At some point, my number, 38, was called. I stood before the law, which in this case was a heavy but translucent prison cell door, where you needed to shout to be heard by a rookie cop on the other side.
I am far less concerned for the status of university presidents than I am for the safety and welfare of university faculty and, above all, students; there is more than academic freedom at stake.
Harron Walker: Hi, Nan. Let’s begin with your decision, this past November, to pull out of a cover shooting for the New York Times Magazine. On Instagram, you cited the newspaper’s “complicity with Israel” and its anti-Palestinian bias, “how they question the veracity of anything Palestini.
Whatever the correct descriptor might be, the military occupation of the West Bank is hard to understand until you see it. You might be surprised at your own intolerance of the idea of a democracy maintaining an open-air prison for 2.7 million people. Before going there myself, I had heard this phrase, open-air prison, and figured it was not literally a prison. (As someone who spends a fair amount of time in prisons, I’m sensitive to its use as a metaphor.) But everywhere I went I saw guard towers and concrete barriers and razor wire truly an open-air prison except where there were settlements, which featured posh, Beverly Hills–style landscaping: little blooming flowers, fragile and bright, the guard towers in the far distance.
We reject antisemitism in all its forms, including when it masquerades as criticism of Zionism or Israel’s policies. We also recognize that, as journalist Peter Beinart wrote in 2019, “Anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic and claiming it is uses Jewish suffering to erase Palestinian experience.”