<h4>Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike. She is the creator behind the seminal comic strip that was syndicated across North America in alternative weeklies for two decades, Ernie Pook's Comeek featuring Marlys and Freddy, as well as the books One! Hundred! Demons!, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, and The Good Times are Killing Me which was adapted as an off-Broadway play and won the Washington State Governor's Award. Her bestselling and acclaimed creative writing-how to-graphic novel for Drawn &amp; Quarterly, What It Is, won the Eisner Award for Best Reality Based Graphic Novel and R.R. Donnelly Award for highest literary achievement by a Wisconsin author.</h4>

Lynda Barry

Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor

<h4>Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her work has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times; Brain, Child; The Georgia Review; The Rumpus; Shenandoah; Brevity; Fourth Genre and elsewhere.  She is a nonfiction reader for r.kv.r.y quarterly and Reviews Editor at PANK.  You can read more of her work at <a href="http://www.randonbillingsnoble.com/">www.randonbillingsnoble.com</a>.</h4>

Randon Billings Noble

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<a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/randon-billings-noble/">Randon Billings Noble is an essayist.</a>

Accidental Notes on the Syllabus

LARB Quarterly, no. 39: Air

Megan Wachspress is an environmental lawyer living in Berkeley, California, where she earned a PhD in jurisprudence and social policy.

Megan Wachspress

AS I’VE WATCHED many Jewish people on college and university campuses react to others’ reactions to Hamas’s massacre on October 7 and Israel’s siege and bombardment of Gaza, I keep coming back to James Baldwin. Specifically, his <a href="https://faculty.gordonstate.edu/lsanders-senu/On%20Being%20White%20and%20Other%20Lies.pdf">short essay,</a> originally published in Essence, entitled “On Being White … and Other Lies,” and his 1967 New York Times <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-antisem.html">essay</a> “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” Baldwin’s claim in the former essay is stark and resonating: the Jewish community in the United States “came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here, in part, because they were not white,” but American Jews have “opted to become white” by embracing the subjugation of Black people. Whiteness is not a phenotype or ethnicity but a position, a status, a membership. Numerous immigrant groups, in Baldwin’s telling, have become white by assuming this status (his examples include the Irish and the Norwegians), but because Jews were not white in Europe, and were not even white in the United States for a time, they have “paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white.” To bowdlerize Baldwin’s point: Jews’ whiteness is contingent, perhaps uniquely so. 
 
Baldwin’s essays are rich and challenging texts that I am not equipped to fully unpack. But as an American Jew who spent a decade engaged in political activism on various university campuses, and as an employee of a large nonprofit that has largely embraced the anti-racism canon that emerged following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, I believe that they provide insight into the current struggle over claims of antisemitism in the academy and other “liberal” spaces. News coverage and social media posts have described broad pro-Palestinian feeling on US college campuses in the days following October 7, which has crystallized in various missives and marches. Many of these—according to media reports—took on the character of outright celebration of Hamas’s “victory,” with explicitly anti-Israeli statements made at a louder volume and among a wider swath of students and faculty than most campuses had seen before. This in turn prompted many professors and students to complain about an atmosphere of antisemitism on campus, with <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-10-29/antisemitism-college-campus-israel-hamas-palestine">many Jews claiming to feel unsafe</a> due to what they saw as a celebration of the murder of Jews (the dozens of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/26/israel-thai-nationals-hamas-hostages">Thai farmworkers</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/29/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-arab-bedouins.html">Bedouin</a> who were kidnapped and killed by Hamas being inconvenient for both sides of the narrative). 
 
Ironically, the claim that Jews on campus feel unsafe (physically or psychologically is never quite made clear) is being advanced at the same moment when the US government is deploying billions of dollars worth of weapons in an ostensible effort to maximize the physical safety of Israelis and making repeated statements intended to assuage the psychological suffering of American Jews. The response among many of those who oppose the Israeli state (Jewish and not) has been to ridicule these fears or to accuse those articulating them of playing the victim in order to gin up more support for the bombing of Gaza. 
 
What Baldwin helps me to see is that something complicated and unarticulated is happening in the campus protests. I think what many Jews on campus are in fact reacting to is the perception that, among white progressive, liberal, or left-wing students and professors, support for the Palestinian cause has become not just canonical but of high salience today. These white students and (largely junior) faculty have spent the last few years suffused in a particular anti-racism curriculum that, in its most popular incarnation within colleges and other liberal, elite institutions, takes a Manichean view of race and racism. As should be clear from the fact that I began with Baldwin, I could not disagree more with the politicians who caricature these DEI efforts as being aimed solely at emotionally browbeating white students and who are seeking, in response, to ban the teaching of history outright. But these critiques are also not entirely baseless: the currently dominant anti-racism curriculum does tend to produce a sense of guilt in white students as its primary affective response and, in some of its theoretically sloppier incarnations, seems aimed primarily at doing so. 
 
In this context, the Israel-Palestinian conflict represents an opportunity for tremendous psychological release. Yes, white Americans are implicated in the annihilation of Gaza through US military support for Israel, but they are not personally implicated in this instantiation of white-supremacist settler colonialism, as they are in US anti-Black racism, through privilege and microaggressions and national original sin. On this view, Jews in Palestine, by contrast, are the agents of (first British, now American) empire—they are whiteness concentrated. This ignores, of course, the actual ethnic and racial diversity (and intra-Jewish discrimination) of Israeli society, which is hugely important for understanding the original Zionist project and the history of Israel. But for these non-Jewish white students, Israel presents a way to condemn whiteness without implicating oneself, to support anti-racist ideology in a way that doesn’t lead to shame and self-abnegation. 
 
