Living in Public

Cynthia G. Franklin’s Narrating Humanity, a book situated squarely within American studies, is chiefly concerned with how life narratives can intervene in the structuring dehumanization endemic to colonial rule. This intervention, however, is not marked by an effort to prove one’s humanity to the colonizer; rather, it is a refusal to be defined by their shifting goalposts of humanity, an insistence on stepping outside of their taxonomies altogether, and a commitment to living in public—fully and unapologetically. In this reflection, I am taking as my starting point Sharon Patricia Holland’s invocation, borrowing from Cornel West and Dean Spade, that solidarity is “what love looks like in public” as she framed last year’s American Studies Association conference as the 2023 president.1 While loving in public, for Holland, characterizes solidarity movement work—and Franklin weaves her own public love for those with whom she is in solidarity throughout the text—living in public describes the refusal to make oneself small and palatable in the face of settler genocidal logics.

In what follows, I treat Narrating Humanity as in invitation: an invitation to consider the place of Palestine within American studies and an invitation to consider the necessary work of anti-Zionism within the space of the university. Focusing on Franklin’s fourth chapter—which deals primarily with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s firing of Steven Salaita and, more broadly, with the defense of Palestine in academia—I center my analysis on the newly formed Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) and the myriad attempts to silence its work.2 This piece, then, is a study of the emergence of the institute—of which I am a founding collective member and Franklin is an advisory board member—and the specter and spectrum of what Umayyah Cable calls “compulsory Zionism” that has animated the backlash against the institute since we launched, within and outside of academia.3

In her fourth chapter, Franklin candidly describes the costs of Palestine solidarity within the academy. She names the actors who work to ensure that Palestinian academics, Palestine studies scholars, and faculty and students in support of Palestinian freedom struggles lose everything from their jobs to their capacity to do their work unencumbered. She writes: “Often based in or funded by the Israeli state, Zionist organizations play a key role in instigating lawfare and campaigns of harassment and intimidation as they posit not only Palestinian solidarity organizing but also any anti-Zionist or Palestine-based scholarship as antisemitic and a threat to academic freedom. Such groups include Canary Mission, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, AMCHA Initiative, Campus Watch, Stand with Us, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Middle East Forum, the Zionist Organization of America, and the Lawfare Project” (153).4 She writes about how she herself has experienced harassment, death threats, pornographic hate mail, fabricated news stories and press releases, accusations that she was funding Hamas, harassment in the form of endless FOIA requests, and countless emails from Zionist colleagues with upper administration cc’d. Of Salaita’s tweets, which served as justification for the administration’s disciplining and silencing of his work, Franklin notes that they “offered in compressed form critiques he makes of the Zionist state in his eight books, in his many scholarly essays, and in journalistic articles in venues ranging from Mondoweiss to Colorlines to Salon” (149). In this, she tethers administrative censuring to work they celebrate in every other context, from promotion and tenure to teaching and publication awards, flagging the ways in which university administrators want it both ways: to celebrate their commitment to diversity by occasionally championing the work of ethnic studies scholars while pleasing donors and conceding to outside pressure to squash real investigations of how race operates in settler colonial contexts.

While I, like Franklin, have experienced cascading repercussions from working on Palestine and, indeed, would not have an academic job had I not been recruited to University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) by departments and programs—Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Feminist Studies—that understand that Palestine is a feminist issue and a central subject of study for ethnic studies, here I will focus on what we collectively endured in the summer of 2023 in response to our unapologetic participation in the institute’s work. The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, directed by American studies trained scholar of the Anti-Defamation League Emmaia Gelman, with a founding collective reaching across disciplines and movement work and a robust advisory board that too reflects interdisciplinary and organizational breadth, is an institute that provides an intellectual and political home for scholars and activists, like myself, who study Zionism and its effects from a disciplined anti-Zionist perspective.5 In other words, Zionism need not only be studied by Zionists. Indeed, the harms of Zionism are a relevant subject of study for anticolonial scholars in Jewish studies, ethnic studies, Palestinian studies, feminist studies, queer studies, philosophy, theology, and beyond. It is not coincidental that so many of us involved in the institute are trained in American studies: We study the trauma the United States enacts in the world, and U.S. support for Israeli state violence is a central part of that story.

