Democratic socialists won big in New York City races in the June primaries. Socialist candidates achieved impressive victories in local elections elsewhere in the country as well, many by enlisting the long legacy of “sewer socialism.” In 2022, union organizer Juan Miguel Martinez and city council member Ryan Clancy both cited the sewer socialists as part of an honorable Wisconsin tradition of good governance. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Milwaukie socialists fought to repair the city’s toxic industrial legacy, cleaning up neighborhoods and factories with new sanitation systems and city-owned water and power systems.

In marking his first 100 days as the newly elected Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani invokes this tradition in his administration’s program to clean up the city. “I know there are many who use ‘socialist’ as a dirty word, something to be ashamed of,” he proclaims. “They can try all they want, but we will not be ashamed of using government to fight for the many, not simply the few.” The mayor spoke about sewer socialism on the campaign trail, promising to build more public restrooms across the city and to improve garbage services across the boroughs.

In primary contests of 2026, we witness one of the many ironies of the Trump era. Here the drama unfolds around his MAGA promise to Drain the swamp! The sewer socialists seem the only politicians intent on taking the slogan seriously.

Dirty and Clean: Symbolic Boundaries in American Politics

The socialists entering Congress have a big job ahead of them, however. Swamp-dwellers proliferate at an alarming rate. The obscenely wealthy, Big Tech, military contractors and mega-donors devour everything within their reach. Corporate Democrats swim in the swamp as well, although they are not the most disgusting of the bottom-feeders.

In my last Substack post, I talk about how systems of power often enlist the categories of dirty and clean to mark social boundaries. Grassroots political campaigns enlist these same categories in subversive ways, however, whether in defending the dignity of “dirty work” to Mamdani’s “pothole politics.”

The DOGE buzz saw attacks on protective services here and abroad was part of this so-called MAGA mandate. In his second term, Trump reflexively projects his swampy psyche onto an external world of “shit-hole countries” and perceived dirty outsiders. Obsessed with germs and cleanliness, Trump, according to authors of Regime Change, paradoxically has quite disgusting bathroom habits. Aides reportedly had to deal with unhygienic conditions, such as soaked carpets left outside his shower that risked mold and his practice of leaving fast-food snack wrappers around his bedroom.

Such reports might seem too petty for serious journalists to chronicle. But with this uniquely petty and emotionally incontinent president, anything goes.

The Reflecting Pool: A Psychoanalytic Picture of Power

One of my favorite Freud quotes: “Dirt is matter in the wrong place,” from his 1908 essay, Character and Anal Erotism.

I start with what the Reflecting Pool represents to this notoriously defiant patient. First, we talk about his relationship with his cold and cruel father and the devouring envy of other men that he has nursed throughout his life. By killing off competitors, my patient imagines that he has finally secured the love of father Fred. The pool is a disturbing reminder of the impossibilities of this task, I gently suggest. There is the naming of honored fathers surrounding the pool itself—the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as well as the Washington Monument at its east. My patient recalls that this was the setting for the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. No matter how many executive orders declaring the Dream dead, the ghost of MLK continues to haunt my patient.

The Return of the Repressed

I also tentatively explore Mr. President’s anxieties around cleanliness. The COVID epidemic seemed to have intensified his anxieties, making them more tied to reality. But the pool problem exposes unconscious currents lurking in this defense. Extracting toxins and filling the pool with “pure, crystal clear water” represented an attempt to expel his own toxic family from his psyche. I gently offer an interpretation: May these anxieties around purity have created blind-spots around his efforts to repair the pool? Was he aware of the shady business profile of his Mar-A-Lago neighbor who he brought in to line the pool in “American flag blue”? Was this an instance where he had to confront, as a man of 80, the illusions behind his belief that he could magically control every situation? Realities in the material world of organisms had intruded. Here the blooming algae and the green swampy reflection pool represent what Freud might term the “return of the repressed.” I suggest to my patient that the disturbing matter surfacing here symbolizes horrifying aspects of his own unconscious—something that cannot be vanquished no matter how many chemicals and edicts are summoned in the effort.

