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That is why I went to the police last Monday to request protection for my class — titled ‘Suicide Terror’ — which is in a basement, so in an emergency situation, it would be very hard to evacuate 95 students.
I couldn’t take the chance that because of my name, someone would try to do away with a ‘Zionist professor.’” The first course of action Pedhazur took was to vacate the offices at the Israeli Studies Institute, and, he said, “Police gave us recommendations on how to secure the facility, so as not to put anybody at risk.” What the university did in the immediate aftermath of the incident was to instruct Pedahzur to defer all requests from journalists to its public affairs department.
Pedahzur’s silence “gave the groups the opportunity to smear me.
The whole field was open to them.” In addition, he said, “I read press releases about the intention of these students to press charges against me.
So I hired a lawyer.” (It was his attorney’s permission that enabled this interview.)
It was not until 10 days after the event that the university offered an official response.
On November 23, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts Randy Diehl issued the following statement, which was also sent to The Algemeiner, following a request to speak to Pedahzur: Amidst the current controversy concerning the disruption of an academic lecture sponsored by the Institute for Israel Studies, I want to reiterate my deep admiration for the work of Professor Ami Pedahzur and the Institute for Israel Studies in conducting courses and public programming that represent the highest standard of academic discourse and dispassionate reasoning and research on a controversial subject of enormous importance.
Students and faculty of every background, including Palestinians and Israelis alike, have enthusiastically received Prof. Pedahzur’s courses and his supervision of undergraduate and graduate research.
Although reviews are still ongoing, I wish to emphasize that there are places on campus for responsibly discussing disagreements.
Disruption of a visiting scholar’s invited academic lecture violates principles of academic freedom and free speech that are crucial to our mission as a great university.
Asked why this particular lecture, open to the public and titled, “The Origin of a Species: The Birth of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Military Culture,” sparked particular outrage, Pedahzur said that it was “completely orchestrated” anger and part of a nationwide campaign.
“It was a targeted opportunity; it was entrapment,” Pedahzur said.
“We at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies have never had a single problem since we started the program in 2007.
But last week’s episode, based on what I’ve heard, was an attempt by different groups to attach themselves to a larger movement that has been afflicting campuses, such as Mizzou [University of Missouri].” Pedahzur, an Israeli who has been in the US for 12 years, pointed to the fact, for example, that the PSC students “didn’t say a word about the news from Paris that same night.
These rioters said nothing on Facebook nor condemned the attacks.
They call themselves ‘Palestinian,’ but most of them don’t even speak Arabic, other than what they’ve learned in language classes at the university.
Most of them are not even Muslims; they’re American kids that don’t have anything to do with Islam.” But, he added, “I am going to do whatever I can as a researcher to find out who is behind this group,” whose leader has openly called on people to rally behind Hamas, Islamic jihad and other groups against the Palestinian Authority, which he views as ‘collaborators’ with Israel.
Pedahzur also laughed bitterly at the notion that the students in question, while defaming his character, are claiming to be the ones who are living in fear.
“Really?
Who, exactly, are they afraid of?
Kids at Hillel House?”
This is a tale of New Jersey politics.
So it is only fitting that it begins — as it will end — in a courtroom.
It is the spring of 1978, and a boy wants to sue the government.
Charles A. Poekel Jr., a suburban attorney, is staring across his desk at his client, a Livingston High School junior who’s trying to run for a minor office but has been disqualified because he can’t vote.
The 16-year-old sits next to his parents, but he does most of the talking.
He knows the names of all the county bosses and town committeemen.
Poekel understands impatient ambition — he ran for Congress himself at the age of 28.
But he’s never met anyone like this boy, David Wildstein.
“It is very unusual that someone of that age would be that all-consumed with politics,” Poekel recalls many years later.
“It was like having a child prodigy as a musician, but he was a child prodigy as a politician.
I would call him a political Mozart.” Wildstein takes his case to court.
He makes the local TV news, the Times, and the front page of the Livingston weekly paper, the West Essex Tribune, which has been covering his activities since middle school.
(It straightforwardly reported his defection from the Democrats to the Republicans at the age of 12.)
When the judge rejects his request, the boy remains defiant.
“I am in no way over the hill,” he declares, “and can assure the voters of Livingston that they have only just begun to see the name of David Wildstein.” Video: A Brief History of “Bridgegate” Back at Livingston High, Wildstein is considered an oddball.
He is chubby, with glasses, and a strident conservative.
Wildstein doesn’t fit into any of the school’s cliques, but he hangs around the margins of the baseball team.
He is a baseball nerd — loves the strategy, the way the game can be broken down into numbers — and acts as team statistician.
Livingston is a championship contender, and the players are popular.
Everyone loves the catcher, who is the president of the class a year behind Wildstein’s, a beefy jock with a shaggy haircut named Chris Christie.
That May, as Wildstein is trying to run for office, Christie makes the paper for socking a home run into a neighboring swimming pool.
Christie’s middle-class family lives in a modest brick home on the other side of town from the Wildsteins, who own a successful manufacturing business and live across the street from the estate of Tom Kean, soon to be New Jersey’s governor.
But Wildstein and Christie do cross paths, working together as volunteers on one of Kean’s campaigns and taking a road trip to a rally in Trenton.
They are friendly, but then Christie is that way with everyone.
He wears his ambition as amiably as a varsity jacket.
Wildstein’s ambition fits him awkwardly, like a grown-up suit a few sizes too large.
When he’s a senior, he runs a write-in campaign for the school board on a platform of cracking down on drug use and vandalism.