The sense of celebration some saw in the post–October 7 protests was not only originating from those who were personally—historically, familially—invested in freeing themselves and their loved ones from Israeli oppression, and who thus saw in Hamas’s attack the possibility of military victory. Muslim, Arab, and anti–Israeli-government Jewish groups have been fighting for Palestinian liberation for a long time; I heard the phrase “from the river to the sea” many times on campus before this month, and no doubt most of those speaking out about unprecedented antisemitism had too. It is, rather, the fact that the white Left on campus is now shouting it that makes some mostly if not exclusively white Jews on campus­—and in other places dominated, explicitly or otherwise, by a white Left—feel unsafe. 
 
This feeling is, I suspect, the unconscious recognition that American Jews’ contingent whiteness may be threatened if “the Jewish state” becomes a means by which other white people can disavow their own complicity in European colonialism. The relationship of leftist activists to their own whiteness is informing both the size and the tenor of the current wave of anti-Israeli campus protests, and inasmuch as this aspect forces into the open the lack of racial identification between white Americans and (Ashkenazi) American Jews, it threatens the success of assimilation and the accrual of white privilege for those American Jews. To put it another way: Many American Jews are not afraid of Hamas sympathizers in their dorms (though this may be what they claim to fear)—they are afraid of losing the status their parents and grandparents won in the diaspora, and the current anti-Israel protests suggest that that status may not be as secure as they had once thought. This fear is not irrational; losing the protection of whiteness is no small thing for people who may have grandparents or great-grandparents who survived the camps. But whiteness also, as Baldwin explained, comes at an enormous moral cost. 
 
Those decrying the “new antisemitism” in colleges and other progressive spaces are therefore not entirely wrong when they attempt to articulate the presence of something ugly in the current campus protests. But what they are sensing is the product of young people working through their own discomfort with whiteness, and it would be a mistake for Jews, in response, to double down on their own. The current wave of pro-Palestinian sentiment on college campuses has to be understood in the context of the last three years of US anti-racist organizing and discourse—and the claims of a “climate of fear” for Jews on campus as a reaction, however subconscious, to facing the perceived loss of racial privilege. 
 
That this fear reaction is especially intense in relation to flagging support for Israel is telling, since Israel presents, for many American Jews, a place where they can be white. What else can it mean for American Jews to support the existence of the state of Israel specifically as a guarantor of Jews’ safety, at the same time that they point to its vulnerability to military incursion and terrorism from its neighbors as justification for billions in American military subsidies? If the United States turned on “the Jewish people,” in what way would Israel—meant to be a hedge against discrimination or worse in the diaspora—offer safety? And why would so many people talk about an “unprecedented” wave of antisemitism in the US with so little, if any, acknowledgment that 11 American Jews were murdered in a Pittsburgh synagogue almost exactly five years ago? The psychological investment in US support for Israel among American Jews is, I think, a subconscious desire that Jews should be recognized as a people with a place, as one of the hyphenated communities Baldwin describes (the Irish-Americans, Norwegian-Americans, etc.), a people who have chosen the United States and thus whiteness. It is also, in a devastating historical irony, a desire to be folded into the ethnonationalist logic for which central European Jews were a “problem” in the first half of the 20th century, and to which the “solution” was annihilation. 
 
The conflation of whiteness and safety, among those writing op-eds and Twitter threads and emails and petitions seeking the protection of white institutions by demanding official condemnation of pro-Palestinian protests and vindication of Israeli military actions, may in this light appear as more understandable and deserving of some sympathy, but it is still a profound mistake. Not only is the effort to reaffirm one’s own whiteness an immoral choice, to use Baldwin’s framing, but it is also one that, I fear, will have long-lasting and ruinous consequences for the Jewish diaspora. What I hope is that liberal American Jews who now sense the contingency of their belonging, not among MAGA Republicans but within their own progressive communities, and who simultaneously are confronted with the monstrous actions of the Israeli state in Gaza, may see this as a watershed to break with ethnonationalism altogether. Perhaps in this “unprecedented” moment there lies an opportunity for American Jews to embrace a return to universalism as a fundamental Jewish principle and to relinquish, in the United States as in Palestine, the poisoned gift of whiteness. 
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<div class="styles_content__pSb5R styles_body__eu8Se">Featured image: <a href="https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003653100/">[Man with horse standing near the Dead Sea]</a>, ca. 1890–1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. <a href="https://www.loc.gov/">loc.gov</a>, CC0. Accessed November 27, 2023.</div>

The “New Antisemitism” and the Logic of Whiteness

Rumaan Alam&nbsp;is the author of&nbsp;Rich and Pretty. His writing has appeared in&nbsp;The New York Times, Elle, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He studied at Oberlin College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Rumaan Alam

Leave the World Behind

Elena Sheppard is an MFA candidate in non-fiction writing at Columbia University. Her essays, reviews, and other writings have been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, and Elle among others. She is Cuban-American. You can follow her on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/eleshepp/?hl=en">@eleshepp</a>.

Elena Sheppard

THE CHARACTERS IN Rumaan Alam’s ominous new novel, Leave the World Behind, directly grapple with a series of important existential questions: 1. How do you behave in an emergency? 2. What kind of prejudices do you, liberal you, hold quietly in your heart? And 3. What do you do when you’re afraid? 
 
