Sunday, November 12, 2017

What Roth Wrought (UPDATED -Twice)

To follow up on the Hotovely-Princeton Hillel mishap:

I tried to zero in on how the decision to cancel the Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel's talk seemed so, well, klutzy.

Now we read that Daniel Kurtzer had been in communication with Rabbi Julie Roth

The decision to postpone/cancel the visit was wrong, plain and simple. Rabbi Julie Roth, the Center for Jewish Life’s director, regretted that decision almost immediately, as she told me the morning after the fact.

So, some 10 hours or so prior to her talk sponsored ultimately by Chabad taking place, there was a window in which Roth could have reversed herself and still had Ms. Hotovely as a Hillel guest.  Although Kurtzer notes that

By that time, however, the Israeli Consulate had already reached out to the university Chabad

That really means nothing.  If Roth had called up both Hotovely and the Chabad Rabbi and said, "a mistake was made and I'm setting it aright and the Depury Minister will indeed speak under Hillel auspices", I am fairly sure Chabad would have stood down and Ms.Hotovely would have been mollified and accepted the renewed invitation.

But Roth did not do that.

Why?

Was she afraid of those progressives?

Did she freeze?

Did she lose Ms. Hotovely's phone number? 

Did she want to make a statement of her own political ideological outlook, which seems to be pro-New Israel Fund?  Did her more (?) radical husband interfere?

Let's not lose sight of the original opening salvo against Hotovely which was not that Roth had not followed a vetting standard procedure.  It was that the Alliance of Jewish Progressives asserted


“We firmly reject the CJL’s choice to host a racist speaker like Hotovely..."

Right at the start Roth should have shut them down and put them in their place. Racist?  Really now Roth.

I repeat from my earlier blog post: she couldn't call up on Sunday evening the committee members for a vote of confirmation?

Hillel, it was reported, was to have received some $7 million dollars from the Israel government through the Mosaic program.  Is she really so obtuse to act in such a manner to a major funder?

What has Roth wrought?

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Ari Fuld interviews Eric Fingerhut who tried to explaining his own official explanation, and wanted to concentrate on the apology part.

"She [Roth] made the wrong decision"
"She should have acted differently".
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UPDATE

I now see (in Hebrew) that Kalman Liebskind asked Hillel if they'll open a channel of communication with Tzipi and meet with her.

They replied, maybe but not now.  And he asked, why not now? And they had no response.



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