In 2015, I saw Jewish and Muslim students forge a set of group agreements so they could dialogue on the Middle East conflict. Initiatives like this or a ‘Semester in Dialogue’ program are promising.
Rushdie feared until he dealt with the attempt on his life, he ‘wouldn’t be able to write anything else’. The book is a clearly cathartic story of courage and resilience, but it’s curiously one-eyed.
A rhetoric scholar says Columbia University President Nemat Shafik fared much better than her predecessors at a hearing about how her school was handling antisemitism on campus.
These cases have asked the justices to consider how to apply some of the most sweeping constitutional protections – those of free speech – to an extremely complex online communication environment.
Writers festivals navigate the fraught frontier between social media’s echo chambers of outrage and the civilised public debate of the public square. What’s the way forward in this heated atmosphere?
Ghassan Hage has been sacked by Germany’s prestigious Max Planck Foundation due to his trenchant criticism of Israel’s war. It’s just the latest in an ongoing culture war in Germany.
University codes of conduct support their mission to educate. But it’s not easy to balance those codes with the values of free speech, as the resignation of a prominent university president shows.
A scholar of the Mideast at a large public university says that caring and a commitment to free speech have been central to his campus’s response to students upset and angry over the Israel-Hamas war.