Visitor accuses universities of anti-semitism

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New Zealand universities stand accused of chronic, endemic anti-Semitism in a new book by a South African-Australian academic.

Professor Colin Tatz, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, has highlighted the controversial cases of Joel Hayward at the University of Canterbury and Hans Kupka at Waikato University as evidence of wider anti-Semitism within New Zealand academia.

"Two postgraduate disparagers of Jews and their history do not make a whole society anti-Semitic," he writes.

"But it is the wide supporting cast that leads to a reasonable conclusion that there is a chronic, endemic anti-Semitism in academe and in the intellectual world of New Zealand."

Canterbury University history student Joel Hayward's 1993 thesis sparked a long-running and ugly controversy when it was revealed he was awarded a masters degree for a thesis that questioned key aspects of the Holocaust.

The New Zealand Jewish Council asked Canterbury to revoke the MA but a high-powered investigation cleared Hayward of anti-Semitism and he kept his degree.

In the book, Worlds Apart: The Re-migration of South African Jews, Tatz says this was despite a British expert on Nazi Germany concluding that Hayward's thesis was a work of Holocaust denial.

Hans Kupka's application for a PhD study on Germans in New Zealand, including interviews with Holocaust survivors, provoked outrage when it was alleged he was a Holocaust denier.

Kupka subsequently left the country, and an independent review concluded that Waikato should apologise to the Jewish community for its lack of sensitivity.

Tatz writes that "the matter of two universities, two postgraduate theses involving the Holocaust, and the ill-grace, impatience and disdain of senior institutions with Jews" was an important litmus test.

Speaking to The Press yesterday, Tatz said action was the real litmus of what happened in society.

"Waikato stuffed up nine (times) out of 10. Had it been a Maori or Islander issue, would there have been the same back-pedalling, the same dismissal as being hypersensitive?"

But Association of University Staff president Nigel Haworth said Tatz drew too long a bow.

"If members of AUS felt there was a structural problem of anti-Semitism we'd be the first to comment on it publicly."

Massey University sociology professor Paul Spoonley, who monitors anti-Semitic activity here for international reporting, said New Zealand was not regarded as anti-Semitic, especially when compared with Europe or even Canada and Australia.

"We've done surveys of both the Auckland and Wellington Jewish communities and they don't find New Zealand very anti-Semitic at all."

But, because New Zealand had not experienced endemic or significant anti-Semitism, it was a little naive and self-satisfied.

"When something does come up, we don't handle it well."

Canterbury University said it stood by its 2000 declaration, made on the release of the Hayward Thesis Working Party's report, that it does not support Holocaust revisionism or harbour anti-Semitic feeling.

- © Fairfax NZ News