The third session with the President was the most difficult. I commented on his pattern of blaming others for every disappointment or defeat in life. The Reflecting Pool problem had perhaps confronted him with the costs of this defense. Do you really believe that leftists snuck into this guarded area at night, violently attacking the blue liner with knives? Do you really believe that the few observers who touched the water or picked up floating pieces of the blue liner were actually vandals to be prosecuted? Or, perhaps, do you see these visitors as vandals because they represent an attack on defenses that now feel as precarious as that blue lining? (I may have been too aggressive here in anticipating the aggressiveness of his response.)

I found the closest door to exit Walter Reed, heading as fast as I could to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. There is solace there in spite of the President’s desperate efforts.

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Who is really draining the swamp—and who is merely renaming it? Could the old tradition of sewer socialism offer a model for progressive politics today?

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United by worry over their own futures and the futures of their children, citizens across the country are fighting to shut down data centers. AI companies’ business plans depend on:

1. Massively increasing subscription revenues.

2. Gobbling up as much land, water and electricity as possible. This second part of the plan is where citizens find their own Strait of Hormuz in resistance to the AI empire.

Lessons from Fossil Fuel Propaganda

As a psychologist and documentarian, I have tracked through my film projects the stories that oil, gas, and nuclear industries tell about themselves to win these wagers. Much of Big Oil propaganda plays on public cognitive dissonance: We need the oil but it is killing us! They offer in response a cognitive compromise: Maybe it is not really killing you! In contradiction/cover-up of their own internal research, oil companies produced a blitz of infomercials in the late 20^th century casting doubt on what had emerged as scientific consensus on fossil fuels and global warming. Another strategy of Big Oil has been to displace responsibility for the problem. British Petroleum (BP) was a true pioneer on this front with their “carbon footprint” campaign, encouraging the public to track its carbon use. Journalist Mark Kaufman describes the marketing campaign: “The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life — going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling — is largely responsible for heating the globe. A decade and a half later, ‘carbon footprint’ is everywhere.” And fossil fuel consumption is also everywhere and climbing at an alarming rate.

In my documentaries on the fights against oil pipelines in North America over the past decade, from the proud Standing Rock Sioux Tribe actions to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline to organized civil disobedience in opposition to Line 3 in Minnesota, even the strong and sustained alliances of these campaigns could not withstand the black boots of federal military force in lockstep with the pipeline companies. The tragic defeats of these campaigns were aided significantly by oil and gas workers, as well as some tribal leaders, who staked their own fortunes on the survival of the oil and pipeline companies. The nuclear power industry, with its endless claims of undergoing a “renaissance,” has some organized labor on its side as well but primarily promotes itself as the work of engineers. The industry also enlists an old boundary between dirty (bad) and clean (good) energy.

Purity, Pollution, and the Politics of Energy

In Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that all cultures draw boundaries between pure and impure. In many cultures, menstruating women are viewed as unclean and excluded for periods of time from contact with men. Douglas goes further to explain how groups that perform “dirty work,” from day laborers, coal miners and garbage collectors to many immigrant and marginalized groups, carry this stigma. Since the 1950s, American bourgeois/middle class culture has leaned heavily into this boundary. Advertisers endlessly promote products that psychologically fuse unrelated phenomena: cleanliness, whiteness and moral purity. Gwyneth Paltrow’s products embody this fusion to a level of absurdity that makes her a favorite target for lampooning.

Unlike the oil industry, proponents of “new nuclear” and their proposed fleet of small reactors enlist this bourgeois boundary and its implicit warding off of the dangerously unclean. Proponents make the case for reviving dying nuclear plants and building a seemingly modern fleet of baby reactors by positioning nuclear power as the clean alternative to polluting sources of energy. (It should be noted, FYI, that nuclear power has a heavy carbon footprint, from the long fuel cycles, extraction and processing of uranium, construction costs and over-runs, through the eventual decommissioning of old reactors.)

