The Ash Twins Blog

I ran across this rather shocking essay on the American intellectual community by Noam Chomsky:

There was this best-seller a few years ago [in 1984], it went through about ten printings, by a woman named Joan Peters—or at least, signed by Joan Peters—called From Time Immemorial. It was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants… [I]t was very popular—it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it… Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there’s no moral issue, because they’re just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country… Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He’s a very careful student, and he started checking the references—and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked… He went ahead and wrote up an article, and he started submitting it to journals. Nothing: they didn’t even bother responding… Meanwhile his professors—this is Princeton University, supposed to be a serious place—stopped talking to him: they wouldn’t make appointments with him, they wouldn’t read his papers, he basically had to quit the program.

I didn’t take much time to fact-check, but the Wikipedia entry for Norman Finkelstein seems to verify the essentials. I found this section fascinating:

In early 2007 the DePaul University Political Science department voted nine to three, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Personnel Committee five to zero, in favor of giving Finkelstein tenure. The three opposing faculty members subsequently filed a minority report opposing tenure, supported by the Dean of the College, Chuck Suchar… In June 2007 a 4-3 vote by DePaul University’s Board on Promotion and Tenure (a faculty board), affirmed by the university’s president, the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, denied Finkelstein tenure… At the same time, the university denied tenure to international studies lecturer Mehrene Larudee, a strong supporter of Finkelstein, despite unanimous support from her department, the Personnel Committee and the Dean… In a statement issued upon Finkelstein’s resignation, DePaul called him “a prolific scholar and an outstanding teacher” (footnotes and hyperlinks omitted).

At today’s PICS journal club, Spiro presented “The spatiotemporal dynamics of autobiographical memory: neural correlates of recall, emotional intensity, and reliving,” a study demonstrating the components of episodic memory retrieval.

Here’s the abstract:

We sought to map the time course of autobiographical memory retrieval, including brain regions that mediate phenomenological experiences of reliving and emotional intensity. Participants recalled personal memories to auditory word cues during event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants pressed a button when a memory was accessed, maintained and elaborated the memory, and then gave subjective ratings of emotion and reliving. A novel fMRI approach based on timing differences capitalized on the protracted reconstructive process of autobiographical memory to segregate brain areas contributing to initial access and later elaboration and maintenance of episodic memories. The initial period engaged hippocampal, retrosplenial, and medial and right prefrontal activity, whereas the later period recruited visual, precuneus, and left prefrontal activity. Emotional intensity ratings were correlated with activity in several regions, including the amygdala and the hippocampus during the initial period. Reliving ratings were correlated with activity in visual cortex and ventromedial and inferior prefrontal regions during the later period. Frontopolar cortex was the only brain region sensitive to emotional intensity across both periods. Results were confirmed by time-locked averages of the fMRI signal. The findings indicate dynamic recruitment of emotion-, memory-, and sensory-related brain regions during remembering and their dissociable contributions to phenomenological features of the memories.