Stranger than Fiction

A Jewish Shakespeare professor gets cast as Shylock in his own hellish drama.

May 07, 2021

NYHS sends a warm Mazel Tov to Melissa Rivkin and David Cohanim the recipients of the 2021 Jack DeLeon Community Leadership Award! Please be sure to join us as we celebrate our school and our amazing honorees at our Virtual Celebration of Leadership (7:30 PM on Monday 5/10/21).

Hello!

I want to start with a shoutout to JTA for republishing my story from last week about Cherry Street Village! Welcome new Cholent subscribers, I’m so glad you’re here!

Before we get into this week’s hot mess, a trip to the mailroom.

The AJS-Cohen-Pianko drama roils on in the way niche community drama does (and I am not helping by continually bringing it up).

Friend of the Cholent Linda B says:

I went back and read the articles about Cohen and Noam Pianko’s involvement, etc. When I first read this week’s Cholent, I had no words because I was upset that you seem to be advocating for Cohen’s reinstatement. I then realized I have two words: Believe Women.
It is time for us to stop worshiping that golden calf of intellectual brilliance, continuity or whatever else you want to call it. We need to value integrity, acting with respect and dignity to all humans. If we don’t hold scholars to those standards, then is their research valid also? Or are they lacking integrity in their methods, reporting, etc? What would we learn if we made space for people who didn’t abuse the power and perks of academic or religious credibility? That’s not cancel culture — that’s expecting all people to adhere to high standards without compartmentalizing so called “brilliance” while disregarding the damage that's being done.

Another Friend of the Cholent turned to the Talmud for insight.

You raised important questions about shunning and the criticism of Prof. Pianko's actions, so I wondered what Talmud might have to say. In its discussion of herem, for me one big takeaway that the case must be proven, before the beit din. Another is the temporary nature of most such bans.
I think there may be some important general guidance in these texts, to temper the rushes to judgment and the muddy route to tshuvah for so many of these exclusions we’re seeing across our society right now. What these transgressors (mostly men) have done is contemptible. But are they shunned for life, and on what evidence? All of them? Some? How does the community decide? How can individuals work to make right what they’ve done wrong?
The same applies to questions about racist histories as well, and whether we can move past discovery and shock and sorrow to meaningful repair for inclusion in a community that lives vividly in its diversity.
May we live in interesting times...

I want to go on the record saying that I am not advocating for Cohen’s reinstatement. And as a lifelong feminist, I am predisposed to believe women. I overall agree with the first comment. But I’m asking about the area of accountability, the parameters of punishment. Herem aside, in the American justice system, even most murderers and rapists get out one day. This is undoubtedly traumatic for victims and families, but the hope is that these criminals can be rehabilitated and reentered into society. Gov. Inslee just restored voting rights immediately to convicted felons, a bill celebrated by Democrats. So it’s ironic that when the jury is the public, or our own community and yes it is our community, we basically sentence offenders to life in prison with no chance of parole. And don’t pick up the prison phone, or you’ll end up in the slammer, too.

Maybe what we need to do is develop some guidelines for how to handle these situations, led by a “va’ad” of diverse and smart Jews from across the country.

Anyway. My theory that this is more about eliminating Cohen’s work in continuity studies in favor of a social justice agenda is proving more evident. From a truly clarifying article by Gilah Kletenik and Raphael Rachel Neis:

Racism, cisheteronormativity, ableism, and classism pervade all academic disciplines. Particular to Jewish Studies is its conferral of authority on people it qualifies as “Jewish.” We’ve benefited from this privilege and also from being Ashkenazi. We worry that an imagined continuity between contemporary “Jewish” scholars and the Jewish cultures studied in our field, erects a hierarchy, privileging scholars who satisfy this credential. This tension is amplified when what’s being studied is temporally and geographically proximate. It’s time to demystify the field and welcome a variety of students and scholars, crediting heterogenous knowledges and experiences as entry-points.

Time to demystify the field indeed.

— Emily

“And then I thought, God, this is how it’s going to go.”

