Documenting the Fight Against the Palestine Exception: A Conversation with Filmmakers Jan Haaken and Jennifer Ruth

The Palestine Exception opens as campus encampments increase across the US in protest against Israel’s war in Gaza. In the largest anti-war movement since the 1970s, students, faculty and staff make demands on their institutions to divest from companies that do business with Israel. The film unfolds as a character-driven story featuring academics whose lives and scholarship bring into sharp relief historical dynamics behind the censoring of criticisms of Israel and Zionism.

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Jan Haaken is professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist, and documentary filmmaker. From refugee camps, war zones, abortion clinics, mental hospitals and jury trials to drag bars, dairy farms and hip-hop clubs, her documentary films focus on stressful work carried out on the social margins and in liminal spaces.  Haaken has directed nine feature films, including Our Bodies Our Doctors (2018), the two-part Necessity series (2022), Atomic Bamboozle (2023) and The Palestine Exception (currently in production).. Her books include Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory and the Perils of Looking Back (1998), Hard Knocks: Domestic Violence and the Psychology of Storytelling (2011), and Psychiatry, Politics and PTSD (2021).  Haaken also is a programmer on KBOO Community Radio in Portland, OR where she produces interviews and reviews for the Old Mole Variety Hour.

Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film studies at Portland State University. She writes extensively about academic freedom and higher education in outlets such as The New Republic, Truthout, Academe, Academe blog, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, LA Review of Books and Ms. She is the author of one book and the co-author, with Michael Bérubé, of two – The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments and It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom. She is the co-editor, with Valerie Johnson and Ellen Schrecker, of The Right to Learn; Resisting the Right-Wing War on Academic Freedom (Beacon Press).