Opinion

GUEST ROOM | Where’s ‘Free Expression’ for Pro-Palestinian Cornellians?

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The Cornell Alumni for Palestine firmly oppose Cornell University’s Interim Expressive Activity Policy, which inhibits free expression and goes against the University’s self-ascribed values of free speech, debate and protest. 

Cornell follows in the footsteps of other U.S. institutions that are on the warpath to silence and suppress pro-Palestine speech on campus. In response to students rising up to defend Palestinian lives, University administrations have introduced “interim policies,” or defined new ones, aimed at policing political speech on campus. These policies are being used disproportionately against SJP chapters and other Palestinian solidarity organizations. According to the interim policy, outdoor events and demonstrations with over 50 participants must be registered in advance. Even candles — often used in vigils and other peaceful gatherings — are no longer permitted without prior approval.

Arts & Culture

‘The Zone of Interest’ and Creeping Desensitization

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Content Warning: Genocide

Adapted from a Martin Amis novel, Jonathon Glazer’s The Zone of Interest follows the inner lives of Auschwitz Commandant Rudolph Höss and his wife Hedwig, focusing its attention on family strife and workplace politics rather than the unspeakable horrors happening on the opposite side of the camp’s walls. Constantly breaking the 180-degree rule, diverting into avant-garde infrared sequences and displaying long, would-be boring depictions of domestic life, the film sets out to put off its own audience, confronting both the ability of cinema to narrativize evil and the startling comfort of an audience in engaging with it. Nearly every scene is set against a vomit-inducing soundscape that combines the machinery of death with the human reactions that it inspires (and the subsequent gunfire and dog barks part and parcel to the repression). It’s one of last years’ most difficult films but also one of its most essential, a treatise on the ease with which horror is tuned out just as its modern analogue is more visible than ever. 

The obvious comparator text for The Zone of Interest is Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, possibly the definitive visual document of the Holocaust and a film most notable for its refusal to show a second of archival footage. Glazer, who isn’t painting with a documentary canvas, must represent Auschwitz as an operating camp, but he too restrains his camera from ever actually depicting images either of genocide or those doomed to it.

Letters To

SAAR | Why Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism in Disguise

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Imagine a group of people accused of racism demanding the University adopt a definition of racism that would exempt them. This, in essence, is what the Cornell Coalition for Mutual Liberation did on Dec. 1 when they demanded Cornell define anti-Zionism as an “ideology” and not antisemitism. It seems Jews are the only minority denied the right to define aggressions against them as bigotry. Defining Zionism is simple: It is the desire by an indigenous people, the Jews, to return to their ancestral homeland and for those who never left to regain/retain sovereignty.