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner thought he was doing the right thing by calling attention to inappropriate behavior among his college’s board of trustees. What happened next is stranger than fiction.

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner was a Shakespeare professor at Linfield College in Oregon until last week, when he was fired from his tenured job for blowing the whistle on allegations of sexual assault and anti-Semitism.

Pollack-Pelzner’s story blew up overnight after he posted a thread on Twitter detailing the surreal drama. Since then, the story has captured national attention as well as earned detailed coverage by The Oregonian. The ADL and the Oregon Board of Rabbis have stepped in to help. It’s a mind-bending story that seems both impossible today and utterly at odds with everything we value in Judaism and in secular society about standing up for victims and making the world a better place.

I am greatly appreciative to Daniel for taking time to talk with me about how everything went down.

(This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

The Cholent: How are you doing?

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: Someday I may sleep again. We’ll see when that day is. My heart is with my poor colleagues and students who were robbed of a professor just hours before they were supposed to send in their final projects for my courses, and my colleagues who have learned that Linfield is perfectly comfortable firing a tenured professor without following any of the procedures in our employee policies and not for any of the causes that are allowed. It’s a tough atmosphere to be in.

And now, it’s just gotten worse. Linfield students wrote messages in chalk, and [the messages] were hosed down and the students were told they would be fined if they used chalk without authorization. Then they wanted to put up posters, and the residence hall advisers were told they were not to provide paper to students who want to express their views. Faculty put up posters in their offices, and the campus security went into locked faculty offices and tore down the posters and confiscated any evidence. From the outside, it’s almost farcical, but if you’re living within it, I think it’s pretty terrifying.

It reminds me of Harry Potter, when each time the students try to do something that seems threatening to the staff, another edict goes up to stop them from gathering. It’s the realm of fantasy literature.

It is absolutely Dolores Umbridge running the ship, decree number 452. Doesn’t she forbid any student group from gathering with more than two people? That’s exactly the same thing that happened at Linfield. The moment the Linfield faculty passed a vote of no confidence, calling for the president and the chair to resign, we get a message from the Dolores Umbridge of Linfield saying, “Faculty are no longer allowed to use the campus email list to communicate with each other, and any message that you want to send has to go through the administrator’s office.” Dolores Umbridge almost seems like the benign version, before the Death Eaters show up in book seven to really crack down.

This doesn’t even sound real. Maybe we should go back a few steps. What on earth is happening there, and what is this place? Here’s this small Christian college outside of Portland, and there’s this nice Jewish boy working there, and then everything goes to hell. Want to start at the beginning?

I like that description of it. It’s surreal to me, too.

I grew up in a Reconstructionist community in Portland. When I finished [grad school] at Harvard in 2010, it just so happened there was a job in my field, which is Shakespeare, in the state where we wanted to be. I grew up going to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The dream of being near my family in Portland, being able to take students to the festival each year and to teach Shakespeare at a small, liberal arts school that really valued teaching. That seemed like my dream come true. For about eight years, it was. I live in Portland, five minutes from my wife’s parents, 20 minutes from my parents. One of my kids is getting ready for his bar mitzvah where I was bar mitzvahed years ago.

I hadn’t heard of Linfield either. Unlike elite schools that try to keep people out, Linfield is trying to invite people in. Whatever your background, you can be transformed by a liberal arts education. It was all wonderful until 2019. It was my turn to do some service at school. There’s a board of trustees. There’s one faculty seat on the board. This was not a position I craved, but Linfield had been tremendously supportive of me, and I wanted to be supportive of my colleagues. After my first meeting on the board, I had two professors come up to me and say, “Daniel, professors and students are being touched inappropriately by members of the board.” I was maybe naively shocked and saddened to hear that. I asked what they wanted to do. They said they didn’t want to file formal reports. They were afraid of retaliation. They weren’t seeking to get anyone in trouble, but they thought, maybe instead of what the board does, which is these late-night events at a country club with drinking, maybe we could do a different format for our events that are geared around our shared academic interests. Maybe there could be some sexual harassment training or guidelines — sitting next to a professor at a dinner is different than picking somebody up at a bar — things you would think we wouldn’t have to explain, but apparently we did.

