When the Tree rises up, the branches
Shall flourish green and fresh in the sun
The laughter of the Tree shall leaf
Beneath the sun
And birds shall return
Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.
—Fadwa Tuqan, from “The Deluge and the Tree”
The very title of Adam Shatz’s most recent, unfortunate piece of writing announces itself clearly as Zionist apologia. “Israel’s Descent” invokes Charles Darwin’s The Descent...
The excitement in Mexico and abroad about North America’s first woman president has dominated the headlines—almost to the exclusion of who Claudia Sheinbaum is, and what she stands for. How did she win, and how will she confront the enormous challenges facing Mexico, perhaps none more dramatic than pervasive violence, including murder and violence against women?
While I am skeptical, or at least cautious, about how much or in what ways her gender will affect her politics, it is worth taking a moment to feel the enormity—and the ecstasy—of the moment. Not only has a left-wing Jewish woman been elected president of an overwhelmingly Catholic country (a country steeped in machismo where women only gained the vote in the 1950s), she won by a landslide (30...
I have been a history professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for twenty years. On May 7, I was one of a handful of faculty members arrested for standing in support of hundreds of students who were engaged in nonviolent protest of university complicity in the ongoing slaughter and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. They want the school to divest from companies profiting from the carnage.
In the hours before UMass Chancellor Javier Reyes called in more than a hundred state police in riot gear to arrest anyone who did not disperse from the area in and around a small encampment, I wrestled with questions of conscience and practicality. Am I willing to be arrested? Is it the right thing to do? Could it make a difference? Would there be negative consequences for my...
(An earlier version of this essay, titled “They tried to kill the truth, but it came back stronger” was published in Issue 4 (Spring 2024) of the print magazine, Discontent.)
1.
Every time I’ve opened this document to continue writing, I’ve had to turn to the death toll in the second paragraph and adjust it. Every time I closed this document, I knew that, while I went on to do seemingly mundane things – go for a walk, softly squeeze an avocado at the grocery store, sit in silence, the closest thing I have to prayer – by the time I returned to what’s supposed to be something between an ode and a eulogy, a celebration and a lament, an indictment...
May 16, 2024
As Jewish academics, researchers, and higher education professionals, we are appalled by, and refuse to accept, the deliberate mischaracterization, and weaponization of persisting fears about Jewish safety and well-being on campuses across the United States as the singular excuse for a series of misguided and dangerous policies by university administrators. These include attempts to destroy one of the largest and most significant student and social movements of the last half century, efforts to crush academic freedom and freedom of expression, encouragement for brutal invasions of peaceful student-led encampments, attacks and arrests by police forces, and facilitating the wholesale takeover of universities by the most illiberal and...