Like Franklin, when we launched the institute, we experienced condescending and harassing emails from UCSC colleagues, which we, like Franklin, did not dignify with a response (156). Following the announcement of our inaugural conference, “Battling the IHRA Definition: Theory and Activism,” we were met with: an accusatory plea to cancel our programming from a local rabbi; countless racist hate messages; defamatory news articles, press releases, and public letters by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, who makes it her job—literally in the form of AMCHA—to harass Palestinians and their allies; Stand with Us’s baseless attempts to malign our work; malicious public records requests by self-proclaimed “lawfare warriors”; the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values publicly taking credit for swaying university administrators to censure our research; and other efforts that have sought to smear us and our work as antisemitic.6 In short, we experienced exactly what Franklin outlines in her fourth chapter: a coordinated and ad hoc spectrum of Zionist repression that seeks, at its core, to silence scholarship critical of Zionism. What I would add is that these are not all right-wing attacks; in fact, the most treacherous of these attacks come from those on the so-called Left who are fast to claim that they are our allies. At UCSC, our administration, in response to Zionist pressure, distanced themselves from our work—just as administrators at the University of Hawai‘i at Manōa did to Franklin—releasing a statement (first on September 5 and then updated on September 8) that they do not endorse our conference (universities are not in the habit of endorsing or not endorsing conferences organized by their faculty), insinuating that our initially asking registrants to confirm their agreement with our Points of Unity was a violation of academic freedom (it was not, yet we amended this clause in the service of clarity that the Points of Unity are a starting point for discussion rather than up for debate), calling into question the commitments of cosponsoring units by describing them as “purported,” and suggesting that the conference itself “may or may not” be antisemitic, the subtext of which was that it most certainly was.7 The Council of UC Faculty Associations aptly described this act as a “misappropriation of university resources to use campus legal counsel funds to curtail faculty members’ academic freedom and First Amendment rights.”8

Woven throughout Franklin’s chapter on Salaita’s case is an extended meditation on the racialized demand for “civility” and Salaita’s refusal to comply with it. Civility, she writes, is “a colonial regime” (27). Made clear by the Zionist spectrum—left and right—that has ceaselessly sought to silence our work is how our Points of Unity triggered a chorus of pearl-clutching and hand-wringing about civility.9 Taking issue with our insistence that Zionism is a settler colonial racial project and that the transnational study of Zionism is necessary for decolonization—both research-based and noncontroversial claims within and beyond Palestinian studies—and the fact that (gasp!) we dared name our desire to be in conversation and community with those with shared values, these attacks have centered on the spurious and roundly debunked claim that academic knowledge production is politically neutral or that the point of academia is debate. We are not interested in debating whether colonialism is good or bad and, as scholars of colonial state practice, we are not obligated to create space for the defense of colonialism.

Borrowing from Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, Franklin rightly refers to the spaces in which we work as “the imperial university” (154).10 Indeed, UCSC’s statement disassociating the administration from the work of its faculty—and those claiming responsibility for bending the university to their will—clung to a claim that ICSZ’s commitment to shared principles of anticolonial analysis (i.e., our Points of Unity) violated university policy.11 Meanwhile, UCSC itself maintains its own expectations around shared principles, which are mobilized in classrooms, conferences, and other university spaces, whether they are stated explicitly or operate implicitly.12 They exist to prevent harassment and discrimination and facilitate the teaching of controversial curricula. While conference organizers had every right to ask for attendees’ agreement with our Points of Unity, we removed them as a registration requirement as a courtesy in response to a direct request from our executive vice-chancellor. For the public statement to persist in mentioning them as a reason for the UCSC administration’s repudiation of the conference indicates that the intent was never really to express concern about Points of Unity in general but rather a desire to publicly disapprove of the convening itself to appease Zionist resistance to our work. The idea that this administration—which announced on Valentine’s Day 2020 that they would firing striking graduate students and unleashed militarized police violence on faculty and students protesting for a livable wage and, more recently, sent police units from across California to violently dismantle UCSC’s thriving Gaza Solidarity Encampment, arresting 112 students, 4 faculty, and 8 community members—has a claim to civility is one that wholly belies the machinations of the imperial university.13

Franklin closes the chapter with Steven Salaita’s words: “Let us not wait for institutions to authorize our imagination. Let us create unsanctioned solidarities. Let us redefine disrepute. Let us harbor intellectual fugitives” (177).14 At the same time, she began the chapter by insisting that Salaita’s memoir—inclusive of his public living as a father and his public love for his son—cannot be understood as liberal, multicultural meaning-making as it is published against a backdrop that routinely positions Palestinians as “terrorists, as inhuman others, as security threats” (146). This public living is instead, for Franklin, a “world-upending, decolonial practice” (146). To close, I want to bring these threads together: the insistence on public living and the refusal to allow institutions to determine the futures of our study or our struggle.15 In between fielding the spectrum of Zionist attempts to discipline and silence our work, as has Franklin at her institution, we at the institute—itself untethered to any institution—have cultivated joy, celebrated our babies, supported each other, and lifted up each other’s work. Fortified in our commitment to carve out space and resources for the critical study of Zionism, now amid a horrific genocide bankrolled by the United States and buoyed by the institutions that employ many of us, this work is grounded in Palestinian studies and committed to the public love of Palestine across fields and movements and not bound by authorizing disciplines or administrations. We publicly live this work and welcome allied scholars and activists to join us in study and struggle until Palestine is free.