CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

On Steven Salaita’s “Jerry and Rodrigo Go to War”

Cover art for the book Jerry and Rodrigo Go to War by Steven Salaita

It is hard not to root for Steven Salaita, a professor who was fired from his job before he had worked a single day, but after he and his wife quit their jobs, sold their home, and prepared to move across the country. Salaita was offered a tenured position in the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on the quality of his academic output and quit his tenured position at Virginia Tech in order to take the new post. The administration, however, withdrew the offer once university donors and others discovered that Salaita had been tweeting in opposition to Israel’s 2014 war in Gaza, in which over 2000 Palestinians were killed. Notably, this was well before Israel embarked on its current genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and unbridled destruction in Iran and Lebanon.

Salaita’s offending tweets included one in which he asked whether anyone would be surprised if Benjamin Netanyahu showed up wearing a necklace made of the teeth of dead Palestinian children. Over 80 thousand dead (including 20 thousand children) and countless more maimed later, the irony, of course, is that Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have said, and done, far worse. Netanyahu has called the Palestinian people “Amalek,” whom, according to the Book of Deuteronomy, God commanded the Israelites to “blot out the memory of,” while cabinet members Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir wear golden noose pins representing their aim of singling out Palestinians for state execution. Since his banishment from US academia, Salaita has taught overseas and written a memoir, a blog, and two novels, the most recent of which is the campus lit romp: Jerry and Rodrigo Go To War.

Of the campus lit I’ve read, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Bernard Malamud’s A New Life are the funniest, John Williams’ Stoner is the most........

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