The novel’s six principal characters, all stuck together in a house due to an unknown national crisis, handle these questions in their own ways. Some, like Rose, a 13-year-old girl on vacation with her family, find themselves unexpectedly and innately prepared for hardship; they are resilient, even brave. Others, like Clay, Rose’s father, are forced to confront unpleasant truths: “He couldn’t bear admitting what sort of man he was when tested.” 
 
Leave the World Behind feels right in sync with 2020. If we have learned anything in this calamitous, unrelenting year, it is that catastrophe can be slow to unravel and unexpected when it does. And even when a calamity unfolds, there are things that still must be attended to, like eating, sleeping, scratching an itch. “Business as usual, the business of being alive.” 
 
The story begins with Amanda and Clay, “middle-class people,” along with their two children Archie and Rose, driving from Brooklyn to the Hamptons for a summer getaway. They’ve rented a house for a week, the online description of which calls it a place to “leave the world behind.” The vacation affords them, along with the perks of relaxation and togetherness, the opportunity to pretend this luxurious life in this expensive house is their own. “[T]hey could pantomime ownership for a week.” 
 
That illusion is quickly shattered when the home’s rightful owners, G. H. and Ruth Washington, show up late one night begging pardon but asking to be let in. “Something happened” in the city, “a blackout” they think; but the scale of it immediately feels far bigger than that — the internet is down everywhere, and before their phones crashed Amanda received a push-alert saying the blackout was affecting the entire East Coast. “This is our house,” G. H. tells Amanda and Clay, “We wanted to be in our house. Safe. While we figured out what’s going on out there.” 
 
This, Alam’s third novel, takes place in the early days of this Armageddon-type event’s unfurling. And while the characters of the novel are geographically removed from whatever is happening, which may have spared their lives, they are forced to directly confront different challenges and dynamics. 
 
Before the Washingtons’ arrival at the house, Leave the World Behind embodies that languid summer space where minutes move like molasses but before you know it it’s happy hour. After the arrival of G. H. and Ruth, time seems to slow even further but in the way it does in an emergency; seconds feel like minutes. “That day’s morning seemed distant.” 
 
In addition, aside from the inherent awkwardness of homeowner and renter suddenly existing together under the same roof, Leave the World Behind tackles head-on some of the most pervasive social complexities of modern American life: class and race. It is at once a page-turner and a lyrical social commentary. G. H. and Ruth are Black, wealthy, in their 60s; Clay and Amanda are white, middle class, in their 40s. The fact that G. H. and Ruth are Black surfaces latent prejudices from their white renters. “The place was comfortable but sufficiently anonymous that she had not bothered to try to picture its owners,” Amanda reflects on the home and the people who own it. “[A]nd now, seeing them, she knew that if she had bothered to picture them, her picture would have been incorrect. This didn’t seem to her like the sort of house where black people lived. But what did she mean by that?” Later on adding, “[T]hose people didn’t look like the sort to own such a beautiful house. They might, though, clean it.” 
 
There is also a performance of non-racism that happens among the characters and on the page. After a consideration of whether or not to let G. H. and Ruth into the house, the omniscient narrator says of Amanda and Clay, “They let those people in because they were black. It was a way of acknowledging they didn’t believe all black people were criminals.” As Clay ruminates, “Morality was vanity, in the end.” 
 
These racial complexities are not new territory for Alam, whose previous novel, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/self-centered-or-savior-transracial-adoption-in-that-kind-of-mother/">That Kind of Mother</a>, delved into the dynamic of a white mother and a Black nanny she hires to take care of her son. Alam seems intent on exploding racism and its complexities via the analysis of very specific relationships and dynamics. 
 
While the four adult characters in Leave the World Behind try and navigate their dynamics within the house, they also are trying to figure out what is going on in the world. “It could be fallout. It could be terrorism. It could be a bomb,” Ruth speculates about what caused the blackout. But the point being underscored seems to be that it doesn’t matter what caused it; it only matters how they cope. 
 
Alam’s novel feels far more concerned with questions of character, prejudice, and morality than it does with plot. His book seems to be built on a thesis of exploring what disaster does to a person, and at times, the characters feel like vehicles for that thesis rather than characters in their own right. There is also coldness present that matches the sterility of the air-conditioned vacation home. These characters are undergoing an Armageddon of sorts — military jets soar overhead, flamingos come out of nowhere to play in the pool, thousands of deer flood the yard —&nbsp;but there is a feeling of watching these scenes from a distance. It is as if G. H., Ruth, Clay, and Amanda are trapped in a dystopian snow globe, and as we read, we are merely watching them shake, not experiencing it by their sides. Considering how visual the book is though, it is no surprise that it has already been optioned to be a <a href="https://deadline.com/2020/07/netflix-julia-roberts-denzel-washington-sam-esmail-leave-the-world-behind-auction-rumaan-alam-novel-1202989464/">Netflix movie</a> starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. The story feels ripe to make that jump. 
 
There is a pervasive sense that the characters are trapped in a tableau, which in part could be a commentary on their luxurious backdrop, the sly way this cocooned vacation home starts to feel suffocatingly isolated. Early in the novel a passivity settles over the group, and while that too could be because they are in a comfortable space, it is never satisfactorily examined. At times it even raises questions about whether or not this doomsday scenario is truly unfolding, though we get confirmation through the omniscient narrator that something terrible is indeed happening in the world outside the house: “The next day, or the day after that, certainly the day following that one, some residents of the uppermost apartments in Manhattan would fall into the delirium that presaged their eventual dehydration.” Those moments of zoom-out did not quiet this reader’s urge for the characters to venture forth and see the changed world for themselves. Instead, they pour more drinks, they go for a swim, they bake a cake. What else is there to do when the world is in danger but you’re safe and sound? 
 
