At the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the syllabus for an Africana Studies summer course entitled The Politics of Race includes prompts for students in need of term paper guidance. The twelve optional topics are deliberately provocative: “Can a Christian or a democrat be a racist?” “I.Q. tests are a means for blaming the victim.” “Zionism is as much racism as Nazism was racism.” A historian visiting from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University complains that the latter topic, thus the course, thus the professor are examples of anti-Semitism. An uproar ensues.
This year is 1983. The professor under scrutiny is Ernest Frederick Dube, the South African anti-apartheid activist, Robben Island survivor, Cornell-trained psychologist, husband, and father. Branded as an anti-Semite, he will be gone from the Stony Brook campus by 1987.
When I began teaching at Stony Brook, my colleagues in Africana Studies told me Dube’s story in different ways. Each time, I understood the lesson: the politics of Israel-Palestine are cordoned-off; they are an arena where you dare not tread. Even when, like Dube, your faculty peers support you, students lead protests against your dismissal, and you are a hero of the South African anti-apartheid movement, you may still end up losing your home and position.
Colleagues outside my department do not know of the Dube affair, but they, like faculty across the United States, are inexorably caught in its gravity. House Resolution 894, eight-hour congressional hearings, push-outs of university presidents, and draconian university policies make it plain: a political firestorm awaits American professors, university administrators, and students who refuse the reductive scripts of Israeli nationalism in public. Before Israel’s latest siege on Gaza and the atrocities of October 7, before the existence of Hamas, before the Canary Mission’s doxxing campaigns, there was Fred Dube.
His story is a spectacular example of how mere complaints can morph into crises when they trigger levers of power. Over the decades, there have been many Fred Dubes, a parade of losses that testifies to the cost of speaking out about Israel’s nationalist violence (which, of course, is endemic to the nation-state and is neither religiously rooted nor exceptional). Cultural theorist Ariella Aisha Azoulay speaks of an “ideological campaign of terror” weaponizing accusations of anti-Semitism against those who refuse to unsee the region’s violence. Decades of reprisal have produced a practice of stilted sentences, empty platitudes, and maddening silence in institutions that would be bastions of critical thought.