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Paper short abstract

An existential-phenomenological account of academic speech and silence in the fraught context of academic antisemitism after October 7, 2023, and the search for some kind of moral and analytic coherence that will allow me to go on teaching, writing ethnography, and participating in the field.

Paper long abstract

The response of professional anthropology to the events of October 7 and the bitter war that followed intensified my crisis of alienation from a field to which I had devoted myself for decades, but which I have come to believe has fundamentally failed on both analytic and moral grounds to adequately grasp the world I inhabit. These failure of anthropology are of course also my own failures, inasmuch as ideas and methods I teach have championed increasingly seem implicated in academic antisemitism that sometimes apologizes for or contributes to real violence. My goal in this paper is not to rehearse or defend these claims, but rather, given their background, to describe in an existential or phenomenological vein the dynamics of speech and silence, forced and chosen, that have come to define a new precarity for me and other scholars I know, somewhere between despair and resilience. In particular, I want to describe three different relational matrices in which I have made different (and admittedly imperfect or contestable) decisions about how to speak, or not speak: with respect to my disciplinary field and intellectual partners, with respect to a broader public world, including my Jewish community, with respect to the people I encounter in fieldwork, and with respect to my own current and former students on all sides our this current desperate moment. Can I do justice to all of them? Can I still find a degree of moral and intellectual coherence in this fractured reality?