Congratulations to Howard Jacobson upon being named the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Finkler Question.
"The Finkler Question is a novel about love, loss and male friendship, and explores what it means to be Jewish today."
Read more: http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1459
To read a 2007 article by Howard Jacobson titled "It's time to end the vilification of Israel" click here.
The video below features Howard Jacobson speaking against a boycott of Israel in 2007.
Thanks for posting the video of Professor Jacobson. His eloquence is both inspiring and humbling. But to the substance of his core argument that intellectual and academic process demands a forum open to all manner of discourse, I find this to be somewhat disingenuous. Would the professor speak out as passionately against a proposed academic boycott of say Iranian teachers who support a nuclear Iran? Or, in theory, would he not have supported a boycott against Nazi sympathizing academics at the height of the pitched conflagration that was WWII? Ultimately, the legitimacy of such boycotts depends on one's view of the "boycottees" and not the pure unbridled desiderata of academic freedom.
ReplyDelete