What Pnina Peri Tells Us about Israel Studies

When University of Maryland visiting assistant professor of Israel studies Pnina Peri was videoed mocking and upbraiding a rabbi helping a businesman put on tefillin at Ben Gurion Airport last month, outraged viewers wondered how someone with her academic expertise could have behaved so horribly. But as Campus Watch Fellow A.J. Caschetta explains today at the American Spectator, Israel studies often harbor anti-Israel professors:

The May 30 cellphone video depicting a woman berating two Jewish men for performing a Jewish prayer at an airport would probably never have made news, let alone “gone viral,” were it not for a confluence of details that make the entire episode so bizarre.

It is peculiar that the location was Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, where Jews might believe they have a right to pray wherever they please. But the revelation that the perpetrator of the attack, Pnina Peri, is a professor of Israel studies made the scene incomprehensible for average viewers. For others it clarified everything.

To read the rest of this essay, please click here.

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Winfield Myers

Winfield Myers is managing editor of the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch project, which reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North American universities. He has taught world history and other topics at the University of Michigan, the University of Georgia, Tulane, and Xavier University of Louisiana. He was previously managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine and CEO of Democracy Project, Inc., which he co-founded. Mr. Myers has served as senior editor and communications director at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and is principal author and editor of a college guide, Choosing the Right College (1998, 2001). He was educated at the University of Georgia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan.