‘A Parody of Reform’

As The New York Sun urges fiscal responsibility and reform in New York State’s next fiscal year budget, Governor Pataki’s veto of one item is not only detrimental to children, it represents true reform and fiscal responsibility – this is the veto of $18 million in Federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families grants in the Office of Children and Family Services budget [“A Parody of Reform,” Editorial, November 10, 2004].

This grant would continue to fund groundbreaking, effective partnerships between child welfare and substance abuse agencies that have greatly reduced child abuse and neglect, cut the foster caseload, and kept more birth families intact. In New York City, the annual cost to provide substance abuse services to a typical family with two children is $16,000 or less than half the $44,000 cost for foster care. In one year alone, the TANF allocation saves New York state millions.

The economic and social impact is immense, with better lives for neglected children and parents who become responsible taxpayers. I urge the Legislature to overturn the veto and that the governor support it.

JAMES SIEGEL
Manhattan

Mr. X’s Neighbors

Mr. X was much too kind in describing that mother who told his little daughter “death to Bush and Chaney” [“Mr. X’s Neighborhood,” Mr. X, Opinion, November 22, 2004].

That statement was one of the most egregious comments any body could make to another person, let alone to a 6-year-old.

ETHEL SCHER
Riverdale, N.Y.

Freedom Tower Security

Anyone who has followed the rebuilding process knows that thanks to Pataki having used the rebuilding process as a patronage mill, we are stuck with Daniel Libeskind’s highly disappointing and pathetic site plan [“Freedom Tower Security Issues Worry Police,” Jill Gardiner, Page 1, November 19, 2004].

Despite his specious claim that it is the “tallest building in the world,” human presence is forbidden above the 68th floor.

Furthermore, the insistence by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation of ramming every street they can through the World Trade Center site has created this security nightmare of tall buildings close the street, as well as what will be the highest urban density anywhere in the city.

There is no reason to slice the site up with streets for some imagined “street life” benefit; the concourse level mall that existed there prior to September 11, 2001, was the most profitable in the country.

Rather than build two tall towers that could fit all the office space in all the buildings that are going to be slapped up at the site, which would solve the security issue, we instead have a garbled mess of buildings that will have no profound effects whatsoever on the skyline.

Since the LMDC is deaf to all but Governor Pataki’s agenda, I doubt they even care about the potential and verifiable problems with the Libeskind plan.

ANDREW OLIFF
Bayside, N.Y.

‘Bollinger’s Blindness’

The real threat to Columbia University is not the free speech accorded to professors Joseph Massad and Rashid Khalidi, but the attempt of nonscholarly organizations like The New York Sun, which seek to impose ideological criteria on universities, thus destroying the basis for scholarly endeavor and the search for truth [“Bollinger’s Blindness,” Editorial, October 22, 2004].

Equally, organizations like Campus Watch seek to impose ideological criteria on scholarship by urging unwary and naive students to report opinions that Campus Watch does not find politically correct-never mind if it can be demonstrated in scholarly ways or is respectably represented in the relevant literature.

You have a right to a Zionist viewpoint, but not the right to ruin our universities by bullying them into sharing your viewpoint at the expense of their scholarly mission. I have a Columbia University doctorate, I am a Jew, and I was a university professor – try dismissing my opinion, please, as “anti-Semitic.”

MIRIAM M. REIK
Manhattan
The writer has a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature.

‘Bollinger’s Blindness’

I’m writing about The New York Sun’s shameful editorial in which you vilify professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University [“Bollinger’s Blindness,” October 22, 2004].

Racism, in the form of anti-Semitism, is being conflated with opposition to Israel. It is not. Opposition to Israeli policies, or even to the existence of the state of Israel itself, is perfectly legitimate. It is criticism of a state, not of Jews as a “race.” It is not racist, and not anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism is opposition to all Jews, religious, Zionist, or not, as a “race.” That is, it’s a form of racism.

GROVER FURR
Newark N.J.
The writer is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Montclair State University.

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