Leave the World Behind is an interesting type of apocalypse examination because it focuses on what happens to those removed from the action. Rather than fully examining the ramifications of this strange new world, it looks at the scars from the old world — race, class — that must be confronted in order for these characters to survive in the new. There is a reality that when things fall apart, we want to know why, but this book puts forth the suggestion that the why is irrelevant. What is relevant includes the tiny ways you can reclaim your humanity, even as the gloom of the world presses on your door. Leaving the world behind is an illusion, just like a vacation is an illusion. Reality will catch up, and Alam’s novel examines what people do differently when it does. 
¤ 
<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/elena-sheppard/">Elena Sheppard’s writing has appeared in&nbsp;The New Yorker,&nbsp;The New York Times, and&nbsp;Vogue&nbsp;among numerous other publications. She is an MFA candidate in nonfiction writing at Columbia University.</a>

Rumaan Alam’s “Leave the World Behind” Examines What Happens When You Can’t

Kate Manne is an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, where she has been teaching since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Manne did her graduate work in philosophy at MIT, and works in moral, social, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of three books: <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/down-girl-9780190604981">Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny</a> (2017), <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/608442/entitled-by-kate-manne/">Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women</a> (2020), and <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/722318/unshrinking-by-kate-manne/">Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia,</a> which is forthcoming in January 2024. You can subscribe to her newsletter, <a href="https://katemanne.substack.com/">More to Hate,</a> for musings on misogyny, fatphobia, their intersection, and more.

Kate Manne

The aim of <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-philosophy-no-longer-smells-of-the-earth">this curated series of essays</a> is to address the question: why is philosophy important at times like these? For many, philosophy is a field of inquiry that remains so esoteric, narrow, and specialized that it has little or no relevance to the everyday world of “ordinary” people. Indeed, philosophers are often characterized as introverted, absent-minded thinkers who are obsessed with analytical minutiae, isolated in their academically cloistered spaces (offices and personal studies) in a monologue with dead white guys, and prone to encouraging dispassionate argumentation and one-upmanship. For the thinkers writing for this series, however, philosophy is a social enterprise that strives for clarity of thought and encourages the formation of multiple cultural spaces of philosophical practice that are welcoming to a diverse range of scholars and laypeople, rather than simply those who look alike and share the same hegemonic meta-philosophical assumptions about the field. 
¤ 
WHY IS PHILOSOPHY important in times like these? I must admit, my first reaction to this question was: Is it? Might philosophy—or, rather, philosophers—contribute to the culture in ways that are actually pernicious and actively harmful? 
 
Ours is a time of accelerating attacks on trans people as well as, increasingly, queer ones. Gender-affirming care for minors has been <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/politics/states-banned-medical-transitioning-for-transgender-youth-dg/index.html">banned in many states,</a> and some are even trying to restrict such care for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/22/health/transgender-adults-treatment-bans.html">adult trans and nonbinary people too.</a> As Montana representative <a href="https://www.zooeyzephyr.com/">Zooey Zephyr</a>—the first trans woman elected to the Montana legislature—put it, such states will have blood on their hands very soon, if they don’t already. Gender-affirming care is lifesaving care, given the <a href="https://www.hcplive.com/view/suicide-risk-reduces-73-transgender-nonbinary-youths-gender-affirming-care">very real risk of suicide</a> for trans children and adults who are denied it. (Zephyr was <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/04/26/1172158461/montana-gop-transgender-zooey-zephyr-punishment-banned-speaking-lgbtq">silenced and barred from doing her job</a> for her advocacy.) 
 
<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/30/politics/republicans-transgender-attacks-statehouse-haley-trump/index.html">Books are being banned; drag is being censored;</a> trans kids are being forcibly excluded from sports, despite ample evidence that <a href="https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/four-myths-about-trans-athletes-debunked">their participation is both fair and valuable.</a> Florida’s notorious 2022 <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/03/28/1089221657/dont-say-gay-florida-desantis">“Don’t Say Gay”</a> law prevents young children from being taught about who they may become in an age-appropriate, non-shaming, positive manner. Trans people who simply want to pee in a bathroom outside their home are being subject to <a href="https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/transgender-teens-restricted-bathroom-access-sexual-assault/">policing and, in many cases, violence.</a> Trans people are disproportionately subject to violence much more broadly. The murders of trans women—particularly trans women of color—<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/transgender-women-deaths.html">represents a veritable epidemic.</a> And, of course, the fact that trans people are disproportionately poor, unemployed, exploited, and <a href="https://endhomelessness.org/resource/transgender-homeless-adults-unsheltered-homelessness-what-the-data-tell-us/">unhoused</a> is intimately related to the ongoing campaign against them. 
 
Against the backdrop of this campaign, some philosophers’ efforts to <a href="https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/05/30/kathleen-stock-trans-professor-views/">question the veracity of trans experience,</a> and to employ <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-abstract/7/3/399/166955/Cisgender-Commonsense-and-Philosophy-s-Transgender">high-handed and abstract ideas to invalidate their very existence,</a> is a particularly poor showing. As philosophers, we’ve long fancied ourselves above politics. In doing so, we show ourselves to be naive, perpetuating the worst political ideas our climate affords us with. For philosophy, like all humanistic intellectual enterprises, is inherently political: we either wield our politics, and our values, deliberately and thoughtfully, or unwittingly and harmfully. 
 
