Description
Book SynopsisIn the Spring of 2015, a post-modern version of the Salem witchcraft trials took place at Connecticut College on the Thames River. Only this time instead of sorcery it was Zionism; instead of punishing in the name of God's law it was in the name of anti-hate speech and inclusive excellence; instead of young teenage girls leading the hysteria it was college-aged social warriors stampeding 200 professors into sacrificing one of their colleagues, and thereby contributing to a wave of administration-promoted hate-speech at their college.
The Pessin affair offers us a case study in a tendency towards "public shaming" that not only deeply compromises the integrity of academia, but increasingly spreads to many aspects of our society, so susceptible to media-driven feeding frenzies.
Trade Review“Salem on the Thames is a collection of essays, but most of them, including a very helpful annotated chronology of events, are by Landes, who has also compiled an extensive archive of primary-source documents at his blog. He and his other contributors dissect each and every way Pessin was sucker punched, lied to, manipulated, and thrown under the bus.”
— Elliot Kaufman, Jewish Review of Books
Table of Contents
- Preface — Richard Landes
- Introduction — Asaf Romirowsky
- Andrew Pessin's Facebook Post during Operation Protective Edge
- Condensed Timeline
- Part I: When Criticizing Hamas Became a Campus Hate Crime — Richard Landes
- 1. The Post: On Truth and Metaphor
- 2. The Shameful Dishonesty of It All: An Annotated Chronology from the Perspective of the Victim
- 3. The People: McCarthyism, New London Style
- Part II: Studies in Pessinology
- 4. Connecticut College Acts Out a Staged Emergency — Ashley Thorne
- 5. "I Was Rude, You Were Evil": Reflections on Academia, Liberalism, and the Betrayal of Andrew Pessin — John Gordon
- 6. The Pessin Case: The Response of Jewish Colleagues — Fred Baumann
- Part III: Reflections: Salem on the Thames – Stampeding a Herd of Cats — Richard Landes
- 7. What Connecticut College's Andrew Pessin Affair Teaches Us
- 8. Reflections on Academia and Freedom: The Case of Connecticut College, Spring 2015
- 9. Pessin, Ironic Prophet: The Liberal Emperor's New Clothes of Humanitarian Racism
- Part IV: Appendix – Documents
- Pessin Affair: Dramatis Personae — Online Petition Posted March 18, 2015
- Bibliography
