Last October, Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, sponsored a public lecture: “Understanding Gaza.” I’ve been thinking about that lecture ever since. That’s way too long, wouldn’t you say? I’m hoping that by writing about it I can finally get the gobbledygook I heard out of my head.
My rabbi, the only one left in Springfield, told us about the lecture. Since Wittenberg is the community’s local college, he encouraged congregants to attend. Before going to the lecture, I did a brief online search of the speakers. The moderator was a local Methodist pastor with a long history of pro-Palestinian activism. The guest speakers were university educators. The first speaker was a Palestinian Christian who grew up in Canada, but now lives in the U.S.A. The second was an American, a practicing Jew, wears a yarmulke, pro-Zionist, democratic socialist, and a pro-Palestinian activist. I went to the lecture knowing that the deck was stacked. To use another gambling analogy: the house always wins.
Walking into the Bayley Auditorium, I first noticed the usual suspects: a handful of students, a larger number of shabbily dressed—worn-out corduroy-jacket-with-leather-elbow-patch—professors, and a small number of business casual outsiders. Near the entrance was an attendance sheet for the students to sign, I suppose, for class credit. Bouncing around the room, making last-minute adjustments, was the event’s organizer, a white male keffiyeh-wearing Wittenberg professor.
The “moderator” wasn’t much of a moderator. Really, just another speaker. He talked about his years ministering to beleaguered Palestinians. The first speaker talked about his personal background and activism, but had little to say about his academic background or research, and briefly denounced Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. Then, for the next 40 minutes, he pummeled us with what seemed like hundreds of PowerPoint slides documenting the destruction in the Gaza strip.
War porn, really. Like sexual porn, eventually war porn is more numbing than stimulating, so you crave ever more intense imagery. The first one’s free, boys and girls. There were also some slides of casualty figures, and statistics about Israel’s disproportionate military strength. Many slides included unattributed quotations. No discussion or slides of what the Palestinians did to Israelis on October 7. Little historical context about the “past,” as promised by the flier. The gist of his stupor-inducing presentation was that October 7 need not be understood in a broader historical context; that, even if Hamas had weapons in schools and hospitals (which he found doubtful), it didn’t give Israel the right to bomb Gaza; and, the destruction is “unprecedented” in human history. More important to understanding his thesis, though, was how carefully he curated his images to make us feel sympathy or rage rather than engage our critical thinking. The calculus is easy enough to understand. Hamas: bad. Israel: worse. Palestinians: eternal victims.
Two points need to be made about this presentation. To say the destruction in Gaza is unprecedented is, at best, hyperbole; or worse, intellectually disingenuous. The long-term environmental and human mutagenic damage, in Gaza, is unlikely to be worse than, say, what we still find in Southeast Asia, caused by Agent Orange. An April 2026 study in The Lancet reports an estimated total casualty figure, Gazans and Israelis, of 80,000 dead and 170,000 injured. According to the Bulletin of the Union of Atomic Scientists, the estimated combined initial deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was 110,000. As bad as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, the speaker would do well to familiarize himself with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey following WWII, a carefully documented empirical study. It identifies one raid on Tokyo (March 9, 1945) as the single most destructive event in human history. The speaker would also do well to familiarize himself with why the Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommended that PowerPoint presentations not be used to disseminate technical information.
The first speaker left the second with little time to make an adequate presentation of his material. (Academics are notorious microphone hogs.) The second speaker, nevertheless, like the first, spent more time talking about his personal history and anti-Israel activism than his academic qualifications or research. He denounced the October 7 attack, then quickly moved on to how Israel has provoked and oppressed the “Palestinian people.” The gist of his presentation was that, while a proud Jew and Zionist, he denounces the current Israeli government as “right-wing,” “racist,” expansionist, and Prime Minister Netanyahu is the devil incarnate. And, once again, recent events need not be contextualized in the broader sweep of history, such as the fact that Israel gave Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005, despite no change in the Hamas charter regarding the eradication of all Jews and the erasure of the State of Israel; immediately after occupying Gaza, Hamas began firing rockets into Israel; or, prior to 1967, the Palestinians did not refer to themselves as such, nor even as Arabs, but as Jordanians and Syrians.