Other philosophers, including Christa Peterson and Robin Dembroff, have <a href="https://www.praile.com/post/kathleen-stock-obe">meticulously analyzed</a> and <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-020-01468-1">exposed the problems</a> with anti-trans philosophy. I find their arguments compelling. But the anti-trans philosophy they effectively dismantle will not be my focus in this piece. Speaking personally, I become the most hopeless and helpless when I speak in generalities and lose track of the enormous diversity in our discipline. And while some philosophers are doing harm on this front (and others), other philosophers are doing work that is generative, creative, and—what’s more—crucial to understanding the current crisis. 
 
I particularly have in mind here work by trans philosopher <a href="https://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/talia-mae-bettcher-professor">Talia Mae Bettcher.</a> Bettcher has contributed a <a href="https://philpapers.org/s/Talia%20Mae%20Bettcher">dynamic body of scholarship</a> that sheds light on the nature of anti-trans bigotry as well as trans experience. In <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4640081">one important paper,</a> Bettcher considers the case of Gwen Araujo, a 17-year-old trans girl brutally murdered by four young cis men, for the noncrime of simply being who she was and being desired by at least some of them. The men—Jason Cazares, Michael Magidson, Jaron Nabors, and José Merél—publicly and violently “outed” Araujo at a party. The subsequent revelation that Araujo was “really a man” (that is, she had a penis), together with the fact that two of the four men had previously had sexual contact with Araujo, appears to have precipitated their vicious attack on her. Araujo was beaten to death, her body unceremoniously buried in the Sierra wilderness, a four-hour drive away. The men stopped at McDonald’s upon their return from burying her battered body. 
 
And despite the heinous nature of their crimes, it was the four men who attracted sympathy from some sources. “If you find out the beautiful woman you’re with is really a man, it would make any man go crazy,” <a href="https://xtramagazine.com/power/cis-obsession-trans-genitals-246880">said one of their mothers.</a> “[Araujo] was not honest with them and had he [sic] been, none of this would have happened,” <a href="https://iowastatedaily.com/199265/opinion/columndouble-standard-in-reactions-to-rape/">wrote a student journalist,</a> Zach Calef. The young men had been provoked into the murder in a way that was “so deep, it’s almost primal,” <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7781181">according to one of their attorneys:</a> namely, “sexual fraud, deception, betrayal.” 
 
Bettcher brilliantly analyzes these events in terms of a <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01184.x">“natural attitude” regarding the metaphysics of sex</a>—crudely, men must be born with and have penises, and women must be born with and continue to lack them—which also imposes a false moral obligation on trans people not to violate this “natural” order. Trans people are viewed, according to the logic of transphobia, as “really a so and so, disguised as a such and such.” Trans women come in for particular scrutiny, given the prevalent social interest in preserving for privileged cis men a class of people—women—with whom they may have heteronormatively sanctioned sex and (biological) children. Trans women’s existence is thus an existential threat to the patriarchy. And detecting them becomes a priority, along with policing and <a href="https://www.everythingishorrible.net/p/i-dont-think-you-exist-often-means?utm_source=profile&amp;utm_medium=reader2">even eradication.</a> 
 
Meanwhile, as Bettcher argues, trans men are often rendered invisible—erased from the discourse and subject to forms of violence that are both subtle and distinctive. This shows up partly in the obsession, sadly evident in some philosophical quarters, with defining what a woman is. Trans men often barely figure in the transphobic imagination; trans nonbinary people are regarded as a nonstarter rather than as a threat to the theory that falsely accuses trans people of perpetuating gender stereotypes. 
 
For their own parts, trans girls and women are subject to a potent double bind: to be either an “evil deceiver” merely pretending to be a woman, or a “make-believer,” a deficient and laughable simulacrum of femininity. For, as Bettcher <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/23254906">writes,</a> 
[t]he trans woman’s body is taken as intimately male. As such her vagina is seen as illegitimate, in part because it’s not the completion of the moral structure of her body. In this case, the trans woman has not only “misrepresented” the structure of her body, she has “misrepresented” the genitalia to which she’s entitled and which is the moral completion of that structure. 
The alternative—to listen to what people say and, when they sincerely identify as a certain gender, believe them—is anathema to this picture. As is a healthy sense that other people’s genitals are precisely none of our business. 
 
Bettcher’s analysis of transphobia in general and transmisogyny in particular jibes beautifully with <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/down-girl-9780190604981?cc=us&amp;lang=en&amp;">my own analysis of misogyny.</a> In my view, misogyny involves girls and women facing hatred and hostility that serves to police and enforce patriarchal norms and expectations. Such norms and expectations often falsely deem girls and women to be obligated to give feminine-coded goods and services to privileged men, including the sex, affection, respect, care, and emotional and reproductive labor to which these men are (again, falsely) deemed entitled. Connecting my views and Bettcher’s reveals transmisogyny to be a case in point, wherein trans girls and women are deemed in violation of their “obligation” to deliver unto cis straight men a world where their sexual attraction never lights upon a person with a penis or someone who cannot “give” them children. The flip side of the same coin is that cis girls and women are deemed not entitled to show a lack of interest in such a man for any reason but their being previously obligated to another. Nor are we allowed to deny such men “their” children—yet another false obligation increasingly enforced within <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/01/roe-v-wade-abortion-laws">the political hellscape</a> that is post-Roe America. 
 
