The third and most public way this happened to me was I was asked to give the graduation speech to the PhD students when I finished my doctoral studies at NYU.

And I had not applied to give the speech. They had a contest but I didn't apply but I guess they

don't like who all applied and they asked me to give it and between the time I was asked to give it and and when I gave it, I'll write about this in depth at another time, but a number of political things happened that are similar to what's happening now.

And by the time it happened, like I knew I was going to address it in some way,

NYU was a center in Tel Aviv, things had happened there.

And so I added like three sentences to my prepared remarks

where I said, this is unfortunately very, very apropos of what happened today at Columbia.

You know, I said in the speech, like, I'm very proud of our students for

students of Justice in Palestine, I'm very proud of our chapters of Jewish

Voices for peace, for being willing to stand out to the apartheid state government of Israel and I said like as we go become professors

we must all do this we must stand up for people being affected by Islamophobia and

Transphobia and anti-Semitism and we must stand up with the most

marginalized on our campus.

And I said this is apropos to today because the S.J.P. and JVP chapters were just sanctioned

at Columbia University just before I got on this call with you.

Sanctioned how like just one of these statements from the dean or what have you saying? They were told they can't meet. They've been like deactivated as official clubs at least for I think to the end of the year for

protesting and violation of policy. So I gave the speech and it was very scary to give and Tana Hasi Coates talked like also around the issue of

flack on democracy now last week about like how frightening it is because you know what's going to happen it's like very very scary

and it was very scary for me and so a couple days went by with not big stuff but then it got into

the press and eventually my PhD advisor never spoke to me again,

and one of the members of my dissertation committee who was a black gay man, who was the dean,

who had asked me to give the speech, totally threw me under the bus, said that I was an anti-semit,

...