As has been noted here previously, there is a genuine niche journalistic phenomenon of the past year, wherein progressive Jewish liberals, when they themselves find themselves on the receiving end of Politically Correct fiats, begin to question such Political Correctness.
I think it’s about time a nickname be designated for this… I’m thinking Jewish Awareness of Politically Correct Absurdities Transpiring (JAPCAT).
So, our latest JAPCAT finding is in The Nation, where Michelle Goldberg writes on “The Laura Kipnis Melodrama”:
Last Monday, about thirty Northwestern anti-rape activists marched to their school’s administrative center carrying mattresses and pillows. The event was a deliberate echo of the performance art project of Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz, who is lugging a mattress everywhere she goes on campus for a year to draw attention to the university’s failure to expel her alleged rapist. At Northwestern, the target of the protest was not a person accused of assault, but the provocative feminist film professor Laura Kipnis. Her offense was penning a February essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” which argues against her school’s ban on sex between professors and students, and more broadly against the growing obsession with trauma and vulnerability among feminists on campus.
“If this is feminism, it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama,” she writes. “The melodramatic imagination’s obsession with helpless victims and powerful predators is what’s shaping the conversation of the moment, to the detriment of those whose interests are supposedly being protected, namely students. The result? Students’ sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.”