These ideas show cis and trans women to be naturally in alliance—to in fact need one another, as we face, and thus might resist, these oppressive and ugly realities together. But of course misogyny has long specialized in disrupting women’s solidarity. 
 
Bettcher wrote in a moving blog post, <a href="https://dailynous.com/2018/05/30/tables-speak-existence-trans-philosophy-guest-talia-mae-bettcher/">“‘When Tables Speak’: On the Existence of Trans Philosophy,”</a> about the frustration of watching philosophers intervene ignorantly in the debate about trans experience, as if trans philosophers were not in the room, as if they were theorizing about the existence of mere tables. As Bettcher puts it, 
It’s one thing to spout views about the composition problem with both arrogance and ignorance. It happens. It’s annoying. But it’s quite another thing to do this when we’re talking about people—people who are in the room, people trying (and succeeding) to philosophize themselves. 
I worry that if we go on as we have before, we will end up with a discipline and even a world in which there will be fewer and fewer trans thinkers to learn from—because they are <a href="https://medium.com/@transphilosopher33/i-am-leaving-academic-philosophy-because-of-its-transphobia-problem-bc618aa55712">excluded from the discourse</a>, because they will cease to be able to speak out, and because they will literally be silenced. We, and they, deserve so much better. I write in the hopes that, at times like these, we may recognize the urgency of their contributions—of thinkers including not only Bettcher but also <a href="https://www.robindembroff.com/">Robin Dembroff</a>, <a href="https://www.dal.ca/faculty/arts/philosophy/FacultyandStaff/our-faculty/stephanie-kapusta.html">Stephanie Kapusta</a>, <a href="https://shonfaye.substack.com/">Shon Faye</a>, <a href="https://dashaunharrison.com/">Da’Shaun L. Harrison</a>, <a href="https://www.perryzurn.com/">Perry Zurn</a>, <a href="https://eminism.org/">Emi Koyama</a>, <a href="https://www.susanstryker.net/">Susan Stryker</a>, <a href="https://www.csun.edu/~hcphi002/">C. Jacob Hale</a>, <a href="https://www.quillrkukla.xyz/">Quill R Kukla</a>, <a href="https://philosophy.uoregon.edu/profile/amarvin/">Amy Marvin</a>, <a href="https://www.oberlin.edu/jade-schiff">Jade Schiff</a>, <a href="https://www.open.ac.uk/people/tc2973">Sophie Grace Chappell</a>, <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/6089/rach-cosker-rowland">Rach Cosker-Rowland</a>, <a href="https://rowanbell.me/">Rowan Bell</a>, <a href="https://www.krysmalcolmbelc.com/">Krys Malcolm Belc</a>, <a href="https://philosophy.cornell.edu/adriene-takaoka">Adriene Takaoka</a>, <a href="https://drveronicaivy.com/about/">Veronica Ivy</a>, <a href="https://www.juliaserano.com/">Julia Serano</a>, <a href="https://katelynburns.medium.com/">Katelyn Burns</a>, <a href="https://www.contrapoints.com/">Natalie Wynn</a>, <a href="https://wstarr.org/">Willow Starr</a>, <a href="https://www.paisleycurrah.com/">Paisley Currah</a>, <a href="https://www.florenceashley.com/">Florence Ashley</a>, <a href="https://tulsacc.academia.edu/DrAngelaJBlack">Angela Black</a>, <a href="https://philpeople.org/profiles/e-m-hernandez">E. M. Hernandez</a>, <a href="https://www.blakehereth.com/">Blake Hereth</a>, <a href="https://philosophy.stanford.edu/people/ray-briggs">Ray Briggs</a>, <a href="https://philpeople.org/profiles/b-r-george">B. R. George</a>, <a href="https://eliclare.com/">Eli Clare</a>, <a href="https://artsci.wustl.edu/faculty-staff/tamsin-kimoto">Tamsin Kimoto</a>, and <a href="https://www.transphilosophyproject.com/event/thinking-trans-trans-thinking-conference/">so many others</a>. Space is limited, as am I. So, go read them. 
¤ 
Featured image: Frances Hodgkins, <a href="https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/281883">Untitled (Textile design no. I)</a>, ca. 1925, England. Purchased 1998 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds. <a href="https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/">Te Papa</a> (1998-0006-5). Accessed November 30, 2023. Image has been cropped.

Trans Philosophy Matters

Sara Abou Rashed is a Palestinian poet, public speaker, and creator of the one-woman show A Map of Myself. Her poems appear in many publications, including the anthology A Land with a People (2021), the latest 9–12 English curriculum from McGraw Hill, Poetry Wales, Poetry Magazine, and The Rumpus, and are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review and The Nation. A former Poetry Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, Sara holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently working on her first book.

Sara Abou Rashed

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of three books: Water &amp; Salt (Red Hen, 2017), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award; Kaan and Her Sisters (Trio House, 2023); and Something About Living, winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry, forthcoming from University of Akron Press. For more about her work, visit <a href="http://www.lenakhalaftuffaha.com">lenakhalaftuffaha.com</a>.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Jessica Abughattas is the author of Strip (University of Arkansas), which won the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara. Her poems appear in Guernica, The Yale Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow and co-chair for Southern California Kundiman.

