The Palestine Exception

       

         

After years of right-wing assaults on higher education, attacks took a new form in 2023 and 2024 that has been described as the new McCarthyism. As students across the country organize protests against Israel's war on Gaza, decades-long taboos in academia around criticism of Israel-the "Palestine exception"-are shattered. This film features professors and students as they join calls for a ceasefire and divestment from companies that do business with Israel and face waves of crackdown from administrators, the media, the police and politicians. Scholars from diverse disciplines explain what is at stake in these protests and why so many young people identify with the Palestinian cause. The documentary unfolds as a story of college campuses as sites of both rebellion and repression, places where personal and collective histories converge in unexpected ways.

       

“PSU professors Jan Haaken and Jennifer Ruth...have crafted a moving and passionate work of investigative journalism that invokes the past to explain the present...The Palestine Exception is an erudite, efficient and engaging documentary that asks us to question our biases and speak out for justice in the face of an uncertain future.” - Willamette Week

           

“The exceptional new documentary, The Palestine Exception… focuses on the wave of pro-Palestinian protests that swept across U.S. college campuses in 2024 and the repressive backlash students, faculty and activists encountered, which is called onscreen ‘the New McCarthyism'.”   - Counterpunch

       

"The most remarkable achievement of Jennifer Ruth and Jan Haaken’s The Palestine Exception is how it situates Palestine human rights activism in the longer history of civil rights activism both in the US and around the world... It demonstrates how against intersecting forms of racialized colonial violence, the empathy and commitment of regular citizens—most notably in the film, students—has always triumphed in the end.." - Karim Mattar, Associate Professor at University of Colorado Boulder

        

            

Jan Haaken is professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist, and award-winning documentary filmmaker. Her documentary films focus on work carried out in contested social spaces and in sites of political controversy. Haaken has directed nine feature films, including most recently the 2-part NECESSITY Series: “Oil, Water, and Climate Resistance” and “Climate Justice & the Thin Green Line,” released in 2023, and “ATOMIC BAMBOOZLE: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance,” completed in 2023. Haaken is author of Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back, Hard Knocks: Domestic Violence and the Psychology of Storytelling and Psychiatry, Politics, and PTSD: Breaking Down and co-editor of Memory Matters: Understanding Recollections of Sexual Abuse.

     

Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film studies at Portland State University. She writes extensively about academic freedom and higher education in outlets such as The New Republic, Truthout, Academe, Academe blog, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, LA Review of Books and Ms. She is the author of one book and the co-author, with Michael Bérubé, of two – The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments and It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom. She is the co-editor, with Valerie Johnson and Ellen Schrecker, of The Right to Learn; Resisting the Right-Wing War on Academic Freedom.