Earlier this week, Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University’s Edward Said professor emeritus, announced that he wouldn’t be teaching his fall course after the school agreed to pay a $200 million settlement for trumped-up charges of antisemitism (that is, anti-Zionist advocacy on campus) and “woke ideology.” How can an anti-Zionist professor continue teaching modern Arab studies at a time like this? As Khalidi wrote for The Guardian, “[Columbia’s] draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible.”
“How can I write at a time like this?” I used to think this was a rhetorical question. Of course a writer could write, an artist create, a lover love, whenever they wanted. The problem was times like these—of war and suffering—in which doing so became vulgar or inconsiderate or wasteful. Naively, I was conflating ethics and propriety, philosophy and manners. As Professor Khalidi’s situation illustrates, however, times like these have implications that are undeniably practical in nature. How could they be otherwise? This isn’t a hypothetical, a thought experiment, a query for Emily Post. An assault on life is an assault on meaning, on which art and love depend.
In the past 24 hours, a 2-year-old Palestinian girl died of malnutrition in the al-Mawasi area, a supposed safe zone. How can we speak at a time like this? Write? Take action? Be holy? I can’t offer you any answers (although I’ve certainly tried). But lately, as the people in what you might call my immediate digital vicinity have returned to this line of questioning, I’ve taken heart in their refusal to give up on it.
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