I went right to the people who did my training for the board, and said here’s what I’ve been told. Could we please get some sexual harassment training, guidelines for proper behavior, maybe some different formats for these social events? And I never heard back.

A month later, a story breaks in The Oregonian that another student was sexually assaulted by another trustee at another event. And she’s also learned that this trustee had been accused by other students. I wrote back and said, “I think we have a bigger problem.” And again, nothing. Then before the next meeting, all the professors get an email from the president’s office saying, “Will you please host a dinner for trustees at your house for the next meeting, on Valentine’s Day, and the school will provide the alcohol?”

By now, I know that at the last three trustee events, someone has been accused of sexual harassment. I said, “Sorry, I can’t support these gatherings anymore until we get these procedures in place.” Naively, I thought this was going to be a no-brainer. Then the chair of the board calls me into his office, and he said, “Daniel, what do you really want?” I said, “I think I’ve been pretty clear. What do you think I want?” He said, “I think you have a secret agenda, and your agenda is to grab power.” As far as I know, I’m the only Jewish person on the board. It’s starting to get weird. And he said, “We never had a problem until you became a trustee.”

I write a report for every board meeting, and I wrote in my report [about the allegations]. And the president then called me into his office and said I would be destroying Linfield if I shared this report with the board. He actually withheld it from being sent out. I said, you know, with all due respect, “I think Linfield actually needs to handle this.”

At the board meeting, the president gets up. He says, “He’s a student of history, and he knows all the great empires of old have been destroyed by disloyalty from within. He knows the Mongol Empire was brought down by internal disunion, the Ottomon Empire was brought down by internal disunion, and now Linfield is going to be brought down by these elements of discord. Unless we all follow the teachings of Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount.” I think other people on the board didn’t know that he had been privately saying that I was destroying this school. So everybody else sort of nodded along. I guess I’ve been teaching The Merchant of Venice, but I felt like I was suddenly cast as Shylock, in the trial scene, with my forced conversion being staged in front of an approving leadership.

And this wasn’t your first strange moment with this president, right?

The president had previously said stuff to me that was just weird. The first time I met him, I told him about teaching Merchant of Venice, and he was very excited. He said, “I know if you measure the size of the average Jewish nose, and you compare it to the size of the average Arab nose, you actually can’t tell the difference between them.” What? I didn’t think anyone talked about measuring Jewish noses since like 1939. But he was my boss, and this was our first meeting, but I thought I would give him the benefit of the doubt.

And then there were swastikas on campus and anti-Black graffiti as well. A number of us said, you know, we really need to have a strong response and handle this. And he got up in front of the faculty and said he didn’t see why the professors like me were so upset about this and seen worse in his life. He’s an African American man, and that it wasn’t a big deal. I was sitting there thinking, “Do you not get that there is anybody besides you who would care about swastikas on campus and who could be affected by their presence at all?” It all just seemed odd, but then he says I’ve got to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ in order to prove my loyalty to the school, and the chair of the board has said I have a secret agenda to grab power — I did go to HR at that point. I said, “I’ve been trying to report sexual misconduct on the board, and here’s what I’ve been facing in response.” The head of HR listened very sympathetically and said, “I just have to stop you there. I just want you to know I don’t think it’s true at all that Jews have a secret agenda to grab power, because I have this neighbor who’s Jewish who’s just the nicest person who would never try to grab power at all.”

And then I thought, God, this is how it’s going to go.