He submits endorsement letters to the local paper from fellow students and his social-studies teacher.
The teacher promptly accuses Wildstein of “political manipulation,” claiming he was tricked into signing a letter he hadn’t written.
Though they later issue a joint statement, saying the matter was “basically a misunderstanding,” Wildstein still finishes with just 37 votes.
Christopher Christie, class of 1980.
Photo: Courtesy of the Livingston Public Library, NJ So now it’s 1984.
Ronald Reagan is running for reelection, “Born in the USA” is piping out of every radio, and Christie is graduating from the University of Delaware, where he ran the student government and met his future wife, Mary Pat Foster.
Wildstein has returned home from Washington, D.C., where he attended college and worked as a congressional aide.
He has been managing campaigns for Jersey politicians, including a state senator named Louis Bassano.
In an era before ubiquitous computers, Wildstein pores over reams of precinct-level voting results, looking for angles.
(“He would spend hours and hours and hours,” Bassano recalls.
“I would walk into the office and there he is, looking over the figures, making notes, making notes.”) Wildstein has an obsession with New Jersey political lore, loves the old stories of clubhouse skulduggery.
When Wildstein says he plans to run for office himself, Bassano thinks it’s a bad idea — the kid has got tactical talent but a backroom personality.
Wildstein proves him wrong, winning a seat on Livingston’s town council.
Two years later, amid a racially tinged uproar over affordable housing, the Republicans win a majority on the council and elect Wildstein to the rotating position of mayor.
He is just 25.
“He was quite a phenom,” says Chuck Hardwick, the Speaker of the New Jersey state assembly at the time, for whom Wildstein worked as an adviser.
“The talk then was that he was going to be the first Jewish president of the United States.” But Wildstein is preoccupied with being king of Livingston.
“We used to call him the Wild Man,” says his former high-school classmate Leonard Sorge.
“He had some wild ideas.” The post of mayor is a part-time position with little power, but he is always at town hall, meddling with the bureaucrats.
He shows up early to monitor what time they come to work.
Teachers at the high school think he visits an inordinate amount, chumming around with the kids in Key Club, for which he is an adviser.
“He was into everything, he wanted to know everything, and he had something to say about everything,” says Pat Sebold, a longtime Democratic officeholder from Livingston.
“He was a major disaster.” Visiting the high school, Wildstein allegedly tells a group of students that a certain township policeman is “a bad apple.” The cop sues him for defamation.
The mayor verbally attacks a municipal judge, claiming that he “continues to take the side of criminals” because he released a pair of shoplifting suspects from Brooklyn.
The judge’s admirers are outraged.
“I look forward to the time when Livingston will again have a mayor who puts the township first and his own political ambitions second,” Todd ­Christie — Chris’s younger brother — writes to the Tribune.
Toward the end of his term, Wildstein organizes a coup against the Republican councilman who is supposed to rotate into the mayor’s office next.
The councilman accuses him of “terror politics” and trickery.
“David’s ploy must be criticized on two counts,” he tells the public.
“Most importantly, it was wrong.
Secondly, the scheme was doomed to backfire from the start.” That September, facing dim prospects, Wildstein announces that he is dropping his bid for reelection.
Democrats retake the Livingston council, which remains in their control to this day.
“A lot of people say that it stays Democrat because of David,” Bassano says.
“He would probably have done the party a lot more justice if he had stuck to electing other people.” Meanwhile, elsewhere in New Jersey, Chris Christie goes through a debacle of his own: a term on the Morris County Board of Chosen Freeholders full of mudslinging, infighting, and litigation, culminating in an ignominious last-place finish in his reelection bid.
By the end of the 1990s, both Christie and Wildstein appear to be finished in electoral politics.
Christie, an attorney, is back in private practice, working as a lobbyist.
Wildstein is running his family’s company, Apache Mills, a leading manufacturer of doormats.
Christie and Wildstein share a laugh, during the third day of Fort Lee’s traffic gridlock.
On February 1, 2000, a crudely designed website appears on the internet, run by a person who goes by the name Wally Edge.
The real Edge was a newspaper publisher, two-time Jersey governor, and tool of the Atlantic City machine of Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, the inspiration of the Prohibition-era series Boardwalk Empire.
The pseudonymous Edge is a purveyor of political gossip.
It is actually Wildstein, hiding behind a characteristically obscure historical reference.
The same personal attributes that were liabilities to him as a politician — his obsessiveness, his lack of tact, his fascination with personal conflict — prove to be well suited to the internet.
The word blogging doesn’t yet exist, but that is what he aims to do, offering readers a mix of score-settling rumors, lobbyist chatter, trial balloons, and arcane trivia.
For the next decade, the true identity of Wally Edge is the subject of much speculation in political circles, but few guess it’s David Wildstein.
He’s gotten married and moved to the town of Montville, where he lives in a brick McMansion on two wooded acres.
He has been selling floor coverings and doing a little political consulting on the side.
One of the politicians he has stayed in contact with is Bob Franks, who represented Livingston in the state assembly during Wildstein’s mayoral tenure.
Franks is a brilliant strategist who mentored many operatives.
By 2000, Franks is a congressman running a long-shot campaign for the U.S. Senate.
In its early days, Wildstein’s site, PoliticsNJ, seems to exist, at least partly, to promote Franks’s candidacy.
His regular column, “The Inside Edge,” defends Franks from his primary rivals’ attacks, suggesting they worked out a corrupt bargain to coordinate against him.