Jessica Abughattas

Deema K. Shehabi is a Palestinian poet, writer, and editor. Deema is the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon (2011) and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here (2012), for which she received a Northern California Book Award. She’s also co-author of Diaspo/Renga (2014) with Marilyn Hacker and winner of the Nazim Hikmet poetry competition in 2018. Deema’s work has appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies. For more information, please visit her website at <a href="http://www.deemakshehabi.com/">Deema K. Shehabi</a>.

Deema K. Shehabi

Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Lying In (2023), as well as The Spirit Papers (2017), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed (2021). Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poem-a-Day. Her essays have been published in Boston Review, Guernica, Conjunctions, PN Review, and Literary Hub, among others. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in California.

Elizabeth Metzger

DEEMA K. SHEHABI, Jessica Abughattas, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, and Sara Abou Rashed have contributed their original poems for this collection of Palestinian poetry at the Los Angeles Review of Books. They each belong to an ancestral tradition of Palestinian poetry that has thrived despite 75 years of Israel’s military violence and cultural erasure. These poems are in conversation with the work of people across Palestine and in the diaspora, and it is my hope as a reader and editor of poetry to bring you their voices, celebrate the beauty and power of their language, and acknowledge their pain and grief in the context of the genocide their people face. I stand with these poets in a call for a ceasefire, an end to the violence and oppression. I am honored to have curated these poems and encourage you to read more of their important work beyond this feature. 
 
—Elizabeth Metzger 
 
&nbsp; 
¤ 
SARA ABOU RASHED 
Against Content Warnings 
We stopped 
counting 
the dead 
but they 
stayed 
dying. 
¤ 
I refuse to give 
my horror 
 
the intimacy 
of a name. 
¤ 
If a word 
announces 
what 
 
who shall 
remember 
how? 
 
<figure id="attachment_365334" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-365334" style="width: 1000px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Samia-Halaby-Black-is-Beautiful-1969-Oil-on-canvas-167.5-x-167.5-cm.jpg"><img class="wp-image-365334" src="/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Samia-Halaby-Black-is-Beautiful-1969-Oil-on-canvas-167.5-x-167.5-cm.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="1007" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-365334" class="wp-caption-text">Samia Halaby, Black Is Beautiful, 1969. Oil on canvas, 167.5 x 167.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Ayyam Gallery.</figcaption></figure> 
 
&nbsp; 
¤ 
LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA 
The State of — 
Noun gerund of the verb (to journey) 
A setting out, a departure 
A boy’s voice calls out from beneath what used to be 
the second story of a house 
I am here he cries can anyone hear me? 
I am here and the night sky is sleeping on my chest 
Noun gerund of the verb (to leave) 
An exodus, a detachment 
A father has gone in search of bread 
A baker has gone in search of flour 
A mother has gone in search of a cloud 
A people have gone 
A world in each of them 
 
Noun gerund of the verb (to travel) 
A parting, a demise 
A girl steps on top of the walls of what used to be 
the third story of a house 
I am searching for the sea she cries 
Has anyone seen it? It used to live in my window. 
 
<figure id="attachment_365335" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-365335" style="width: 1000px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Samia-Halaby-Marble-1980-Oil-on-Linen-Canvas-92-x-122-cm.jpg"><img class="wp-image-365335" src="/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Samia-Halaby-Marble-1980-Oil-on-Linen-Canvas-92-x-122-cm.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="751" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-365335" class="wp-caption-text">Samia Halaby, Marble, 1980. Oil on Linen Canvas, 92 x 122 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Ayyam Gallery.</figcaption></figure> 
 
&nbsp; 
¤ 
JESSICA ABUGHATTAS 
Occupation 
There is a part a past participle of me 
at peace. In fifteen months live four places. 
My love is a crag, a swamp, the depths. 
A cave is dark and warm like my heart. 
 
The heat swarms, won’t budge, won’t create a budget 
for my heart which I dole out 
 
in finite sums until I’m whole. My whole heart 
isn’t interested in collecting interest. 
 
Instead of a heart I carry a debt, a deficit 
a deftness. I am a cavity for potential, a vial 
 
of future substance. Sustenances. Sentences 
I wrap around myself in chains 
 
blocks, block chains, encrypted, inscribed, 
indiscriminate spreading anger. Anger 
 
has a motive, a number, anger has a dial 
that winds, hums, releases like a spindle 
 
like a spine unraveling, renaming, replacing, 
placating. An absence of a spine is a job 
 
an occupation. I vocate to purchase creature 
comforts to make everyone 
 
comfortable to make them see me 
so they can see my worth it seems like I only 
 
matter I’m only worth what I can sell 
my time to sell the other workers it’s called hard 
 
work and when it pays off, when the ticker 
finally ticks my way, when they eat my 
 
hair then I will be dead then 
I will be totally preoccupied. 
 
<figure id="attachment_365337" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-365337" style="width: 1000px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Schermafbeelding-2018-12-15-om-13.21.20.jpg"><img class="wp-image-365337" src="/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Schermafbeelding-2018-12-15-om-13.21.20.jpg" alt="" width="1000" height="750" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-365337" class="wp-caption-text">Rosalind Nashashibi, Electrical Gaza, 2015. Cinematography by Emma Dalesman, production by Kate Parker. Digital video still transferred from 16mm film, animation, color, sound 17:53 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam, London, New York.</figcaption></figure> 
 
