Through Ben-Amos, Penn's speech code now occasioned a sustained scholarship on the
term behema. Jastrow's Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi,
and the Midrashic Literature offered, as the first definition of the term, "water-ox."
Brown's Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, translated behema as "ox
of the water." Dahn Ben-Amotz's (no relation) World Dictionary of Hebrew Slang defined
the term behemott in the plural of biblical Hebrew as "water-cows and cattle"
and, from modern Hebrew, as people of thoughtless behavior.
Michael Meyers, the visionary black leader of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and
a member of the National Board of the ACLU, had worked on race relations for
twenty-five years--in particular, black-Jewish tension. Asked about "water buffalo"
as a racial epithet, he said (and wrote), "I have never heard the term 'water buffalo'
used as a racial epithet." He also agreed to testify to this. Crucially, he suggested
that Kors call Deborah Leavy, the executive director of the Pennsylvania ACLU, who
agreed that she and Stefan Presser, the General Counsel of the Pennsylvania ACLU,
would join the case pro bono on Eden's behalf. Leavy added, "My father-in-law calls
people behema all the time." Eden now had two legal teams behind him. After hearing
the details of the case, Arnold and Sonya Silverstein, two attorneys of Kors's
acquaintance, had offered to represent Eden pro bono, providing the first ray of
hope that Penn might be forced by the rule of law to honor its own policies in this
case. A similar offer came from the lawyer in charge of the Civil Rights Committee
of the Eastern Pennsylvania Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith after an exchange of letters with Penn.
At this point, no one in the mainstream media was familiar with the case, but a
growing number of professors were responding with outrage. Kenny Williams, a
renowned scholar of American Literature at Duke University, had replied to an
inquiry about "water buffalo" that if Eden had wanted to use a racial epithet,
there was, sadly, a vast lexicon from which to choose. "Water buffalo," she noted,
was not one of them. "How in the world," she asked, "can anyone find racism or racial
intent in that term?" She put it perfectly: "What is perhaps most disturbing about
this matter is the assumption...that a word...will mean whatever a particular
thought-control officer will deem language to mean....Language will cease to have
any communicative value.' Williams, who is black, saw another dimension to the
case:
On a personal level, what is more disturbing...is the ability of some administrator
... to define (in effect) an entire race and to introduce another racial term into
language .... This is the real racism .... The student did nothing wrong, and if
the students who were called "water buffalo" didn't like it, they should have merely
stated that fact and in the process taken their noise making activities elsewhere!
Young people have a marvelous ability to solve their own problems. Issues of racism
are too serious to be treated frivolously by
administrators.15