The second speaker did, nevertheless, make some insightful observations. For instance, he says that, in the past few years he’s noticed a misguided (my term) change in Jewish students on American college campuses. Soon after arriving, many shed their Jewish identity, denounce the State of Israel, and uncritically support Hamas.
Misguided, as in receiving bad guidance, is the operative word here. The question is, is the misguidance from the parents or those in loco parentis?
Like sexual porn, eventually war porn is more numbing than stimulating, so you crave ever more intense imagery.
There wasn’t much time left, so the moderator announced he would take questions from the students. Time permitting, he would then take questions from the general audience. Long silence. At the risk of idealizing my salad days, it seems that today’s college students have fewer questions, and are loath to challenge. As if the Tide pod challenge of 2018 wasn’t proof enough of a generation-wide inability to think independently.
Eventually, two or three students asked questions. Or rather, made statements, posed as questions, designed to signal their complete agreement with everything everyone on the dais had said. The token Jewish student seemed especially desperate to have the speakers’ approval. Long silence. Finally, a few general audience members were allowed to make statements of agreement posed as questions.
But who can blame the students? With their keffiyeh-wearing professor on vigil, and attendance being taken, they knew their cards were dealt from the bottom. When I was a graduate teaching assistant, we were constantly warned about the unequal power relationship between teacher and student, and how to avoid imposing our ideologies on students. Clearly academe has moved beyond such petty concerns.
There was one exception. A gentleman in the back asked about Iran’s and Qatar’s role in supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, and in orchestrating October 7. The first speaker ham-handedly tried to evade the question. It was like watching a cat trying to walk on freshly waxed linoleum. The moderator rescued the speaker by calling time.
The second speaker graciously offered to stay and talk with audience members. He seemed genuinely eager. A mensch. I told him that the panel did not announce their unified sympathies with the Gazans, and lack of sympathy with Israelis. The students, being undergraduates, could not be expected to recognize that there was no dialectic. (Roland Barth refers to such omissions as “myths” intended to obscure ideology; and, photography as one of the most pernicious vectors of myth.) Therefore, the panel robbed the students of the ability to arrive at their own conclusions, disagree, challenge, or even ask the panelists intelligent questions. Indeed, there were no questions from the students, only the obsequious statements of agreement.
The Jewish professor thought for a moment about what I said to him, then agreed it was an unfortunate oversight. He countered, nevertheless, that the opposition has no one worth inviting. A representative from the Israeli embassy, he said, would just provide the usual stock statements. His lack of self-reflexiveness, that his statements could be characterized as no less pat, put me on my heels. I assured him we could find someone locally, such as the person who asked about Iran’s and Qatar’s support for Hamas. Again, he had the intellectual integrity to acknowledge my point, while reiterating that he was not the organizer. He then handed me his card and asked me to contact him.
The panel utterly failed to live up to the promise to contextualize Gaza in “the Past, the Present, and… the future,” focusing just on the present. What about the “Palestinians”’ repeated refusals to compromise, such as in 1948, or renounce their intent to destroy Israel, even after being given Gaza in 2005? What about Arab Muslims’ active support of the “Final Solution”? Or Mahmoud Abass’ insistence that there was no Holocaust (Shoah)? The silence on such issues was deafening.
I don’t blame the two speakers. They did what they were asked to do. I blame the organizer who violated the sacred responsibility of an educator to set aside his own biases in order to help his students become independent thinkers. His right to wear a keffiyeh does not outweigh his responsibility as one in loco parentis. I blame Wittenberg for its feckless failure to maintain academic standards.
Looking back on this event, months later, I’m glad I went. I learned a few things. More importantly, it gave me some comfort: the knowledge that I am not the only parent to have failed to fully inoculate my children against an illiberal education.
