Masha Gessen writes:

On the surface, this is a small story: A college canceled an event planned by a magazine. But it seems to be a story about something bigger: fear. Rather, it’s a story about many fears — including the fear of antisemitism, the fear of being accused of antisemitism, and the fear of controversy generally — and how they can combine to turn an institution designed to facilitate open discussion into something that makes open discussion impossible.

The college is Brooklyn College. The magazine is Jewish Currents. If you’ve never heard of it, that is because it’s tiny. Decades ago, it was militantly atheist and affiliated with the Communist Party. In this century, a new generation took over — not Communist and not necessarily atheist or even secular, but still well to the left of the political mainstream. Since its relaunch in 2018, the magazine has risen to minor media-world stardom (both The Times and The New Yorker have published profiles of it). The publication has grown, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, but its subscribers still number around 10,000. I serve on the board of Jewish Currents, and I am a professor in the same university system that Brooklyn College is a part of.

Back in May, the magazine arranged to use Brooklyn College facilities for a day of panels and performances about politics and culture that would include, among many other speakers, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories and Robert Malley, who served as the lead American negotiator on the Iran nuclear deal. Scheduled for Sunday, the event was also a fund-raiser for humanitarian services for Palestinian children and legal support for pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. But just two weeks ago, Brooklyn College canceled. It told the magazine that the reason was a roof leak in the main auditorium, but all the other spaces the magazine had arranged to use were placed off-limits, too — even though they were in a different building altogether.

That roof may indeed be leaky; subsequent events have also been canceled. But with the magazine being shut out entirely, my mind flashed to a time about 20 years ago when I trailed Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess champion turned opposition politician and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, on what was supposed to be a speaking tour of southern Russia. In city after city, venues he had rented would fall through: A sewage pipe supposedly burst in one of them, electricity was shut off in another, and a giant stage curtain had either collapsed or got stuck in a third.

So last week I reached out to Dena Beard and Marcus Richardson, of the college’s performing arts center (which runs the auditorium), and Michelle Anderson, the college’s president. I heard back from Richard Pietras, the college’s director of communications, who began our phone conversation by saying, “I’m not comfortable being on the record.” The college told New York Jewish Week that politics played no part in the cancellation. But the refusal to answer questions and speak openly about the matter, as well as recent events at that college and elsewhere, leave a very different impression.

“It seems silly to say this,” Corey Robin, an outspoken professor of political science at Brooklyn College, told me, “but this” — fostering open discussion — “is what a university is for. You can’t talk about a two-state solution or a one-state solution if you can’t even have a conversation about it on a college campus.”

Discussion of Israel and Palestine has long fallen into a special category. Some have called it “the Palestine exception to free speech.” Brooklyn College, like other universities, has weathered many controversies in this area. [Continue reading…]