The Clean Machine Aesthetic

AI companies and their investors work this same boundary with supercomputers humming along and quietly colonizing farmland and extending into the vast tech “Enterprise Zones” that circle urban areas and occupy rural lands around the country. The corporate boxy towers, warehouses and distribution centers that are now a central feature of these zones are visibly clean and neo-brutalist in design.

Last weekend, my photographer friend, Friderike Heuer, and I drove by some of these massive AI data centers in Hillsboro, Oregon, 16 miles from where we live in Portland. A city of around 110,000 people, Hillsboro was regularly on the Portland TV news last fall for student led protests against ICE Raids on the Latino community there. Hillsboro, known as the Silicon Valley of Oregon, is once again on the local news for community led outrage over the expansion of data centers on to tracks of farmland and for sucking up resources in this agricultural region. Packed meetings with city council members in May and June featured locals demanding answers as to why these leaders allowed fast-track permits for eight companies before the June 6^th State moratorium against data center permits went into effect. Hillsboro Herald has been a beacon of independent media in following this unfolding story.

Capitalism and Enshitification

Coined by author and activist Cory Doctorow in 2022, enshitification describes the lifecycle of platforms as they transition from being genuinely useful to sucking users into degraded, degrading and addictive platforms. The term now circulates widely to describe the AI ecosystem as well with degradation of existing chatbot services and the flooding of the internet with AI slop. As an idiom that works between the registers of academia (something-itifcation) and street talk (shit) enshitification lands most loudly on the dirty side of Mary Douglas’ anthropological divide.

The term may also be apt in describing our current advanced age of capitalism. The transformative technologies that powered industrial revolution from the 19^th century through the late 20^th century had what Karl Marx called “use value.” But from the railroads, radio and telegraph, electric lights, the automobile, airplanes, computer technology and the world wide web, technologies also often brought death, destruction and the displacement of workers.

The railway bubble that led to a major stock market crisis and depression in the US in the 1870s is often cited as historical reference for the current AI bubble. There were deaths associated with rail. The earliest neurotic conditions treated by doctors in the US were for a condition termed “railway spine.” People claimed to suffer debilitating neurological conditions, often after merely witnessing a derailment.

When History Feels Uncanny

But as frightening as rail may have been and as enormous as the costs of the investment mania, the use value of rail was never really in question (aside from their role in the genocide of Indigenous peoples). And unlike the major AI companies today who proclaim helplessly that their products may destroy most jobs and potentially all of humanity, railroad executives would never have said that their trains may blow up your town, but you have to build the stations anyway.

The bizarreness of our current situation is brought into relief by these historical comparisons. Freud’s concept of the uncanny also comes to mind: a response to a current situation that is simultaneously familiar in evoking something from the past and hauntingly strange.

In addition to use value, Marx introduced the concept of exchange value in his theory of the driving forces behind capitalism. Profits accumulate through a system of commodity exchange by extracting as much value as possible from human labor and natural resources while keeping costs of production as low as possible. Labor (and we might add, Nature) pushes back in various ways against this intensive exploitation, for example in the late 19^th century fight of workers for the eight-hour day. Marx predicted an era when periods of crisis—which are structural characteristics of capitalist growth—reach their limits and workers would usher in an era of socialism and liberation from the alienating labor of capitalist production. This era, as most historians agree, has not yet come about. There is a rich history of experiments and social movements to draw on, however, as potential signposts for futures yet to be realized.

In addition to one of the most influential political economists and philosophers of the modern era, Marx continues to be studied because of the eloquence of his writing. Published in 1848 and co-authored by Frederik Engels, The Communist Manifesto remains on many college syllabi because of the lyrical beauty of its prose. A line from the introduction speaks to the capitalism of that era and perhaps to ours: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Certainly, AI has ushered in a world of horrifying commerce where what had seemed solid in the past now melts into air. We are compelled to soberly face our current conditions, to imagine a different future, and to organize in bringing it about.

