Having learned from President Michael Kotlikoff’s email about the decision to cancel Kehlani — whom I hadn’t heard of before April 23 — as this year’s Slope Day headliner, I wanted to better understand the opposition to her invitation. The Cornell Daily Sun linked to the petition that Cornellians for Israel had circulated. According to The Sun, the petition claimed that Kehlani’s public calls for “intifada” and to “dismantle Israel” made “Jewish students feel unsafe.” But the link only thanks the signatories to the petition for their part in the group’s success in disinviting Kehlani — the petition’s content has vanished.
I have no personal stake in Slope Day or Kehlani’s performance. But I do want to urge your group to hold yourselves to a consistent standard. If your objection to Kehlani was that her anti-Israel position would have made you “feel unsafe” during her performance, then give a thought to what makes your fellow Cornellians feel unsafe.
For my part, I will say this: With the federal government squeezing our university financially as punishment for unspecified antisemitism and civil rights violations, threatening to destroy fundamental research and set back academic careers, your misrepresentation of political opposition to Israel and the Israeli government as “antisemitic” and an “attack directed against a core part of Jewish identity,” makes me, and I imagine many others, “feel unsafe.”
I openly oppose the government of India, my country of origin, and its unjustified territorial claims in Kashmir, but it would be rank misrepresentation to say that I’m anti-Indian. It would conflate opposition to a government with hatred of a people. When we allow misrepresentations to carry the day, we not only feel, but are, less safe.
Striving to make every Cornellian feel safe is a worthy goal and more power to you if you can uphold that standard. What no one can stomach, however, is a double standard.
Rachana Kamtekar is Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies and a Professor of Philosophy and Classics. She can be reached at rk579@cornell.edu.
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