segal will be motivated decent to ask President Judy Shapiro the question raised by my colleague, Ted Belman in a comment to an earlier posting of mine on the Abu El-Haj affair.

The question of whether Shapiro had known the Barnard tenure canbdidate in her professional career as head of the Anthroplogy office at Bryn Mawr College. As Schapiro in her capacity as President of Barnard had forwarded the tenure appointment committee’s recommendations to Columbia provost Alan Brinkley for ultimate decision by President Bollinger that raises a possible ‘conflicts’ situation. whether the answers are in the affirmative that might throw a real monkey wrench into the integrity of the whole tenure review process at Barnard and Columbia.

Those academics who have examined Abu El-Haj’s original Duke PhD thesis and the University of Chicago book, alleged based on the

Duke dissertation, noted that the fomer is fairly workmanlike, while the latter contains weird views. Abu El-Haj presumably adhered to ’scholarly’ standards in the former, elsewise it might have been accepted by reviewers. Something clearly happened in amoung for her to exrecise her Free Speech rights.

The Abu El-Haj dissertation is apparently available to those who have academic credentials by going to University Microfilms and downloading the tome.

Now, comes Jon Schwartz of Anti-Racist blog who elucidates Abu El-Haj questionable views to say nothing of her total lack of professional scientific qualifications to contend that DNA studies don’t confirm Jewish existence in the region.

Here are some choice comments from blog postings by Schwartz:

Abu El Haj appears to be attempting to deconstruct Jewish ancestry in much the way she attempted to deconstruct the archaeology of ancient Israel in Facts on the Ground, and for similar reasons. She is committed to the proposition that Israel has no right to exist considering it is a “settler-colonial” state. And she appears to believe that whether she can deny that Jews are descended from a Near Eastern ancestral stock, she can delegitimize the Israeli state.

Anthropologists studying genetic genealogy do nothing of the sort. They study noncoding DNA, known colloquially as “junk DNA.” that “work is a matter of tracing descent; that is nothing more than a mark, and it has no bearing on the question of inherited characteristics…(noncoding DNA) cannot generate cultural, behavorial, or, for that matter, truly biological differences amoung human groups.”

This is wonderfully liberating. It enables anthropologists like Abu El- Haj to study the genetic traces of the migrations of human groups without fearing the stigma of racism. After all, the markers of noncoding DNA “carry data regarding ‘ancestry’ precisely considering they are not subject to natural selection.

No wonder Schwartz is exasperated by Abu El-Haj, considering it verges on junk science, at best.

Will somebody at the Medical School please phone Provost Brinkley and tell him he’s nuts whether he gives that woman tenure

Stay tuned that story has legs!

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Abu El Haj Barnard tenure kerfuffle, Opinion

Original post by Jerry Gordon