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Do you think the AI boom carries symbolic weight in public thinking that differs from technologies of the past? What is your assessment of current opposition to data centers?

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Easily overlooked in this drama is how allegations against Platner are understood through the lens of his PTSD story. It’s a new version of an old story. Throughout the history of America’s wars, postwar syndromes include mounting public anxieties over the mental states of returning soldiers. American films reflect these anxieties, from John Huston’s classic documentary Let There Be Light (1946), a sympathetic portrayal of emotional broken, hospitalized WW II veterans, to Taxi Driver (1976) and Deer Hunter (1978) - films that draw out the psychopathic side of Vietnam era veterans.

The Rise of PTSD as a Redemptive Narrative

PTSD emerged in the 1980s as a redemptive diagnosis – a condition tied to the situational madness of war. (As promoters routinely exclaimed, “PTSD is a normal response to an abnormal situation.”) Unlike the psychotic or psychopathic veterans of earlier eras, the veteran with PTSD arouses far less anxiety. At the same time, the diagnosis grew alongside public recognition of how military culture fosters sexism and aggressive acting out. Military discipline and rules of engagement often break down on the battlefront and on the home front. Higher rates of suicide and domestic violence are among the signature problems of returning service members.

Addressing a crowd of cheering supporters at a YMCA gym in Blue Hill Maine, Platner acknowledged voters’ concerns about his past behavior. But he broke from the PTSD clinical frame in positioning himself in the tradition of veterans for peace, fighters whose struggles with personal demons speak to fights on the home front. “If you believe, as I do, that we can change our politics and change our country, then you must also believe that people can change,” he told supporters.

Two Veterans, Two Visions of Recovery

Pete Hegseth also offers a PTSD story in explaining his history of bad behavior, but he provides a very different denouement. Both joined the military as young men after 9/11 and both served many tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan during the “long wars.” Both acknowledge histories of heavy drinking, sexual misconduct and aggressive behavior related to their extensive combat experience. But their politics are very far apart as are the lessons they drew from those wars.

While enlisting the PTSD script, Hegseth distances himself from the debilitating aspects of this condition. His hyper-masculine persona conforms to the Trump regime’s view that vulnerability and weakness are incompatible with manliness. In a 2020 Fox news interview where he “opens up“ about his emotional problems, he offers that “I’m sure I was a mess... I didn’t talk about things like post-traumatic stress and all that. I definitely had it… I don’t call it PTSD because I don’t think you live with a disorder all the time – not everyone does... I don’t live with the disorder today, but I definitely had it. [I spent] a lot of time drinking and laying on the couch.” When he got off that couch, he vaulted into a Fox News gig and then to the heights of power as Secretary of Defense/War.

Healing, Masculinity, and the Politics of Care

For Platner, recovering from PTSD means overcoming a very debilitating vision of manhood. He talks about learning to listen and caring for others as central to that process. It is noteworthy that he sought treatment through the VA during an era when military planners launched campaigns to overcome stigma around mental health problems. Throughout VA facilities, posters announced that “it takes a strong warrior to get help.” Platner often attributes his process of recovery to reconnecting with nature, as well as to his ongoing therapy. His story of how he became an oyster farmer opens into a wider tale of capitalist exploitation and calls for a different relationship with the natural world. One reporter sums up Platner’s oyster philosophy:

“From Indigenous subsistence to working-class staple, a species decimated by extractive capitalism and the predilections of the elite, [was] brought back to life by a public institution as a sustainable resource [oysters].