&nbsp; 
¤ 
DEEMA K. SHEHABI 
Palestine Sunbird 
The city: a tightrope of eyes as we sat on a bench beneath a row of birches. 
Before your confession: sandhill cranes skimmed the lake, 
moss-colored in light. Years later, we are hiking in a valley chiming 
with golden poppies in early April. Where does this gushing come from? 
When clouds disrobe the hill near the mountain, it occurs to me to kiss 
the rain off your mouth. How to say your answer pulled a song of our lost country 
from my throat? Back home in the evening, we step into a garden where ropes 
of wisteria hang at eye level, and I inventory all objects withering 
from your half appetite: decaying peaches in green bowls, drawings of heritage oaks 
giving way to parking lots, brownish bougainvillea in planters. 
Define avoidance, you say half-jokingly. I turn away, eyelashes threshing the air. 
&nbsp; 
¤ 
Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem) is a leading abstract painter and an influential scholar of Palestinian art. Although based in the United States since 1951, Halaby is recognized as a pioneer of contemporary abstraction in the Arab world. Halaby has been collected by international institutions since the 1970s, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art (New York and Abu Dhabi); Yale University Art Gallery; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Institut du Monde Arabe; and the British Museum. 
 
Rosalind Nashashibi (b. 1973 in Croydon, United Kingdom) received her BA in painting from Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield (UK), in 1995, after which she attended the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (UK), where she received her MFA in 2000. As part of her master’s degree, Nashashibi participated in a three-month exchange program in Valencia, California (United States), at CalArts in 2000. Nashashibi became the first artist in residence at the National Gallery in London, after the program was reestablished in 2020. She was a Turner Prize nominee in 2017, and represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennale. Her work has been included in Documenta 14, Manifesta 7, the Nordic Triennial, and Sharjah 10. She was the first woman to win the Beck’s Futures prize in 2003. 
 
&nbsp; 
¤ 
Featured image: Samia Halaby, Red Moon, 2015. Acrylic on linen canvas, 97 x 97 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Ayyam Gallery.

Who Shall Remember How? Palestinian Poets Respond

Jacob Hamburger is a graduate student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, whose work has focused on Cold War liberalism and neoconservatism in France and the United States. His journalistic writings have appeared in numerous publications in both English and French; and he has translated the authors Michel Foucault and Marcel Gauchet. Jacob covers American politics for the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, with which he recently co-created a special report on the left under Trump entitled Feeling the Burn. He is also the editor of Tocqueville 21, a blog devoted to democratic politics and ideas in the 21st century.

Jacob Hamburger

The “Intellectual Dark Web” Is Nothing New

<h4>Megan Kirby lives and writes in Chicago. Since moving to the city, she’s paid her rent freelancing for alumni magazines, walking rich people’s dogs, working a comic shop counter, and selling the occasional short story. She loves discussing feminism, geek culture, and the places where the two intersect. Over the years, she’s published a few zines. One of them is about The NeverEnding Story.</h4>

Megan Kirby

Sink or Swim: Corinne Mucha Strives to “Get Over It”

"All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated." — Comics Code, 1954

Comics

<h4><a href="laurakenins.com">Laura Kenins</a> is a Canadian-born artist and writer living in Riga, Latvia. Her comics have appeared in anthologies in Europe, Canada, and the US. Her latest book is She Wants to Tell Me.</h4>

Laura Kenins

Ambivalence and the Cosmic Subconsciousness

<h4>Tim Hanley is a comic book historian and the author of Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World's Most Famous Heroine. His website, Straitened Circumstances, discusses Wonder Woman and women in comics, and his column "Gendercrunching" runs monthly on Bleeding Cool. He has contributed to several comic book sites, including DC Women Kicking Ass and Women Write About Comics, and has also worked with the Ladydrawers Comics Collective. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, between his massive stacks of comic books.</h4>

Tim Hanley

Zombie Archie Kills the Comics Code for Good

Ana Mina is an artist, writer, and technologist based in California. She is co-founder of <a title="The Civic Beat" href="http://www.thecivicbeat.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Civic Beat</a>, an online magazine about issues of global justice, creativity, and technology. In the tech sector, she works at the SF-based <a title="Meedan Labs" href="www.meedanlabs.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Meedan Labs</a>, where they are building a platform for social translation of social media. Their first project aims to translate geolocated tweets for <a title="Out of Eden Walk" href="www.outofedenwalk.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Out of Eden Walk</a>, a global journey tracing the historic path of human migration led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek. She has spoken at venues like the Personal Democracy Forum, Creative Mornings, and the Aspen Institute, and she has contributed writing to publications like The Atlantic, Wired, and Design Observer. She was a 2013 fellow at the USC Annenberg / Getty Arts Journalism Program, is a current research fellow for the Digital Ecologies Research Partnership, and serves as a consulting editor to the New York online art publication Hyperallergic. Having recently served as a section editor for Ai Weiwei: Spatial Matters (published by MIT Press and Tate Publishing), she is currently working on a book about internet memes and global social movements.

Ana Mina

A Pen in a World of Scissors: Crazy Crab’s Chinese Dream

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins

Politics

<h4>Olga Gershenson has been Jewish in Russia, Russian in Israel, and finally became an academic in the US, where she is Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Gesher: Russian Theatre in Israel (2005) and The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (2013). She has published widely on Jewish and Israeli films, and also co-edited Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (2009). To learn more about her work, see <a href="http://www.people.umass.edu/olga">www.people.umass.edu/olga</a></h4>

Olga Gershenson

A Language of Her Own

Tahneer Oksman is a writer, teacher, and scholar specializing in memoir as well as graphic novels and comics. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

LARB is cooking up a storm!

Accidental Notes on the Syllabus

By Randon Billings NobleFebruary 21, 2015

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