So, the board agreed to take some very basic sexual harassment training. Then at the very next meeting, after the student trustee has reported being sexually assaulted, the board moves to get rid of the faculty trustee and the student trustee — to get rid of our positions on the board. I had to write another report: whatever the intention, this will be perceived as retaliatory for us speaking up about sexual misconduct. I have a lot of privilege. I’m a tenured professor. What’s the effect going to be on, you know, a young person who doesn’t feel like they have a voice? And then being told that if you speak up about sexual misconduct, you will lose your voice? I didn’t think that they were going to say, “Yasher koach, Daniel, thank you.” But I thought at least we’d have a discussion about it. But instead, the chair of the board censored my report. He cut out every section about sexual misconduct, and he told the other trustees they weren’t allowed to read it. Then the board formally censured me for writing the reports. It said I couldn’t discuss these issues outside of their confidential executive session. And then they kicked me out of the confidential executive session, and they had their lawyers threaten me with public humiliation if I continued to report sexual misconduct. Then the chair of the board sent a letter to the whole Linfield community saying that I was shameful and malicious for having reported sexual misconduct. I thought that was the worst of it. I thought, well, can they go worse than that? Then the whole faculty assembly took a vote of no confidence in the chair of the board, who it turned out was a guy who knew that there had been prior allegations against this pernicious trustee, but it kept him on the board and allowed him to be near other kids.

And the board disregarded the vote of no confidence and then got rid of the faculty assembly, the faculty body that passed this vote. I came back to the board and said, “You know, can you at least adopt an anti-retaliation policy so that whatever you’ve done to me, other people will know that you won’t do that to them if they come forward.” And the board said, no, we won’t.

And then they announced that they were formally going to get rid of the faculty trustee position. At that point I thought, well, I’ve been trying to work internally. There’s no internal left to work with. So then I posted a Twitter thread in March about my experiences.

The ADL weighed in with a letter. The president responded to the ADL saying that I was mounting a smear campaign to harm the university, at which point, then the Oregon Board of Rabbis called for the resignation of the president and the chair of the board, and in response to that senior member of the board is the head of the American Baptist churches called up the Oregon Board of Rabbis and said that I was a pathological liar who was trying to use my Jewish affiliation to rally other Jews to leverage my cause. If you’re trying to deflect accusations of anti-Semitism, it’s a pretty odd way to express them.

I’m the faculty trustee, it’s my fiduciary duty to speak up. And I’m a tenured professor with an endowed chair and I’m a middle-aged white guy. I’ve got as much privilege as anybody in that field has. I’ve got to use it to try to make sure these issues are addressed and they can’t fire me because you can’t retaliate against the whistle blower. I thought. And then all of a sudden they did, and here we are. So that’s the whole megillah.

You could write your own kind of Kafkaesque novel. You don’t even have to make anything up.

The most Kafkaesque moment actually was when I got this email: “You’re being summoned to a mandatory meeting with the provost and the head of HR and the dean.” And I thought, well, this doesn’t sound good,” but I didn’t know what it was going to be. And I asked, “Do I need to bring a lawyer?” And they said, “Well, we can’t tell you what’s going to happen. But if you want to bring a lawyer, then have a lawyer.” And I said, “Well, if you can’t tell me what’s going to happen, then it sounds like maybe I do need a lawyer. So can we wait until I get one?” And they said, “Nope, the meeting’s off. You’ll get a FedEx package [tomorrow].”

So I was on a Zoom call for work last Tuesday afternoon, and suddenly in the middle of the Zoom call with the head of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, interviewing her about race in American theater, and the call freezes. I thought my internet went out, but then my computer shut down, and I thought, oh no, it’s not charged it or something. And then it restarts and says, “Your access has been disabled.” And I still didn’t get it. And I couldn’t get into my email. I sent an email to my work account from my personal account, and I got this autoreply back from myself, saying, “Daniel Pollack-Pelzner is no longer an employee of Linfield University.”

That’s how you found out.

I was telling myself that I had been fired.

Obviously, you’re shocked, but what were you feeling at that moment or in those next hours or day?

What do they say, denial is the first stage of loss? I think I was just sort of incredulous and I mean, honestly, a lot of people had been telling me that there was a limit to what I could accomplish and that I probably had an inflated sense of my own powers of persuasion with this story.

I guess I didn’t want to accept that I couldn’t actually accomplish the change that I had promised my students and colleagues that I would do. And then when I was fired, I guess I had a slight moment of clarity of like, I guess there is a limit to what I can do. But I also thought, well, maybe this is what it will take for everybody else to recognize how abusive the people are in a position of power at Linfield.

