Princeton University’s progressive Jews oppose banning book that says Israel maims Palestinians
Zionist
groups and Israel have called for text to be removed at the Ivy League
school, but hundreds say far-right leaders 'don't speak for us'
Students exit a building at Princeton University on 4 February 2020 in Princeton, New Jersey (AFP)
A coalition of
hundreds of Jewish undergraduate and graduate students, alumni,
faculty, and community members at Princeton University have signed an
open letter in solidarity with professor Sateya Larson, after the
academic came under fire from pro-Israel groups for teaching a text that says Israel intentionally maims Palestinians.
"We are deeply troubled by the attempt to censor professor Larson,
ban Puar’s book, limit intellectual inquiry, and silence faculty-student
exchange within and beyond the classroom, particularly on issues of
such political, moral, and philosophical significance," said the open letter, penned by the Alliance of Jewish Progressives.
As of Thursday evening GMT, the letter had 250 signatures.
Larson's course, scheduled for the upcoming fall semester, covers the
field of trauma studies, focusing on perspectives from the Global
South.
"Re-orienting healing as a decolonizing process enables students to
re-politicize personal trauma as it intersects with global legacies of
violence, war, racism, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, orientalism,
homophobia, ableism, capitalism, and extractivism," a description of the
class says.The texts included in the class are Orientalism by Edward Said; Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon; and Colonial Trauma by Karima Lazali.
On 8 August, the US-based Zionist group StopAntisemitism, accused
professor Larson of teaching "blood libel", citing one of the texts
being taught, Jasbir Puar's The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, which claims that Israel intentionally maims Palestinians as a method of controlling the population.
The book, released in 2018, won the National Women's Studies
Association Alison Piepmeier Book Prize but has also faced attacks from
Zionist groups.
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Citing frontline doctors in Gaza, Middle East Eye has previously reported how Israeli snipers intentionally maimed Palestinians protesting in Gaza and was creating a generation of disabled youth.
The Zionist Hillel student organisation's Center for Jewish Life also
sent out a letter raising concerns about Puar's text being taught in
Larson's class.
And then on 9 August, Israel's minister of diaspora affairs sent a
letter to Princeton's President Christopher Eisgruber, calling on the
school to remove the text from Larson's class and to conduct a review of
all material being taught at the university.
The Jewish students' letter pushed back against the calls from Israel
and Zionist groups, saying that not studying "controversial texts
represents an attack on the very mandate of the University".
"While far-right Jewish leaders in America and Israel claim to speak
for us, they do not. This latest attempt to silence educational
discourse related to Israel-Palestine is part of a pattern in which the
[Center for Jewish Life] aims to interfere with academic and
co-curricular events, inquiry, and debate on campus," the open letter
said.
Middle East Eye reached out to Princeton University for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Universities have become hotbeds for free speech issues in the United
States. At the same time, they have also been at the centre of smear
campaigns targeting Palestinian students and other students involved in
activism supporting the rights of Palestinians.
Middle East Eye previously spoke to several Palestinian students who faced such campaigns as well as being blacklisted and placed on websites like Canary Mission.