JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
This story originally appeared in Jweekly.com. Reposted with permission. It has been updated. The Bay Area Book Festival has rescinded an invitation to author Alice Walker over incendiary statements she has made over the years about Jews and Israel. Walker had been invited to interview writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, at Jeffers’ request, as the headlining…
Editor’s note: We’ve republished this piece, originally published on December 20, 2018, after Walker’s appearance this week on writer Cheryl Strayed’s podcast for The New York Times, “Sugar Calling,” created new outrage. Earlier this week, the internet issued a collective groan when Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker recommended a book by the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist…
When it comes to anti-Semitism, Alice Walker still doesn’t get it. Or to be more precise, she still wasn’t getting it when she wrote her most recent blog post, which contains a poem titled “Conscious Earthlings.” The post begins with an email that Walker writes was sent to her by Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli scholar…
Tamika Mallory. Marc Lamont Hill. Alice Walker. Angela Davis. Every week seems to bring with it another black leader running afoul of the Jewish community — and an angry, effective response. Mallory’s refusal to denounce the notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, a man she had previously praised, led Jewish activists to call for her to resign…
Every generation that struggles against oppression stands on the shoulders of those who came before us. But even as we honor those who taught us, we must also challenge them when they stray from the path of fighting for justice, and fall into the trap of stigmatizing one community to uplift another. For Black feminists,…
The New York Times’s “By the Book” column is no stranger to scandal. Male authors who participate in the feature, in which an author answers questions about the books that have formed them, tend to mention few female authors among their picks. It’s a phenomenon so notable that when Lauren Groff was a “By the…
Alice Walker and the University of Michigan Center for Education for Women — which disinvited her from a speaking engagement at its 50th anniversary celebration, as the Sisterhood’s Erika Dreifus recently wrote about, then later re-invited her to speak at a public forum on campus — are both misguided. It was foolish of Alice Walker…
Author Alice Walker will be invited to speak in a public forum on campus, the provost of the University of Michigan said, after being disinvited from a women’s center celebration. The provost, Martha Pollack, said in a letter to university faculty posted on the university’s Center for the Education of Women’s web page that the…
