Catch up on the latest Jewish culture wars
And a bonus debate about bisexuality
Jews of convenience: Phoebe Maltz Bovy on the new gatekeeping around identity in the aftermath of Oct. 7
Let me state upfront that I don’t have the inside scoop on Joe Roberts’s whole deal. All I know is that the same man who wrote a syndicated Jewish Telegraphic Agency column in February about fearing he’d have to become a U.S. immigrant-turned-refugee from Canada—which I wrote my own column about in response—who now stands accused of having invented a Jewish identity for himself….
What happened when a Jewish professor created a right-wing curriculum for his liberal college students
Last September, Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University in Boston, tried something that hasn’t been done before: he created a class teaching conservative ideas to students of his private liberal college. He felt there was a gap in the school’s poli-sci curriculum, sensing that graduates were leaving without understanding the central ideas of the political right. He included articles from the National Review, videos of Tucker Carlson and essays by conservative Black intellectuals such as Glenn Loury and Thomas Sowell.
The results, summarized in a recent longform feature in Boston Magazine, hint at the effectiveness of teaching politically diverse opinions on campus: most students (of this admittedly self-selecting group who are even willing to engage with the curriculum in the first place) did seem to positively grapple with the ideas, understand them better and have reasonable debates in an open academic forum.
As pro-Palestinian tent protests continue dividing post-secondary institutions across North America, and political polarization feels more prevalent than ever before, we’re joined by Hersh on Bonjour Chai to discuss what he learned by running this “conservative thought experiment” over an entire semester.