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Articles by Eric Cheyfitz
CHEYFITZ | Cornell University: No Democracy, No Justice, No Peace
Editor’s note: This article references sexual assault. For the past several years, students and faculty at America’s leading universities have been subjected to a particularly violent form of corporate lawlessness reflecting a larger anti-democratic practice that sees authorities ignoring the people’s safety and welfare to serve the narrow interests of wealthy elites.
In Memoriam: Ward Churchill, 1947-2026
Churchill testifying in the civil trial of Ward Churchill v. University of Colorado – Public Domain I write in remembrance of Ward Churchill, who died on August 11, 2026.
Shared Ideology Behind Settler Colonialism In Native America And Palestine
Above photo: American Progress, a 1872 painting by John Gast, depicts the settler-colonial dispossession of Native America as a celebration of the idea of Manifest Destiny. Wikimedia. Both the United States and Israel were founded and exist on land taken during ongoing genocides. Settler colonialism drives these genocides, and both nations share an ideology that justifies the theft and rationalizes the killing.
Zionism and the Iran War
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair The U.S.-Israel war with Iran is a continuation of Zionism’s project of expanding its hegemony in the Middle East, begun definitively with the Six-Day War in 1967 but ideologically with the formulation of “revisionist Zionism” in the 1923 article by Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall.” In a March 11, 2026 article in Mondoweiss, Qassam Muaddi calls our attention to this expansionist project: According to Palestinian historian Bilal Shalash, Israel has...
The Collapse of the Corporate University in the Time of Gaza
Across the globe, we are living in a moment of profound crisis where the very essence of education as a democratic institution is under attack. In the United States, the assault on higher education is part of a broader war waged by authoritarian forces aiming to dismantle the pillars of not only academic freedom, dissent, and human rights, but also the essential foundations of democracy itself.
Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide Revisited
Abstract In “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide Updated,” Mark Levine and Eric Cheyfitz, taking into account the Post October 7th Israeli invasion of Gaza, revisit their 2017 essay “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide,” to focus on the question of the limits of the definition of genocide in the1948 Convention.
CHEYFITZ | President by Fiat
By fiat, the Board of Trustees has just appointed Interim President Michael Kotlikoff as the 15th president of Cornell University. For the first time in my 22 years here as a tenured member of the faculty, there has been no national search for the university presidency. Such searches typically include faculty. So this suspension of a search is one more sign of the decline in faculty governance, which has been declining rapidly at Cornell since Jeff Lehman “resigned” as president in 2005.
The weaponization of antisemitism and the suppression of expression at Cornell University and beyond
Charges of antisemitism are currently abound at U.S. colleges and universities. These charges have resulted in a nationwide crackdown on free expression on these campuses.
The Colonial Construction of Indian Country: Native American Literatures and Federal Indian Law. By Eric Cheyfitz
Legal scholars and law practitioners long have derided federal Indian law, a primary tool of colonization that dominates the lives of Indigenous peoples, as a form of fiction. It makes sense, then, that fiction writers and literature scholars use Indian law as a frame for powerful stories about the lives of Indigenous people.
On a Unified Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza
A response to Representative Mike Sigler’s comments at the Tompkins County Legislature’s meetings on Jan 2, and 16, 2024, concerning A Unified Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza; Urgent Humanitarian and Local Imperatives of the Tompkins County Human Rights Commission: I make the following comments as a citizen of Tompkins County, a Jew with a daughter and three grandchildren who are Israeli citizens and live in Tel Aviv.
Reservation Iraq
Commenting on U.S. federal policy in “Indian country,” the legal term for federally held and administered tribal lands, D’Arcy McNickle, a Salish/Kootenai Indian who during his life was an administrator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a Native activist, and fiction writer wrote: action, “however benign in intent, if it originates in sources of power and purpose outside of a community can only destroy that community.” We might take this quote to heart in thinking about current U.S. policy in...
Response to the Rev. Hagler: Whoopi Goldberg, Jews and Blacks
On the January 31st edition of The View, during a discussion of the banning by a Tennessee school district of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus, Whoopi Goldberg, the show’s moderator, made the following comments: “If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it, because the Holocaust isn’t about race,” she said…. “It’s not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about,” she said.
Status Quo and Beyond in Israel/Palestine 2022
Any discussion of the situation in Israel/Palestine must begin with a terminological issue, which is the use of the term “conflict” to characterize the relationship between Israel and Palestine. That term implies a symmetry of power when the facts on the ground are vastly asymmetrical.
Cornell University: The Erasure of Memory
On May 7 of this year, the NY Times published an op-ed by By Tristan Ahtone and Robert Lee titled “Ask Who Paid for America’s Universities.” The article concerned the Morrill Act of 1862, which was the basis for the founding of land-grant universities and colleges. The focus of the article was the source of this funding, which created the endowments for these schools. As Ahtone and Lee note: “The Morrill Act was a wealth transfer disguised as a donation.
Covid-19 in Native America: The Erasure of Memory
Native Americans in the United States (American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians) have historically been the object of genocide. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, this was accomplished overtly through war, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and the withholding first of the smallpox inoculation (developed in the early 18th century) and then of the modern vaccination (developed at the end of the 18th century).
The Limits of Capitalism’s Imagination
In a June 2, 2018 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Philip Alston, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, focuses on what I understand as the collapse of liberal democracy in the U.S.: “The United States has the highest inequality of the richest nations. It has the highest incarceration rate by far. It has among the highest child mortality rates. It has the highest youth poverty rate.
Obama and Trump: The Present as Prologue to a History of Inequality
In 2011, I began writing The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States, which was published by Routledge in 2017, just after the Trump administration succeeded that of Obama, and now appears in this PaperBoat Press edition. The book is an historical view going back to the 17th century of how we got to Trump, whom we should not forget “we, the people” elected.
A “Better Deal” for American Workers?
For those people in the United States who still believe there are two major political parties, the Democrats’ Senator Chuck Schumer on July 24th of this year published an op-ed in the New York Times in the form of a policy statement intended to speak to “Americans clamoring for bold changes to our politics and our economy.” This statement was the synthesis of a public event staged in Berryville, Virginia, a small town that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump and is represented by a...
Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide
“Genocide” evokes crematoria, mountains of skulls, and mass graves. It is what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe, what the Khmer Rouge did to fellow Cambodians, what Hutu nationalists did to Tutsis in Rwanda. The term, like the practices of death and social destruction to which it refers, is odious. Charging genocide is like ringing an alarm because, when this crime is occurring or when it has occurred, consequences for perpetrators should follow.
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