Touro Speech Excerpts
Excerpts of the keynote address delivered by President Ruth J. Simmons at the 60th Annual Reading of the George Washington Letter at the nation’s oldest synagogue, Touro Synagogue, Newport, R.I., Sunday, Aug. 19, 2007.
Today, the stealing and sealing of faith remains a saga shaped by world events. My trip to Israel this summer came in the wake of a shocking proposal advanced by some in the Union of College and University Professors in Great Britain who proposed a debate about whether the Union should oppose cooperation with Israeli academics. This proposal is evil on several levels. The first is, of course, its inherent attempt to hold the Israeli Academy hostage to the Union’s political policies, goals and interests. This attack upon the Academy is a dangerous action of a type seen many times before. Where it has succeeded, states have accelerated their tyranny over freedom of speech, societal commerce has been poisoned, and all freedoms have been compromised. Like other universities and colleges, we have affirmed our support for Israeli scholars and their academic freedom. We stand with our Israeli colleagues in fighting efforts to intimidate them into silence, conformity, or political compliance. The independence of the Academy under-girds our civic rights and stays misguided efforts at religious intolerance.
At another level, this is a form of intimidation that can and should be taken as an attack upon these individual scholars in their role as academics and in their identity with a Jewish institution. If the Union seeks to question the Israeli government’s policies, the most direct route to such criticism is through British government diplomacy or, better yet, through direct commentary on Israeli government policies. We all know that the debate within Israel robustly embraces dissent. I was in Israel at the time of the summer elections and observed first-hand the degree of raucous debate about politics and Palestinian issues. That the Union chose to direct this question at the Israeli Academy is, in my view, a sign that some seek to turn opinion and arouse animus against individual Israeli students and scholars. What could be more pernicious or threatening to the freedoms we enjoy in spiritual and civic life?