October 28, 2023
Dear President Rosenbury,
Disheartening—that would be a serious understatement as a description of my response to your most recent email. You could not have made more apparent who you consider to be valued members of the Barnard community, and who you are willing to sacrifice. I don’t know if the language you chose was designed to address the concerns of donors (even directly dictated by a few, perhaps?) or if it represents your own sincere ideological commitments and biases. Regardless, it made eminently clear that Palestinians, in particular, and many others—Arabs, Muslim, Jewish students, and anyone else that does not sign onto the email’s politics—are welcome at Barnard only if they align with a particular political ideology.
Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism are directed against persons for who they are—or, perhaps more accurately, for who they are assumed to be. As speech acts, they constitute racist and hate speech. Anti-Zionism, by way of contrast, is directed at a state-building project and a political regime. To render anti-Zionism equivalent to the first three is to commit a fundamental category mistake that is not sustainable on any serious intellectual grounds. What’s more, that “mistake” has serious consequences for many members of our community. Jewish Voice for Peace is explicitly anti-Zionist: Are those self-identified Jewish students mere anti-Semites, or perhaps, just bad Jews? And what about Palestinian students for whom not being anti-Zionist would be an oxymoron, given what the establishment of the Israeli state meant for their (our) families, in living memory, let alone what the occupation since 1967 has meant in the lives of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza? I understand that some Jewish students may “experience” anti-Zionist speech as hate speech. But so too do Palestinian students often “experience” Zionist speech as hate speech. If your criteria is student “experience,” then you should formally declare both Zionist and anti-Zionist speech out of bounds, free speech be damned. But that is not what you did. You referred to the “spreading” of anti-Zionism on campus as “appalling.” In so doing, intentionally or not, you communicated to Palestinian students, let alone to many, many others—Muslims, Arabs, Christians, Jews, and the list of “identity” categories can go on and on—that this community is not for them.
If this had been the official position of the Barnard president when I came up for tenure many years ago, those agitating against my tenure, in the name of my being an anti-Semite, would have won. (My academic work levels a pretty trenchant critique of Zionism, after all.) Does this mean going forward that the official position of the Barnard administration is that academic freedom does not extend to work on Palestine/Israel that is anti-Zionist? Does that apply only if (some) students “experience” it as hate speech? If so, who will be the judge? What’s more, should your statement be understood as a threat to untenured members of the faculty whose academic and public work includes anti-Zionist speech? That is certainly the message that we have received, loud and clear.
Having sat on the committee on academic freedom for the past two years, your email made it clear that it has been a total waste of my time. I am glad to know that Palestine will be the exception to free speech and academic freedom at Barnard, as it is in so many other contexts in US society—an exception that is skyrocketing in its reach and consequences today. At least the College has put its cards on the table. The parameters of acceptable speech, research, and by implication, who the college will speak for and protect are now very clear.
Nadia Abu El-Haj
Ann Whitney Olin Professor, Department of Anthropology
Director of Graduate Studies, ICLS
Co-Director, The Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia
