The Department of Journalism hosted a screening of “The Palestine Exception” Wednesday, Feb. 19 in the Bright Family Screening Room in Paramount Center. A discussion followed the screening with a crowd of a few dozen students and staff led by visual media arts professor John Gianvito, journalism professor Doug Struck, and the former curator of Emerson’s Bright Lights Cinema series, Anna Feder.
The documentary follows the “largest surge of student demonstrations since the 1970s” across the country last year protesting Israel’s retaliatory bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip that has killed at least 48,000 Palestinians since Oct. 7—the latest iteration of the conflict began after the Hamas attack in Israel that killed over 1,200 Israelis. It documents how students’ and professors’ “calls for a ceasefire and divestment from companies that do business with Israel” were met by a surge of administrative policies regarding political speech and protest.
“The right to free speech, the right to free expression, the right to demonstrate with your grievances are part of the U.S. Constitution and have been upheld by one court after another,” Struck said before the screening. “Those rights are also fundamental to the fabric of journalism, and that is why the journalism department has decided to sponsor this. We believe freedom of expression and demonstration are necessary to this very democracy.”
The “Palestinian exception” that the film refers to is the idea that while freedom of speech is shrouded in the First Amendment right, speaking in support of the Palestinian cause in any way is conflated with antisemitism. Scholars and academics in the film call the administrative, political, and media response to pro-Palestinian protests as a “new McCarthyism.”
On April 25, 2024, 118 people—mainly Emerson students and professors—were arrested in the 2 Boylston Place Alley as police forcibly removed the “Popular University Encampment” that was active for four days prior. Students at Emerson and across the country demanded their administrations divest from Israeli entities and demand a ceasefire. Instead, student activists at Emerson students described an “administrative suppression of free speech” that happened because of their support for Palestine.
Filmmakers Jan Haaken and Jennifer Ruth followed student and faculty protests and subsequent punitive actions taken against them by colleges and schools across the world including Portland State University, Barnard College, Hunter College, UCLA, and Birzeit University in Palestine.
“There is a real Palestinian exception in New York City. You can do a lot of controversial things, but you can’t question Israel,” said Jennifer Gaboury in the film, an adviser at Hunter College who was facilitating a pro-Palestinian film screening when it was abruptly canceled by the school.
In October 2023, Feder’s attempt to screen the same film at Emerson titled “Israelism,” was also postponed.
American philosopher Judith Butler says in the film that Jewish people were victims of a genocide, but “does that mean we are always victims, and can’t also be perpetrators of a genocide?”
Gianvito said that he knows it is a “volatile” topic, but saw it as an opportunity for all parties to reflect on what happened.
While Emerson College is not in the film, Struck and Gianvito said the audience would see the parallels between what’s happening across the country and on Emerson’s campus.
“Here at Emerson, I personally have felt there hasn’t been a sufficient reckoning with those events emotionally or intellectually of the protests themselves and the arrests around those protests,” Gianvito said in an interview with The Beacon. “I saw this as one opportunity to revisit that because the ripple effects are very much still being felt.”
The screening comes one month after Israel and Hamas, who have governed the Gaza Strip since 2007, agreed to an ongoing three-part ceasefire deal. It comes four months after Feder, the previous director and curator of the 12-year-long Bright Lights, was abruptly laid off citing budget cuts, but many faculty, staff, and students suspected it was politically motivated because of Feder’s outspoken support of, and participation in, the April encampment.
Feder, who attended the screening and was part of the panel discussion afterwards, said that she was a consulting producer on Haaken and Ruth’s film “right before” she was terminated from Emerson. Feder said she wants student activists to see that “they are on the right side of history on a long enough timeline,” citing protests against apartheid South Africa and the seven-year push towards divestment.
When asked why she came to the screening at the school she was terminated from, Feder responded: “Because I’m living the Palestinian exception … I was fired from Emerson College for advocating for Palestine and for supporting our student encampment, and that is the repression that they talk about in the film.”