The Warrior Ethos and the Rejection of Restraint

The lesson Hegseth draws from his tours of duty point to anxieties around the castrating effects of rules on fighters. This complaint courses through Hegseth’s book, The War on Warriors. Military rules around engagement seem to fuse in his mind with a nanny state, that old cudgel of the right against any governmental restrictions on personal behavior. Hegseth’s psyche may have been shaped by his experience during the early years of the US War on Terrorism as well. In the spring of 2004, he deployed to Guantanamo Bay where he guarded detainees for a year. A 2008 UC Berkeley Law article titled Guantánamo and Its Aftermath presents an analysis of the traumatic impact of these black sites on detainees as well as their morally corrosive effects on military personnel.

In his book American Crusade, Hegseth recalls telling his platoon to disregard the rules of engagement that are standard military protocol. “I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains,” he said. “Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat.” The enemy for Hegseth began as a holy war against Islam and extended into the wide reach of the fascists currently governing this country. The Crusader tattoos inking Hegseth’s chest and limbs proudly proclaim his far-right political identity, even as questions continue to swirl around Platner’s tattoo from his Marine days and whether it signified hidden Nazi sympathies.

Why Return to a War You Oppose?

I want to return at the end to Graham Platner and the lessons he brings home from his military service. Supporters have a right to answers about allegations of sexual misconduct and other concerns that might affect their support for the candidate. But we might ask why someone who expressed opposition to Bush’s war as a young man ended up spending most of his adult life in the military. Beginning with joining the Marines after high school in 2003 (against the opposition of his parents), he served repeated tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and then returned to Afghanistan as a State Department security contractor in 2018. These repeated deployments may explain why he had so many girlfriends (with no lasting domestic partners until his current partner) and why some of them found his moods and behavior “unsettling.” These are common biographies among professional Soldiers and Marines. But why did he keep returning to fight in wars that he had publicly opposed?

This is not meant to be accusatory in tone. My own psychoanalytic approach to therapy places considerable emphasis on ambivalence and conflict, how people struggle with the interplay of love and hate, and how adult choices are shaped by childhood experiences in complicated ways. In talking with service members in Afghanistan while filming Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front Lines, this theme of ambivalence and conflict over military missions was a recurring one. I came to recognize during this documentary project what many young people found of such value–forms of community and camaraderie that were often missing back home. Yet this camaraderie was in the service of maintaining the lethal American war machine. This may have also been the case for Platner. Those values he does seem to be bringing home in this campaign.

💬 What Do You Think?

What are the important questions that we should be asking of progressive candidates such as Graham Platner? How important is his PTSD story to how we understand his politics?

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📖 Psychiatry, Politics and PTSD: Breaking Down

Providing a new way of thinking about PTSD and an alternative to both critics and defenders of the diagnosis, this text will be useful for scholars and practitioners in psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, public health policy as well as, sociology, social work, gender studies, and the law.

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🎞️ MIND ZONE

MIND ZONE follows therapists with the 113th Army Combat Stress Control detachment as they carry out two conflicting missions: protecting soldiers from battle fatigue and keeping these same soldiers in the fight.

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State laws proposed or passed in recent years include everything from bathroom bans and restrictions on gender-affirming health care to laws against drag performances and campaigns to overturn gay marriage. These repressive campaigns share a common political agenda. But they each express specific anxieties and defenses animating conservative politics.

Generational Shifts Within LGBTQ+ Identity

There are important generational dynamics in play as well. While many women of my generation fought to come out as lesbians (L), many young women identify as queer (Q) or bi (B). These latter terms reflect the gender fluidity that is central to this generation’s politics. These politics also reflect younger activists’ emphasis on the irreducible remainder of non-conforming categories (+). Gay (G) is still an umbrella term. But the G remains troubling to some straight people in its association with gay men and anal sex. Lesbians in the homophobic imagination can be pictured as cuddling in non-genital ways. Gay men, on the other hand, bring to mind images that disturb more forcefully repressive hetero-sex codes.

