On April 2-3 the Gender Institute hosted the women’s labor historian, Annelise Orleck, who presented the groundbreaking documentary Storming Caesar’s Palace and gave a deeply inspiring talk on the global labor movement. On May 1, Orleck, a Professor of History and former director of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth University, joined a group of female faculty, who she described as being in their 60s to 80s, in an effort to protect protesting students on campus. Police roughly grabbed Orleck and arrested her. She is now banned from the campus where she has taught for 34 years. That same day police arrested 16 protestors on UB’s North campus who were part of a pro-Palestinian group attempting to set up an encampment protesting the war in Gaza.

As a historian of U.S. social movements, what I am seeing now reflects a profound misunderstanding of the historical past. The transformational changes in racial justice, gender equality and LGTBQ rights did not emerge out of passive, peaceful protest. Instead, they emerged from a tumultuous, messy, and sometimes contradictory grassroots politics. In this sense what we are seeing today is about continuity, not change. I want to make clear that I do not personally agree with all the positions of the pro-Palestinian protestors and am acutely aware of the need to quell antisemitism on campus. But we are a public university that has been willing to allow controversial opinions to be voiced in other cases. Allowing dozens of armed police onto North Campus in this instance, as in Dartmouth and elsewhere, is unnecessary and potentially dangerous. Read more here.