It is not every day that a government minister writes to an American university president demanding that a book be immediately removed "from the curriculum of any of its courses" and "conduct a thorough review of the academic materials" used in its classes. But such is the demand that Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism has issued to President Christopher Eisgruber of Princeton University.
In recent days it has come to the attention of the national media in both the United States and Israel that an assistant professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University is assigning a controversial book to students who will take a seminar at the university in the upcoming fall semester. The book in question is The Right to Maim by Rutgers University professor Jasbir Puar. The book is published by Duke University Press and is billed as an application of "Foucauldian biopolitics" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Critics see it a bit differently. Ronald Lauder of the World Jewish Congress called on Princeton to "cancel the course in question immediately" and "fire its professor" for fomenting "hate speech." International Legal Forum CEO Arsen Ostrovsky characterized the book propagating "a modern-day antisemitic blood libel" and should be banned from the class in order to avoid creating "hostile and discriminatory environments for students, such as one that will inevitably be created as a result of the use such antisemitic and inflammatory material." The university has yet to comment.