Marriage Equality and Civil Rights

The advances in LGBTQ+ rights are important to celebrate even in waves of backlash. Gay marriage gained broad popular support in the 21^st century with most Democrats and around half of Republicans supporting same-sex relationships (with regression in support among Republicans under Trump 2.0). The right to marry in the US across race (interracial marriage was illegal in the US until the Supreme Court 1967 Loving v Virginia ruling of June 12, 1967) and gender lines does represent real progress. It is important to honor and learn from the movements that fought for this basic civil right. At the same time, the right to marry represents the most domesticated and conservative demand of the gay rights movement. Gender fluidity (and the famous Trump ad against Harris, “She is for they/them; He is for you”) mobilizes old fears around a new frontier of perceived threats (+!)

Drag Queens and the Politics of Visibility

Drag performers are the loudest and most visible side of the gay rights movement. These performances have gained public followings over the years, leading Pride marches and other civic events as well as invited performances in liberal parts of the country for school-age children. The Stonewall Uprising in 1969 was led by drag queens who resisted a police raid on a gay bar in Greenwich Village. The uprising on June 29^th of that year is a primary reason that June is celebrated as Pride month. Their insistently joyful visibility makes them an ongoing target of hysterical reactions.

Trans People and the Politics of Suspicion

Trans people, on the other hand, are objects of the aggressively paranoid edge of the right. Political paranoia, much like clinical paranoia, fixates on hidden threats. Its concern is with intimate invasions and alarm over outsiders passing as “one of us.” Post-war McCarthyism marshaled anti-communism through this tactic. A communist could be your normal-seeming neighbor. Or it could even be your doctor. The Trump regime’s violent campaign against “aliens within” is awash in the markers of the crazed paranoiac: “They walk among us,” the government website ominously declares in shades of horror comic green.

In an article and prelude to Gender Trouble, published the following year, queer theorist Judith Butler offers an astute observation that touches on this same distinction (even as she conflates transvestism and drag):

“The site of a transvestite on stage can compel pleasure and applause while the site of that same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence.”

Put in contemporary terms, the drag queen on stage can be enjoyed as an act (it’s not real, after all) whereas the trans woman’s claim to a place in everyday life feels dangerously close.

In my earliest documentary feature, Queens of Heart: Community Therapists in Drag, Darcelle XV, the star of the film, takes up different identities and the meanings of those identities in the LGBTQ community. She explains the difference between gay men performing drag and trans women just living their lives and also comments on public conflation of cross-dressing—a private practice primarily of straight men—and drag, a very public performance primarily by gay men. We learn in the film about the history of the club as a lesbian bar in the late 1960s and as a refuge over the decades, including during times of intense persecution. The club has been most famous locally for their raucous “bride’s last night out” parties—a phenomenon that we take up in the film.

Drag, Gender Identity, and Community Tensions

The documentary project began in 2003 with conversations in the LGBTQ community, including currents of ambivalence for some about drag. In a conversation on Reddit in 2023, two decades later, I was reminded of these early conversations, and particularly comments by trans women about drag queens.

“It gives me a huge amount of dysphoria. It is like my worst fear. That I will always look like a guy in a dress.”

“Yep, this is why. Drag is what (almost) every trans girl is afraid of being.”

“I don’t have a problem with drag queens…but I do have a problem being called one….I want to be a girl. I want to feel like a girl and be perceived as a girl….not as a guy playing dress up.”

This Pride Month, it is important to march in solidarity with a movement that carries liberatory potential for all of us. At the same time, it is important to recognize how attacks on people take varying forms. Each identity in the LGBTQ+ Rainbow is its own Rorschach card for bigots, arousing fears, fantasies and persecutory impulses that we must collectively resist.

Remembering Darcelle XV

Portland Oregon is a queer friendly place for the most part. In this city, we honor this month the memory of Darcelle XV, our city’s most famous and beloved drag queen. At 85 years of age, she was proud to receive an entry in the Guinness World of Records as the oldest continually performing drag queen in the world. With support from her rhinestone encrusted walker, she continued to delight audiences with her dazzle, warmth and acerbic wit until shortly before her death at age 92. She was my friend and a friend to so many others.