And I guess I just have to hope eventually, however long that moral arc of the universe is, that if enough light gets shed on these coverups, that they won’t be able to continue.

And now are they still just hoping this goes away?

That’s exactly what they’re doing. Even the one person of conscience on the board just resigned publicly on Sunday and wrote a letter to The Oregonian about that the foolishness and destructiveness of firing the whistleblower instead of addressing the actual problems that were being reported.

What’s the deal with the president? What’s his motivation?

I mean, he’s one of the people who is accused of misconduct by one of my colleagues. There’s also a facet of institutional racism, which is that four members of the board have been accused of sexual misconduct or the last two years. Two are white men named Dave. Two are Black men. The board has never investigated, to the best of my knowledge, the allegations against the white men on the board. They only investigated the allegations against the Black men on the board. And the board is currently chaired by another white man named Dave. And it was previously chaired by another white man named Dave. And all of these guys that seem to just be covering up for each other.

Even though I think a lot of the things that the president has done are not okay within an educational environment, I also think he’s in a tremendously difficult position, because the bylaws say that the president serves at the pleasure of the board. The president’s lost faculty, lost some students, lost the alumni. The board is the only one backing him. And so I can sort of only speculate that it would be very difficult for him to confront the board on their own institutional racism — not that he shouldn’t be investigated — but that they should be investigating the white guys named Dave as well. That puts the president in a very difficult position.

And is the fact that he’s not white a complicating factor?

These things are always intersectional. It’s a board that’s pretty much old white Christian men with money who meet at a country club every year to talk about the state of this school. And if you’re not an insider in that community, then it can be difficult to have an influence. And when that community comes under stress, consciously or not, folks are looking for scapegoats or outsiders to expel.

What’s your take on the anti-Semitism you encountered?

I’ve written stuff and people have written back to me and said, you know, “What you just wrote about blackface in Mary Poppins is horrible, and you sneaky Jews should be rounded up and sent back to the camps where you belong.” I was like, “Well, I didn’t know people still said that kind of thing these days, but at least it’s far away, not in my community.” And of course, that’s far more virulent than anything that’s been said to me at Linfield, but, you know, it feels more like a difference of degree rather than of kind — that fundamental notion that Jews are not part of the community, that they’re not loyal, that they have their own agendas. And that when push comes to shove, you’ve got to get rid of them.

Where did we go from here? It has to come apart at some point.

It’s a weird thing that non-profit boards are just not accountable to anybody. There’s no oversight. They’re just entirely self-regulating. Faculty can pass whatever votes they want. The Oregonian can write whatever articles they want.

I’ve been really informed by the work of the trauma psychologist Jennifer Freyd, who describes why trauma is so much worse when it’s perpetuated by people who are supposed to be protecting you. She calls this betrayal trauma, and she’s described institutional betrayal, by institutions that are supposed to be guarding your safety but are harming you. Jennifer Freyd has articulated the antidote, which she calls institutional courage. It’s moving away from the kind of denial-defense mindset into thinking, how do you actually listen? How do you really support people who have been traumatized and who are sharing their experiences, and how do you move toward healing instead of risk management? And so my hope is that there will be accountability for institutional betrayals at Linfield and their real demonstrated commitment to institutional courage. But I haven’t seen any signs of that yet.

What are you going to do now? Are you able to think, like, what’s going to happen to me?

I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out the next steps. When I first joined the board, I told you, it was against my will. And my dad said, “You know, whatever happens to you, I know you’re going to learn a lot from this.”

Community Announcements

Check out the Seattle Jewish community calendar.

This week’s parasha is Behar-Behukotai.

Candlelighting in Seattle is at 8:12 p.m.

Shoutouts!

Kol HaKavod to Max Patashnik, Cassie Garvin and Aliza Mossman for all of their hard work launching the new Jewish Community Relations Council. —Randi Abrams-Caras

Wishing a speedy recovery to Rabbi Yohanna Kinberg, and thank you to all in our community who stepped in to cover for her absence. —Linda Bookey

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