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… read about Harvard sidelining its experts for its advisory group on antisemitism.

Roughly three weeks after Oct. 7, Harvard President Claudine Gay announced [[link removed]] the establishment of an advisory group on combating antisemitism. But as Peter Beinart writes for Jewish Currents, Derek Penslar, director for Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and author of the book "Zionism: An Emotional State," was reportedly not only not asked to join, but not even consulted.

Beinart speculates that Penslar was passed over because he signed the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism, which says that criticizing Zionism is not necessarily antisemitic, whereas most of the people chosen have said anti-Zionism is antisemitic or are affiliated with groups that take that view. Beinart suggests this means the group was chosen less for scholastic reasons than for politics, notes that other scholars of antisemitism were passed over for what he suspects were similarly ideological reasons, and reports that some Harvard faculty see the very establishment of the advisory group as a response to donor pressure. There have also been other, similar projects announced at other universities since Oct. 7; they, too, appear to have been established around politics more than scholarly interest, writes Beinart, pointing to a new task force at the University of Pennsylvania and a newly announced center at New York University.

“Never before have America’s leading universities been so eager to study antisemitism,” Beinart writes. “And never before have they displayed such contempt for the experts who could help them understand it.”

Punjab’s Problems

If violent Sikh separatism hasn’t existed in India for decades, why does Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi seem so preoccupied with it? That’s the question Francis Wade, London-based journalist and author, considers [[link removed]] in a new Noema Magazine piece.

Wade asks “was Modi, with an eye on the 2024 elections, raising the specter of a national security threat in order to sell the idea that his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for whom national security has always been top of the agenda, must be reelected lest India break apart? Might he be diverting attention from the many real crises in Punjab, if not India more generally, that the BJP has been unable to resolve?”

There are real issues in Punjab, Wade writes, after offering a brisk overview of the Indian state’s history. Namely, there is discontent among the state’s farmers in particular. But Wade suggests that Modi would rather hold up the specter of separatism, showing that he can unify the country by snuffing out dangerous factions rather than actually doing so through governance, particularly since “shows of force are game-changers in Indian politics. The fact that there is little evidence of an appetite among Sikhs inside India for another era of violent upheaval makes little difference to how those threat narratives land with the wider electorate.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Portia’s Paintings

Africa Is a Country has a new interview [[link removed]] with Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera, who has “reached the peak of international stardom.” Zvavahera’s paintings prominently feature women and children (she herself is a mother to three), though “each composition though is unique in its formal qualities with exaggerated limbs, daubed in reds, purples, greens, and ochres and more recently brighter oranges and yellows.”

Zvavahera also remembers her dreams and uses them in her work. Her art is connected to her spirituality, her spirituality to her life, and her life to her art. “My grandmother would ask us what we were dreaming and that’s how it started … how I started to paint something spiritual. Now I have a connection with God and I know what I am doing,” she said.

Her work was exhibited alongside that of Gustav Klimt in 2019, as well as Virginia Chihota in 2013 in Zimbabwe’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Chihota’s and Zvavahera’s work had more in common then than it does today. Nine years later, Zvavahera returned to the Venice Biennale, this time in its main exhibition. “It was a great, great honor to be shown with other great artists. It builds confidence,” she said.” People are recognizing your work out there. Despite the fact that you are scared, people want to understand better.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Home is where the heat isn’t

What makes a habitat a home? For North American mammals, a new study says [[link removed]], the answer has to do with how hot it gets — and the impact that hotter climate has on the species in its habitat.

“If climatic conditions dictate species’ capacities to persist in anthropogenic landscapes, increasing temperature and precipitation variability may impede efforts to conserve biodiversity in anthropogenic landscapes,” warn Mahdieh Tourani, Rahel Sollmann, Roland Kays, and Daniel S. Karp, for a new report published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. To put it more simply: if climate conditions make it more difficult for species to exist in certain landscapes, that very fact could impact, and perhaps hinder, conservation efforts.

The authors “leveraged a continental-scale dataset to study variation in how North American mammals respond to forest cover and anthropogenic modification across their ranges. Species were consistently more sensitive to human modification, and more dependent on forests, in hotter regions.” This means “that decisions about enhancing the conservation value of anthropogenic landscapes versus protecting natural areas should consider how species’ habitat affiliations are likely to shift under a changing climate.”

The authors were interested in three questions. First, are species’ use of forests and anthropogenic habitats “consistent across continental scales”? Second, can spatial variations in how species respond to land use be explained by macroclimatic conditions? And third, can species’ traits show which species will show “climate-dependent associations”?

First, the authors note that the same species may react differently to human interaction and interference in different regions, offering as an example birds in the Atlantic Forests of Brazil, who “appear more sensitive to deforestation near the edge of their ranges compared to their range centers.” The authors thus urge against simple categorization of species, as that may, in fact, “mask” how a given species is actually reacting to habitat conservation. Another way of putting this is that “results indicate that North American mammals exhibit significant intraspecific variation in land-cover responses across space.”

Second, the authors “found that macroclimatic conditions mediated species’ responses to forest cover and human modification across their US ranges, with the maximum temperature of the warmest month being the strongest climatic predictor of species’ land-cover associations.” In other words, yes, climate matters, and it seems to make species seek out more shade.

And finally, on traits determining responses, evidence was mixed.

Perhaps most importantly, the authors found that mammals are more sensitive to human activity in warmer regions, and that climate extremes may hinder human biodiversity and conservation efforts. (Though the authors do not write this, one would be forgiven for concluding that climate change, caused by humans, must be addressed directly, and cannot be mitigated through conservation efforts, if species are to be preserved). Still, the authors suggest that protecting forests is one way to help species endure. Like me, and probably like you, they want to be cool and comfortable in the habitats they call home.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] RECEIPTS

Ellie Shackleton looked at [[link removed]] COP28 and concluded that “some of the most significant drivers of climate change: militaries and armed conflicts” are being inadequately addressed. While it is true that there was an event at the conference on the war in Ukraine and its impact on the environment, Shackleton wrote that these soft initial signs of willingness to address emissions generated by conflicts and the military are “only the first step down a long road.” Shackleton also noted that emissions can be cut through demilitarization, which has not yet been discussed at COP.

Carol Hills told the story [[link removed]] of a film festival that is quite literally staying afloat. Ecuador is hosting a floating film festival in the Amazon region. The festival is making its way around the region on a solar-powered river boat, stopping at various Indigenous communities along the way. Elizabeth Swanson Andi, an Indigenous filmmaker, said one of her favorite parts has been putting up the movie screen, telling The World, “For many, this is the first time they've seen such a big screen. And for many also the first time that they've seen movies and movies by Indigenous filmmakers.”

Victoras Antonopoulos reported on [[link removed]] how Israel’s war in Gaza is dividing the European Union. Antonopoulos looked at rifts both within and between countries. To take one example, popular support for Palestinians in Greece is coming into conflict with the current government’s more supportive line on Israel; to take another, there is Spain, which condemned Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack but has also vowed to work toward the recognition of a Palestinian state while the EU more generally stands in firm support of the Israeli government. Antonopoulos also included mention of how, in countries like France and Germany, measures to crack down on pro-Palestinian rallies, ostensibly put in place to combat antisemitism, have been criticized as silencing pro-Palestinian speech.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL-PLAYED

It’s that time [[link removed]] again.

Haters gonna’ hate, and sometimes they are right. [[link removed]]

We see you, reviewer two [[link removed]].

The girls (by which we mean people online) are fighting [[link removed]] (about the economy).

‘Tis the season [[link removed]].

Well, so could anyone [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Emily Tamkin (welcome, Emily!) with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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