Goddesses rest her beautiful soul.

Watch Queens of Heart Free on YouTube

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Prosecution and defense arguments in jury trials in California and in New Mexico centered on interpretations of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act enacted by Congress in 1996.

Often called the law that created the 21^st century internet, Section 230 protects servers and users from liability for objectionable content. The law also provides legal protection for content moderation, including content deemed “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.”

Until these recent cases, Meta has been able to enlist Section 230 to shield the company from governmental regulation and liability. In our Left & the Law review of these recent lawsuits, we look at some of the measures that critics are calling for in protecting youth from the harmful effects of online apps and how young people themselves are pushing back on corporate control of social media.

As we prepare for our radio segments, Mike and I often take up the personal and professional associations that come to mind with the cases under discussion. On the professional side, we met decades ago through our shared research and writing on child protection agencies and their role in the “Satanic ritual abuse” scare of the 1990s. On the personal side, we both grew up in white middle-class families during the repressive post-war era. This was a time of televised congressional hearings with the mandate of protecting a decisively conservative vision of morality against the rebellious currents of that era.

My Story: When Bambi Was Too Dangerous to Watch

In the fundamentalist Christian home of my youth, movies were strictly forbidden. As a grade schooler, I suffered many humiliations over this policy. When the mom at a friend’s birthday party hauled everyone in her station wagon to a local theater to watch Bambi, I had to go home.

It was the 1950s and the McCarthy hearings were targeting the film industry in Hollywood for communist sympathies and for subversion of public morality. Walt Disney was himself a stalwart supporter of McCarthyism. In 1947 he went before HUAC to name leaders of the Screen Cartoonists Guild, claiming that they were labor agitators and members of or influenced by the Communist Party.

But my mother was not seduced by Disney’s distancing his studios from the problems of Hollywood. The sanitized (and very white) allure of Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Bambi failed to satisfy the strict scrutiny of my mother’s personal censorship codes. When I appealed for mercy, she would inevitably instruct me in the slippery slope argument: “Today it’s Bambi; tomorrow it’s Lolita” (that was not her exact reference but something to that effect). Her backup argument—one that actually stayed with me in thinking critically about films—was that “these films have a lot of hidden messages. They are not just entertainment.” We never talked about what those messages were.

The Hays Code that governed censorship in the film industry during the post-war era also failed to convince her. Once again, she insisted that there was a lot more going on in films that went under the radar of the Code and its list of prohibited images and words. And decades of psychoanalytic and feminist film analysis would support her in that general critical stance.

Mike’s Story: When Comic Books Became a National Scandal

Mike, on the other hand, had more freedom from watchful parents. He could walk to the local movie house on Saturday to watch a double-feature. The stacks of comic books under his bed did not arouse parental suspicion. Mike was a big fan of the Little Lulu comics which feature a spunky, stubborn girl (Lulu) and her friend Tubby, a boy she spars with, and her best friend Annie. The Lulu series had a distinctively proto-feminist message: girls are as smart and clever as boys and need to band together to fight for their rights. (Lulu and her friends confront the “Clubhouse boys” who try to enforce their “no girls allowed” rules.)

The EC comics seemed to Mike to be part of the landscape but they were the Horror Corner. He was jarred when he saw the comic book part of his life spill over into the daily newspapers that his father religiously read. It took a minute for him to realize that actual grown-ups were saying that reading a comic book would somehow shape your future behavior. That realization was perhaps the first time he felt that grownups, some of them anyway, were caught up in some kind of national hysteria.

