Controversial academic Jasbir Puar will speak at the College tomorrow as part of the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth’s “Archipelagic Entanglements” panel.
Puar was the subject of a large volume of media attention following a Feb. 3 speech at Vassar College. In her remarks, she encouraged American universities to not engage in academic exchange with Israeli scholars and instituions, coupled with comments that many viewed as anti-semitic.
“We’re upset that someone who has said those things was invited, not that we’re feeling personally attacked because she’s coming here to speak,” Hillel president David Mannes ’17 said.
Both Chabad and Hillel, the two major Jewish student groups at Dartmouth, plan to attend Puar’s talk on Saturday afternoon. The presidents of both organizations said they will not bring up issues related to Israel or anti-semitism as those are not the topic at hand.
“We don’t want to block her from speaking or make this into an issue that will impact people on both sides or be inflammatory,” Chabad co-president Matthew Goldstein ’18 said .
Puar, a professor in Rutgers University’s women’s and gender studies department, was originally scheduled to speak on April 15, but the event was abruptly rescheduled following a conflict. Puar specializes in critical ethnic studies, feminist globalization studies, the study of immigration and diaspora, sexuality studies and queer studies.
English professor Aimee Bahng wrote in an email that the change in timing was prompted by Puar’s receipt of an award in Toronto while several GRID organizers were dealing with family emergencies. She emphasized that delaying the event was not intended as an evasion of media criticism.
Bahng, the event’s chief organizer, was not available to comment due to time constraints and directed inquiries to GRID postdoctoral fellow Max Hantel.
Puar was invited to speak because of her work on intersectionality and other related topics, Hantel said. The “Archipelagic Entanglements” talk is focused on the “fraught histories of race, sexuality, gender, class” and “addresses topics other than human beings,” he added.
Hantel also said the talk will also deal with “multi-species ethnography and multi-species literary criticism” and “different geographical modes of connection.”
When speaking at Vassar, Puar requested audience members not record her talk. The Vassar professor who introduced her stated that non-recording was “essential to the exchange of ideas,” a claim that was later criticized for being antithetical to the free and repeated exchange of ideas.
At Dartmouth, Hantel said it is unclear if she will be recorded.
According to Hantel, some GRID discussions are recorded while others are not. Goldstein and Mannes said that all or almost all GRID talks — and most academic discussions at Dartmouth — are recorded.
Representatives from Hillel and Chabad will attend the discussion, Goldstein said, in case they deem any aspect of Puar’s remarks inflammatory or anti-Semitic.
At Vassar, Puar called for the boycotting of Israeli academics as part of an “armed” resistance, stated that Israel had “mined for organs for scientific research” from dead Palestinians and also said that Israelis give Palestinians the “bare minimum for survival” as part of a medical “experiment.” The accusation that Israel harvested organs for scientific research was called a return to medieval doctrine of “blood libel” aimed at Jews by the Anti-Defamation League, a group that speaks out against anti-Semitism.
Goldstein agreed that Puar’s speech invoked blood libel, and said her charges of organ harvesting from Palestinian terrorists was “absolutely not fact-based.”
The Vassar campus previously saw “anti-semitic and racist messages published on social media” by the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine according to the ADL, a group that has also recently clashed with Jewish students in the City University of New York system. The SJP operates a chapter at Dartmouth.
While Dartmouth’s Jewish groups “do not believe [Puar] is being invited in any sort of act of hostility,” according to Goldstein, they still find the “tacit approval” of her views by GRID organizers to be troubling.
“The problem is getting larger [on college campuses],” Goldstein said. “There are things that are being masqueraded as political causes that are actually very anti-semitic.”
Hantel declined to address charges of anti-semitism against Puar.
“Of course it’s reasonable for [Jewish student groups] to take part in academic freedom and to come to a public event and partake in it,” he said.
He did not want to engage with the discussion of anti-semitism in Puar’s work, he said.
“To engage in it at that level is to create the very conditions of the controversy,” he said. “I don’t know how to answer that question, I can only ask people to read what she has written.”
For their part, Mannes and Goldstein also encouraged the Dartmouth community to read Puar’s work. Goldstein said that awareness of her beliefs and past comments is essential for understanding why the Jewish community takes issue with her appearance.
“We do want people to know that things she has said in the past are horrendous and are out there as a matter of public record,” Goldstein added.
In an email, Bahng cited a variety of Puar’s academic work.
In one article, Puar wrote that charges of anti-semitism against her “were intended to discredit scholarship about the deleterious effects of the occupation on Palestinian daily life.”
Bahng also cited an article that discussed the differences between anti-Zionism and anti-semitism, a distinction that she said is important in understanding Puar and her supporters.
A variety of media outlets ran stories on Puar’s remarks at Vassar, with many criticiziing her statements while others defended her.
Writing in The New York Obsever, Ziva Dahl — herself a Vassar alumna who is currently a fellow at the Haym Salomon Center — compared the co-sponsorship of the event by Vassar’s Jewish Studies program with the hypothetical endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan by the Africana Studies program or a talk featuring Ray Rice hosted by a women’s studies program.
“This lecture was hate speech, pure and simple,” Dahl wrote .
Still, not all saw the Vassar talk as anti-semitic. The left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz said that while Puar’s speech was “irresponsible” and her claims “unsubstantiated,” it was not anti-semitism.
Puar’s work has been referred to as “anti-Israel sentiment mixed with age-old anti-Semitism” in one Wall Street Journal article. “The false accusation that a people, some of whose members were experimented on at Auschwitz, are today experimenting on others is a disgrace,” the piece’s authors — the chairman and executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which opposes academic boycotts of Israel — wrote in the article.
Following Puar’s appearance, an article authored by the president of the Vassar Jewish Union appeared on Forward stating that “The anti-Semitism that is constantly reported is the real exception.”
GRID’s director, Spanish and Portuguese professor Annabel Martín, directed requests for comment to Bahng, who directed those requests to Hantel.
The “Archipelagic Entanglements” panel will also include Yale University women and gender studies Vanessa Agard-Jones; George Mason University English professor Zakiyyah Iman Jackson; University of California, Riverside ethnic studies professor Maile Arvin; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill English professor Neel Ahuja; and Fordham University communication research fellow Larisa Kingston Mann, also known as DJ Ripley.
The event is scheduled for 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. in the Kreindler Conference Hall. Following the event, Mann — in her DJ Ripley persona — will host a dance party in Sarner Underground.
Matthew Goldstein is a former member of The Dartmouth Staff
