MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Presence of Zionist lecturer ends up in scandal at Uruguay's main university

“Yes, I am a Zionist, and I am proud of it,” the Montevideo-born Spektorowski stressed

A student movement resulting in the suppression of a course to be taught by Professor Alberto Spektorowski at Montevideo's Faculty of Humanities of the University of the Republic (Udelar) given his “Zionist” allegiance has led to a scandal in the Uruguayan capital involving the local Jewish community and various Members of Parliament.

Congressman Felipe Schipani of the Colorado Party -a member of President Luis Lacalle Pou's Multicolor coalition- asked the Lower House to summon the Udelar authorities.

Student union leader Mateo Peña told Telenoche that the group rejected Spektorowski's statements that “relativize the genocide and deny the situation that the Palestinians are living.” Peña insisted that the teacher there would “not be 30,000 dead, but 50,000 or as many as necessary” which for the students constituted “hate speech and apology of war.” Academia “should not amplify that speech,” Peña also argued.

Pablo Martinis, dean of the School of Humanities, pointed out that the start of Spektorowski's postgraduate course was postponed to review the matter but insisted that it was neither suspended nor canceled. The school will “take a little more time to refine the proposal and to leave no room for any doubts or considerations regarding the fact that the plurality of perspectives that the subject deserves are being presented,” Martinis stressed. “It is a complex issue,” he added.

“Any cancellation policy linked to ideological aspects is inadmissible at the University of the Republic,” he insisted. Regarding Spektorowski's pay, the Dean admitted he would be entitled to a grade 5 compensation but would not be granted a full-time position.

“There is an anti-Semitic purpose,” Schipani noted in his submission before the House's Education Committee. “We find very serious what has been reported through the press the fact that the participation of a prominent Uruguayan-Israeli academic is canceled because he is a Zionist as if it were something bad. To be a Zionist is to defend the existence of the State of Israel: I consider myself a Zionist,” he said. “These things cannot happen in Uruguay and cannot happen in the public university,” he added.

Martinis and Udelar Rector Rodrigo Arim are to appear before the House on May 15.

Spektorowski is a Uruguayan-Israeli political scientist. Born in 1952 in Montevideo, he emigrated to Israel at an early age. He is a retired professor at the University of Tel Aviv. His fields of interest include identity politics, democracy, and conflict resolution.

He is the author of “The Origins of Argentina’s Revolution of the Right” (published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2003), “Politics of Eugenics: Productionism, Population, and National Welfare” (co-authored with Liza Ireni-Saban and published by Routledge in 2013), and “Autoritarios y populistas. Los orígenes del fascismo en la Argentina” (published by Lumière in 2013), among others.

Regarding the current scandal in Montevideo, Spektorowski openly declared that “Yes, I am a Zionist, and I am proud of it” because being a Zionist is not inherently wrong.

Jewish organizations in Uruguay, including the Central Israelite Committee and Bnei Brith, expressed their condemnation of the situation.

Regarding his course at the Udelar, Spektorowski said that “I don't want to get involved with institutional decisions, whatever decision they make I accept it, because I was going to participate as a guest lecturer.”

“I have no complaints whatsoever,” he also pointed out. He was to lecture on “Laicism as a problem: its history and foundations” to analyze “the concept of laicism from the historical and comparative point of view with other countries”, as well as “its relationship with culture and politics”, and “the close link between laicism and culture, laicism and politics, laicism and education.”

For the Committee, the Udelar “puts at stake its historical democratic, plural and secular identity” by “yielding to these pressures”.“It is no longer about defending the State of Israel and its right to legitimate self-defense, it is about our country, Uruguay, importing a conflict that is alien to it, a single conflict regarding the many and so painful ones in the world, making clear a discriminatory intention,” the organization said in a statement.

“We will not remain silent when circumstances warrant our voice, loud and clear, to reject anti-Semitism and any hate speech that is intended to spread,” they added.

B'nai B'rith Uruguay underlined that Spektorowski had an “outstanding trajectory and credentials, he was summoned as a guest to give two classes within a course in Humanities, which has nothing to do with Israel, nor with Judaism, nor with Zionism, but with secularism, a historical principle in our country of which we Uruguayans are proud.”

“We reject and condemn the fact that the student union has based its opposition on the Zionist condition of the aforementioned teacher. Zionism, as a national movement of the Jewish people, defends the right of the Jewish people to have their own State. To use the term as a disqualification or accusation directly implies denying the right to the existence of Israel, and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination,” added the Jewish organization.