The Leader, an approximately four-year-old student publication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has a “tradition” of being “anti-Hollywood,” according to one of the Leader’s editors.
So in its Nov. 7 issue, a writer for the Leader reviewed “Uprising,” the recently aired made-for-TV movie about the Warsaw Ghetto revolt of Polish Jews against the Nazis during World War II, and panned the show in a manner meant to embody that tradition, said the editor.
But the piece actually constituted anti-Semitic hate speech, according to several Jewish students, the executive director of the campus Hillel Foundation, the executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations and the Anti-Defamation League’s Greater Chicago/Upper Midwest Region office.
Moreover, Hillel executive director Edda S. Post, MJCCR executive director Paula Simon and ADL Midwest director Richard S. Hirschhaut all want UWM Chancellor Nancy Zimpher to respond publicly to the Leader piece — and thereby, as Post said, “educate the university community on the difference between genuine academic debate” and the promulgation of “hate-mongering ideas.”
A meeting on this matter has been scheduled for Tuesday, Dec. 11, noon, in Chapman Hall, the building that houses the chancellor’s office, according to the office of Tom Luljak, the interim vice chancellor for university relations and communications.
It is not clear whether Zimpher will attend. Post said she, Simon, Hillel president Jerry Safer and MJCCR president Marty Katz will likely attend.
‘The Jewish hegemony’
The article was published in the paper and on the paper’s web site under an “Editorials” heading and was headlined, “Enough with the Holocaust, already.” Its author, Chris Orcholl, is identified in the online UWM directory as a junior and was listed on the masthead of the Leader’s Nov. 21 issue as a “News/Beat” writer. The review concluded:
“Each year we are pummeled by a Blitzkrieg of movies and miniseries that mythologize the sufferings of downtrodden Jews at the hands of merciless Nazis…. The Jewish hegemony over the entertainment industry permits the schlock to continue unabated as a form of revenge for something that happened 60 years ago. Meanwhile, [director] Steven Spielberg rolls around naked in piles of cash [after which come more sexual vulgarities about Spielberg and “Life is Beautiful” star Roberto Benigni]. Give it up.
“Some might argue that we need to remember the past, lest we be doomed to repeat it. While this is true, must our remembrances be so one-sided? Let’s see a movie that humanized Nazis who backed the Third Reich in an act of self-preservation…. IS there a film producer alive brave enough to say one kind thing about Hitler?”
Within days, the article was the talk of the Jewish students at Hillel Hour. Avi Domnitz, a senior biology and Hebrew studies major, saw the article there. “I was absolutely appalled,” she told The Chronicle. “This goes beyond what should be allowed because although still an independent paper, [the Leader] is still associated with the university.”
Kevin Horwitz, a senior majoring in geography, said the article was “an insult to me as a Jewish person and to the Jewish community,” and that Orcholl “showed his stupidity and ignorance.”
Corrina Dorfman, a senior Hebrew studies major, wrote a long letter to the Leader and spoke to three of the paper’s editors. In a telephone interview, Dorfman characterized the editors’ responses to her concerns as “ridiculous…. They don’t acknowledge the fact that it was an anti-Semitic article. They don’t know what anti-Semitism is.”
Hillel director Post said she was as “incensed and very upset” as the students. “What’s frightening to me is that there are people looking at [Orcholl’s piece] and saying, ‘This is a review of a TV show.’ I look at it and I say this is a diatribe against the Jewish people masked as a review. It’s just plain ugly,” she said.
The Leader published Dorfman’s and two other letters blasting Orcholl’s review in the Nov. 21 issue, including one from Post, and posted some additional letters on its web site.
The Nov. 21 issue also carried a boxed statement saying that “Against the wishes of the editors and the entire Leader staff,” Orcholl resigned from the paper on Nov. 17 “due to the recent controversy over his last editorial….”
The statement also said that “Orcholl’s editorial was not meant to attack Jewish people but rather to criticize a Hollywood miniseries’ trite portrayal of historical events.”
Opinion, not fact?
ssful. Leader news editor Ryan Garnier and arts-entertainment editor Dave Donars in telephone interviews both emphasized that Orcholl’s article was billed as an editorial.
“It was an editorial, it was opinion, not fact,” said Donars. Such articles “don’t hold to the same standards of journalism as news pieces.” Donars said that the paper has no editor-in-chief, that decisions on what to print are made by “the whole staff,” and the staff read Orcholl’s review as being “in our tradition of being anti-Hollywood.”
University officials told The Chronicle that the Leader started about four years ago as an alternative to the UWM Post, and that its relationship to the university administration is loose.
Dean of Students James Hill said student organizations and publications have to register with the university, but that’s almost the extent of the university’s rules for them.
In fact, said Tom McGinnity, assistant dean of students and manager of the student organizations advising and resource office, “student organizations are independent of the university” by state law. Their members “have the right to develop their own governing structures without interference by the university.”
Moreover, “publications are different from other student organizations” because they all fall under the same freedom of speech protections “that would be accorded to any other publication,” said Hill.
Hill said the Leader review was “in bad taste,” but added that “I haven’t had any students come to me [or his staff] and indicate that they had a problem with it.” Moreover, while “I can’t really say what the university should do” in response, Hill said the university can’t “analyze everything that’s written” in student publications “to see if it’s going to be offensive to anybody.”
The Leader receives no funding from the university. When it first started, it received funding from the student government. But the student government “has a policy that student publications can receive funding for three years, then they are on their own,” said McGinnity. The Leader stopped receiving such funds about a year ago and now has to support itself entirely by advertising, he said.
The Leader does have office space in the UWM Union and is distributed free in boxes on the campus — privileges that UWM student Dorfman said the paper should lose unless its staff members “recognize that they made a mistake and publish that.”
Simon of the MJCCR, however, emphasized that she does not want the Leader to be “censored, closed or lose funding.” She does want the UWM administration to “give the kids the message that they have the responsibility not to use hate speech” and to say that UWM doesn’t “condone the message and content” of the Leader’s review and understands that the review was “hurtful and hateful to a specific group on the campus.”
“I believe we are all confident that the university will do the right thing in terms of not condoning this kind of message, [and] reaffirming their commitment to a diverse and accepting campus,” said Simon.
Also planning to attend the Dec. 11 meeting is Rabbi Francis Barry Silberg, spiritual leader emeritus of Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun, a scholar-in-residence in ethics at UWM and the “chancellor’s ambassador,” according to Silberg and Luljak.
Silberg told The Chronicle he learned about the Leader review after he returned from Germany last week and that he wanted to “withhold judgement” on the issues until after the meeting. He added that “the university is very concerned about these matters…. I think a resonable conclusion will be drawn at the meeting.”
Loading ...