In a good review of the recent campus-led push for divestment from Israel, Jonathan Alter writes that the "dark side to divestment" arises from "a careless use of analogy and a poor reading of the Middle East." What he doesn't point out is that many of the people who are modelling the bad reading practices and irresponsible analogizing that have enabled the campus left to rationalize its position are English professors. Some of the most prominent English professors in the country--among them Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak--are also rabidly anti-Israel and disturbingly enthralled by what they like to think of as "Palestinian resistance." American English departments tend to reflect the tone, temper, and reading practices of these luminaries. The popularity of divestment on campuses is, in this sense, an indirect but very real example of how much influence the seemingly irrelevant theoretical machinations of English departments truly have; it's also a fine example of how much power is held by those who profess to teach literature for a living. Teaching literature is teaching reading; how you read, even more than what you read, definitively shapes who you are and what you believe. (Worth a look: the growing list of faculty signatures on the University of California's Divestment Petition.)

UPDATE: Jay Harris, a Harvard professor of Jewish Studies, does a damning reading of campus divestment rhetoric. Describing in detail "the basic Manichean structure of the petitionersí narrative in which all blame rests entirely with the Jews," Harris unravels how the language of divestment has become inextricably intertwined with a virulent and unacknowledged anti-Semitism. In the process, he proves that what divestment petitioners are doing is indeed promoting a particular narrative about Israel; in other words, that they are engaged in the powerful social act of casting self-serving fictions as gospel truth. This is the sort of unravelling literary critics should themselves be helping to do right now. But instead, too, too many are in the business of producing--and mystifying--the fictions that need unravelling. As Carly Simon would say, "Nobody does it better."