A heated controversy has erupted in the wake of a lecture on “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters” delivered at Vassar College on February 3 by Jasbir K. Puar, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. While Puar’s critics charge that her lecture provided especially offensive examples of contemporary anti-Semitism in the form of age-old anti-Semitic tropes updated and applied to Israel, her supporters insist that her work is based on solid scholarship and that the criticism of her talk at Vassar should be seen as a threat to academic freedom and the right to free speech. But the claim that Puar is merely exercising her academic freedom and right to free speech in her lectures does not seem to imply that everyone should have the right to hear what she has to say: Puar recently cancelled a scheduled lecture on “the biopolitics of debility in Gaza” at Fordham University when the university administration insisted on recording her talk and making it publicly available; and she has also threatened legal action against anyone who would make an existing audio recording of her Vassar lecture public.

The circumstances leading to Puar’s cancellation of her talk at Fordham were reported by the New York Daily News, which had previously published a scathing editorial on her lecture at Vassar. According to the paper’s report, “Fordham President Rev. Joseph McShane has made clear that, as an institution, the school condemns much of Puar’s outlook on Israel,” but that the university was nevertheless prepared to host Puar for a lecture “as a matter of free expression.” However, in the interest of “academic transparency” and in order to shield Puar from the alleged “mischaracterizations” that followed her talk at Vassar, McShane reportedly “directed aides to inform Puar she could speak only if she was recorded and the recording was made public.” Professor Puar preferred to cancel her talk at Fordham.

Puar’s reluctance to be recorded was also highlighted in one of the first reports about her lecture at Vassar, when William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection noted that the speaker introducing Puar at Vassar requested that audience members “refrain from recording” Puar’s talk, even though it was explicitly acknowledged that such a recording “is not against the law.” Despite this, an alumni group called Fairness to Israel attended Puar’s talk and prepared a transcript on the basis of a recording that was obtained by the group.

In the context of the ensuing controversy about Puar’s talk at Vassar, it is important to note that her supporters claim that “anyone who heard her Vassar lecture…can attest [that] her words are carefully chosen.” If so, it would obviously be in Puar’s interest to refute her critics with the help of the existing recording of her Vassar talk. This is especially true given that Puar faces serious allegations. In the words of Mark G. Yudof and Ken Waltzer, whoseWall Street Journal op-ed, “Majoring in Anti-Semitism at Vassar,” seemed to enrage Puar’s supporters in particular:

Ms. Puar passed on vicious lies that Israel had “mined for organs for scientific research” from dead Palestinians—updating the medieval blood libel against Jews—and accused Israelis of attempting to give Palestinians the “bare minimum for survival” as part of a medical “experiment.”…Ms. Puar’s calumnies reached a new low. She spoke of Jews deliberately starving Palestinians, “stunting” and “maiming” a population. The false accusation that a people, some of whose members were experimented on at Auschwitz, are today experimenting on others is a disgrace.

More here H/T: Gary Aminoff and Rafael Guber