A Roundup of Conversations Had and Not Had

Just for the record, I feel guilty about relying on roundups so much of the past few weeks.

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Vox interviews Brown University professor and eclectic right-of-center Black academic Glenn Loury. I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Loury earlier this year, and he is a very thoughtful man whose ideas are worth reading even when one disagrees. This interview is no different.

"On BDS, Bring More Minority Students to Israel." Not coincidentally, BDSers tend to pull out all the stops to retaliate against students (minority or otherwise) who visit Israel.

Ruth Smeeth's testimony regarding the anti-Semitism she's faced at the hands of Jeremy Corbyn supporters -- and Corbyn's own blithe indifference to the atmosphere of hate he's birthed -- is heart-breaking. Corbyn's movement really is just a left-wing version of Trumpism.

Reports are that Israel has blocked a British academic scheduled to give a series of lectures at Birzeit University from entering the West Bank. I know nothing about the professor or his scholarship, but such decisions are an anathema to academic freedom and deserve full-throated condemnation.

Well, the Oberlin Student Senate finally found a Mideast related event that demanded condemnation: the one where my friend Stacey Aviva Flint, an African-American Jew from Chicago, will talk about her experience as a Jew of color and issues of intersectionality. Flint -- a member (like me) of the left-wing Third Narrative organization -- will be joined by Kenneth Marcus of the Brandeis Center and Chloe Simone Valdary, a non-Jewish African American woman who has been active in (generally right-wing) efforts to cultivate solidarity between Israel and the African-American community.

Massachusetts Supreme Court concludes (a) that vague descriptions that a criminal suspect is a Black man wearing dark clothes is insufficient to justify a stop of any Black man wearing dark clothes and (b) that, given realities of racial profiling, the act of running from the police does not, in of itself, establish probable cause for a stop either.