Susannah Heschel, professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College (New Hampshire, USA) visited Freie Universität Berlin in December with a group of students. Together with her colleague Veronika Fuechtner, chair of comparative literature and associate professor of German studies at Dartmouth, she taught the three-week program “Migration and Memory.” The program was centered around Berlin as one of the most vibrant cultural and intellectual centers of Jewish life worldwide. It also discussed practices of memorialization and the historical and present-day ramifications of racism and antisemitism. Freie Universität Berlin and Dartmouth College have been cooperating for many years through a direct exchange program.

Cooperation between Freie Universität Berlin and Dartmouth College
Since 2006, Freie Universität Berlin has maintained a memorandum of understanding with Dartmouth College, the smallest university in the Ivy League. The two institutions also signed a cooperation agreement in 2019. Dartmouth College has an office in Freie Universität’s International House from which it organizes study programs of varying lengths for visiting Dartmouth students up to three times per year. Dartmouth students are registered at Freie Universität for the duration of their time here, meaning that they can utilize the libraries and canteens and fully participate in university life.
In return, one student from Freie Universität Berlin is entitled to take part in the comparative literature program at Dartmouth College each year. Successful applicants receive a full scholarship and the option to obtain a full master’s degree from Dartmouth.

The interview with Susannah Heschel came about as a result of the strong reactions displayed at many North American universities following the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023. While other Ivy League universities such as Harvard experienced major unrest among its members when it came to the discourse surrounding Hamas’ attack and Israel’s reaction, this was not the case at Dartmouth. Heschel attributes this to the more than twenty years of constructive exchange between the Jewish studies and the Middle Eastern studies programs at Dartmouth.

Professor Heschel, how did you and your colleagues at Dartmouth react to the events of October 7? How were your reactions different from what happened at other universities?

When I heard the news on October 7, I was horrified. I was devastated, terrified and enraged. That same day I got a phone call from my colleague at Dartmouth, Tarek El-Ariss, who is the chair of the Middle Eastern studies program and also a good friend. He was in Cairo to lead an alumni trip and sounded as devastated as I felt. I had been thinking about holding a gathering for faculty to discuss what happened, and he said: Get a bigger room, open it up, let students come.

So we organized two public meetings in the week after October 7, I asked three of my colleagues to make some brief comments and then we took questions from students. These meetings were open to everyone, we had several hundred people in the room and, for the second meeting, more than a thousand in the livestream. One more thing that is important: Our dean and the university’s president both wanted faculty to get involved and organize something like this, I think that also didn’t happen at many schools.

What was your goal at that moment? To process what was happening? To understand?

First of all, of course, it was a place for students to ask questions and for students and faculty to express their feelings. Secondly, it was a place to ask questions, academic questions, to make sense of what is happening. But the academic aspect was not only about the content, but rather about an academic style of speaking, of dealing with something like this.

And it’s the latter that was most important. We weren’t there to give people a lecture on the history of the Middle East. We offer courses on that. But rather we wanted to show how you behave as a professor at a moment like this. How do you behave with your colleagues and with your students? Do you get hysterical and angry and start screaming and using expletives the way some faculty at other universities did? As you may have read.

Yes.

Of course, we’re upset. On the panel with me were a former Egyptian diplomat, a scholar of Moroccan and Egyptian literature, and an Israeli journalist. All of us have been to Israel and teach courses related to the conflict: we’re immersed in this part of the world. At the forums, we kept an atmosphere of professionalism and dignity. You will have read about how unprofessional some of the professors at American universities behaved; some of them celebrated the October 7 attacks, one professor at Cornell saying he was “exhilarated” by it and so on.

How is your format holding up? You started a process of dialogue, of discussion. Will this continue? I saw that some students at Dartmouth have set up a vigil and demanded certain actions from the university.

I think it’s holding up very well. Of course, there are also students from either end of the radical spectrum, the right wing and the left wing, but at Dartmouth the middle is really the dominant. Jewish students held a prayer vigil. Palestinians also held a vigil. Students from both groups talked to each other. Just two students got in trouble, but only because they had set up a protest tent on the Dartmouth Green, which you’re not allowed to do.

It seems to me that a lot of the conflicts going on at other universities, and Harvard is a good example, originated from statements that either the university or certain groups or organization on campus issued: Statements which then led to counterstatements and so on…

Yes, there was a lot of discussion about different university presidents and the statements they issued, but I think it was a displacement of the emotional horror of the attacks. People were extremely upset, they didn’t know what to do with their feelings or how to express them, so they started arguing about those statements. I personally don’t care about statements of this kind, they are not what we really need, you read them, and five minutes later you can’t even remember what they said.

I think what we need on campus is that we come together respectfully as faculty and students. With “we” I mean the grownups. The adults in the room as faculty have to demonstrate how to behave, how to speak to one another, how to show collegiality and respect, even if you disagree with someone. That does not mean that we suppress our feelings: But my own devastation, I took it to my family and to my friends, I don’t need to scream my feelings in a public forum.

What were the actual discussions that you engaged in this forum?

For a start, we emphasized that the problem that we’re facing is a horror that one cannot reduce to a simple narrative. We can’t discuss the Middle East the way we read a children’s storybook, who is good, who is bad… It’s too complicated for that. Both sides have done terrible things, both sides have done great things.

Both sides are victims and oppressors simultaneously. But even if they are oppressors, that does not mean they stop being human beings, which means they should not be reduced to an ideological formula or a political identity. The conflict cannot be reduced to a simple narrative.

When students said, “Well, is Israel an apartheid state? Yes or no?” we began a discussion with them. Apartheid is not a slogan; it’s a legal definition. What are international legal definitions of apartheid? Do they apply to Israel? To the West Bank or Gaza? And so on…

But the more important question we asked the students is: Why are you asking this question? Do you want to understand or do you want to condemn? We also asked them to imagine a future for Israelis and Palestinians, but without magical thinking, without wishing away either Israel or the people in Gaza, because neither is going to happen.

It seems to me that because of the dimension of the ongoing horror, both in the attack by Hamas and the death toll of the Israeli war on Hamas, many people feel they need to shout very loud and escalate their rhetoric. Once you reach that level, you feel you are justified to disrupt the normal functioning of a university, to occupy lecture halls or put up posters in libraries…

I would say if someone is that upset, I respect that, but then they need to leave the university and go and do whatever it is they need to do in Washington, in the Middle East, with a therapist, wherever. They should leave the university. That’s fine. But free speech should not interfere with the ability of other people to speak. Free speech doesn’t mean you can stop someone else from speaking. And free speech doesn’t mean that you can interfere with someone else’s ability to pursue their studies at a university.

Interview conducted by Pepe Egger

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The original German version of this article appeared in campus.leben, the online magazine published by Freie Universität Berlin.