The Palestine Exception
- Jan Haaken & Jennifer Ruth
- USA
- 2024
- 71'
- 22nd Edition
syno
psis
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, where personal and collective histories converge in unexpected ways.
Director's
bio
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 sites of political controversy.
Among her most recent films:
Our Bodies Our Doctors (2019), Necessity: Oil, Water, and Climate Resistance-Part I (2020), Necessity: Climate Justice and the Thin Green Line–Part II (2022) and Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance (2023).
Jennifer Ruth is a professor in the School of Film and an associate dean in the College of the Arts at Portland State University. She writes extensively about academic freedom and higher education. She is the co-editor, with Valerie Johnson and Ellen Schrecker, of The Right to Learn; Resisting the Right-Wing War on Academic Freedom (2024). The producers are Jan Haaken and Marlene Eid, a faculty member at Portland Community College.