Making “The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests?”

BY JENNIFER RUTH

When Jan Haaken and I made a decision to make The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake within the Campus Protests?, we couldn’t know the way occasions right here—a lot much less in Gaza and the West Financial institution—would unfold. We had been speaking a couple of movie in regards to the suppression of educational freedom in Texas and pivoted when among the similar right-wing politicians demonizing essential race principle pivoted themselves to demonizing speech and scholarship about Palestine.

A motivating issue for me personally was that I now not wished to procrastinate on growing a deeper understanding of that phrase—the Palestine exception. I had researched plenty of academic-freedom questions (contingency’s influence on the professoriate, authoritarian regimes’ suppression of educational freedom, and many others.) however not that one. Desirous to do some actual analysis on that is additionally why I agreed to serve, when requested to by my college president, on a Activity Pressure known as “Constructing Bridges” (one of many many, many Activity Forces at schools and universities that sprung up throughout the US in 2023 and early 2024).

When it grew to become clear that the Activity Pressure wouldn’t have the ability to present an umbrella for scholarly analyses of the state of affairs, ones delicate to historical past and context, I resigned. “The Activity Pressure area felt more and more untenable for me, given my dedication to tutorial freedom,” I wrote final spring to members of the committee after resigning, persevering with:

Any experience I may need on this space appeared secondary to the objectives of the Activity Pressure, which appear to be about creating dialogue about one thing terribly difficult and in an asymmetrical state of affairs by which Palestinian-Individuals should not nicely represented. We don’t have sufficient illustration from Palestinian-Individuals on the duty power as a result of, partially, among the individuals who had been requested rightly felt {that a} premise that centered questions of discrimination was extra prone to be counterproductive than useful. I can perceive that. When you’ve got suffered from the Nakba and statelessness, your problem is just not with Judaism. It’s not an islamophobia/antisemitism problem. It is a matter rooted in claims over land and who will get to claim these claims and with whose assist/assist/assets.

Lastly, I used to be not snug with makes an attempt to summary what is going on on campus from what is going on within the nation at massive. There’s a right-wing motion on this nation, related to Trump (Foxx, Stefanik, and many others.), that’s capitalizing on the battle in methods which can be harmful and creating narratives that, to my thoughts, misrepresent and caricature college students talking up for Palestinians. I fear that if we give an excessive amount of credence to their self-interested narrative on the expense of listening to the said motives of the protesters (ending a genocide, often), we’re headed in a harmful path come November.

The making of the movie grew to become the medium via which to pursue deeper understanding. And, certainly, Jan and I are so grateful that plenty of consultants stepped as much as train us by permitting us to interview them: folks like Saree Makdisi, Ellen Schrecker, Judith Butler, Premilla Nadasen, Jennifer Gaboury and our personal colleagues at Portland State (a number of of whom descend from fathers expelled through the Nakba and one other of whom carries on the custom of her grandfather, a rabbi well-known for his criticism of Zionism).

And, after all, we additionally discovered from the scholars who taught us, at first, that it’s doable to combat the figurative (and literal) erasure of Palestinians whereas combating antisemitism on the similar time.

We now have screenings all through the nation. Three upcoming screenings within the New York space are open to the general public: The Individuals’s Discussion board (320 W. thirty seventh St.) on February twenty second at 3 pm, Stone Circle Theatre in Queens on February 23 at 7 pm, and Rutgers Heart for Safety, Race, and Rights on the Rutgers Regulation College in Newark on Monday, February 24 at 4 pm.

Should you’re on a campus or a part of a corporation that want to host a screening, please attain out right here.

Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Weblog and the writer, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Way forward for Tutorial Freedom and coeditor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Proper to Study: Resisting the Proper-Wing Assault on Tutorial Freedom. She is the director, with Jan Haaken, of the movie The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake within the Campus Protests?