A Comment the UT Chose Not to Publish

". . . do we stand up with all our fellow human beings across the country and say: NOT IN OUR NAME! and NEVER AGAIN IS NOW!"

By Stephanie Jed

On March 31, 2025, I sent this commentary piece to the Union Tribune. The response I received the next day was: “We will have to take a pass on this commentary at this time.” This is what I wrote:

In his work The Periodic Table, Primo Levi (1919-1987) – an Auschwitz survivor, an important Italian writer (and chemist), and a vocal critic of the Israeli government’s violation of the humanity and human rights of Palestinians – wrote: “By January of 1941, the fate of Europe and the world was already sealed. Only someone suffering from illusion could still think that Germany wouldn‘t win… And still, if we wanted to live… our best resource was voluntary blindness. Like the British, we didn‘t ‘notice,‘ we chased every threat into the limbo of things not perceived and instantly forgotten. … we hadn‘t yet developed the idea that we had to – and were able to – resist fascism“ (excerpt from Primo Levi, “Potassium,“ The Periodic Table, translation mine). Levi goes on to identify several famous figures who, having expressed their conscience and resistance to fascism, had already been silenced by prison and exile.

These chilling words are an appropriate warning for this moment in which our fellow scholars are now being silenced in prison. Scholars and thinkers who have spoken out against a documented genocide are being extra-legally apprehended, detained without charges, without habeas corpus. Others (including Yale professors Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, and Marci Shore) are voluntarily leaving the country, in order to protect themselves and their families. Many more human beings are being indiscriminately apprehended without charges and flown (against judges‘ orders) to detention centers outside the U.S., where they are subjected to inhuman treatment.

On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, announcing that the State Department has revoked over 300 visas of students who have publicly expressed their perspectives in defense of a people suffering genocide, said “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.” To these dehumanizing words and actions, we might respond (rewriting Primo Levi’s poem that introduced his Auschwitz memoir – “If This is a Man”):

   You who live safe in your warm houses,
who, after a day’s work, return home
to find warm food and friendly faces,
   Consider if you are a part of the same human community –
as the one whom you tore from the arms of his wife about to give birth,
as the one you kidnapped and imprisoned for writing,
as the mother who has lost her child to your bombs,
as the child who died of hunger because humanitarian aid was blocked,
as the teacher whose school you have destroyed,
as the physicians who died when their hospital was bombed,
as the journalists you targeted because they were bearing witness,
 If we cannot see all of us as part of the same human community (albeit with different perspectives), can we still call ourselves human? 

We are definitely at the crossroads about which Primo Levi warned. Do we continue in “voluntary blindness“ with an illusory hope that someone else will succeed in stopping the inhumanity before it gets to us? Do we distract ourselves from and “forget“ what is happening, pretending to believe in our illusions, insisting on conducting business as usual, until our democracy and our universities are destroyed?

Or do we stand up with all our fellow human beings across the country and say: NOT IN OUR NAME! and NEVER AGAIN IS NOW!

The choice is a clear one. As a Jewish Emerita faculty member at UCSD, I call upon Governor Newsom, UC President Drake and the Board of Regents and all of our elected officials to speak out publicly, clearly, and immediately against the travesties being perpetrated against all of us; to demand the protection of civil liberties and academic freedom at all universities; to demand the protection of foreign scholars, students, and all immigrants; and to communicate in advance that neither threats nor blackmail will make the UC system (or any of us) bend to the current inhuman threats and behavior of the federal government.

Since I wrote this piece (expressing gratitude for all I was privileged to learn as a researcher and educator in my 40-year career in support of the mission of the University of California), our “democracy“ has deteriorated considerably. Thousands have been deported without due process, judges defending the rule of law are in the crosshairs, and a newly declared “National Defense Area“ is patrolled by U.S. troops at the U.S.-Mexico border.

So as not to lose the opportunity to defend our democracy (and our universities), may we all act now and every day, before it is too late.

Stephanie Jed is a Professor Emerita of Literature at UC San Diego.
"Queremos un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos/We want a world where many worlds fit." (Zapatista principle).