The Comics Code Authority, created by the Comics Magazine Association of America in 1954, was a response to moral panic over the burgeoning popularity of comics, particularly crime and horror comics, and modeled after the Hays Code in Hollywood. Some of this anxiety was fueled by the bestselling book, Seduction of the Innocent published in the same year. Authored by German American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, the book targets crime comics as a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. The book asserts that “if one were to set out to show children how to steal, rob, lie, cheat, assault and break into houses, no better method could be devised” than letting them read comic books. As supporting evidence, Wertham argues that 95% of children placed in reform school for delinquent behavior read comics. Based on the popular influence of his book, Wertham was invited to testify in 1954 before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. Like other figures in 1950s inquisitions, the psychiatrist’s scrutiny of comics also fixated on anxiety over homosexual seductions of youth. The Batman and Robin comics in particulars, he warned, expressed “a wish-dream of two homosexuals living together.”

The Cases Against Meta: Moral Panic?

Just as there were in Mike and my youth, there are currents of moral panic in contemporary discourse over youth mentally destroyed through their use of social media. The history of campaigns to protect youth from corruptive influences should give us pause. Unlike movies and comic books, however, Meta represents a qualitatively and quantitatively different threat. These platforms intrude on personal life in very intimate ways. At the same time, young people find creative ways of ways using these tools. In our Left & the Law segment on the cases against Meta, we look at forms of resistance among youth to social media in their lives.

Discussion of the monstrous side of Meta often overlooks how these companies are products of capitalism and particularly the lightly regulated reign of industries so central to the dominant American story of progress. Not unlike the film industry and the companies publishing comic books in earlier eras, the profit motive drives this generation’s social media companies as well. As a college drop-out in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and his former roommates/co-developers pitched Facebook as a place for “building community and connection.” In 2012, Zuckerberg enlisted mobile phone companies in the global South with the noble aim of bringing internet access to hundreds of millions of underserved people. He is now one of the richest people in the world and, like other capitalists, measures growth in how much value (profit) can be extracted from the human labor behind his products.

In the case of social media platforms, users themselves are the living base of this system of extraction. The longer users stay on a platform, the more revenue in advertising. Indeed, Meta and Google control over half of the world’s digital advertising market and over 40% of the entire global advertising market.

A former liberal supporting LGBT rights, immigrant rights, and the Black Lives Matter Movement, Zuckerberg proclaimed himself in 2025 an avid Trump supporter. In January 2025, he proclaimed (with no apparent shame) that “We now have a U.S. administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning and that will defend our values and interests abroad.” Much like other Silicon Valley tech liberals, Zuckerberg has turned hard right in embracing the Trump regime. He aggressively opposes EU regulations of his social media companies, stating “we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies.”

Part of the story of Meta that unfolds in recent lawsuits centers on the federal government’s role in the commercialization of the internet at the turn of the 21^st century. A 2025 Stanford Law article asserts that “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is the most important law in the history of the internet. It is also one of the most flawed.” Representatives Christopher Cox (R-CA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced the provision in 1995 as the “Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act” which was folded into the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Their goal was to protect nascent internet startups from lawsuits and regulation.

In our Left & the Law segment on June 8th, Mike and I take up the stories and strategies behind the recent jury trials in California and New Mexico. And we look at how lawsuits signify a shift in public views on social media and how they affect regulatory initiatives. We close the segment with some of the initiatives of young people as they struggle with intense ambivalence over the place of social media in their lives.

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Join us on the Old Mole Variety Hour on KBOO Community Radio and listen to the whole 25-minute segment on Monday!

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Left theorists invoke melancholia in describing the pervasive malaise that often characterize left-wing movements during reactionary periods. In History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, political theorist Theodor Adorno addresses the depressive emotional currents of left-wing culture. For Adorno,

“This is a melancholy that has become active, not a melancholy that makes do, that remains stuck in an unhappy consciousness, not at home with itself, but a consciousness that exteriorizes itself as critique of existing phenomena.”

In joining campus screenings of The Palestine Exception, directed by Jennifer Ruth and me, I am often asked to speak as a clinical psychologist to students’ feelings of distress. Student activists describe feeling traumatized and suffering from symptoms of PTSD in the wake of punitive actions on the part of their universities. The sense of joyful community and revolutionary possibilities that accompanied the encampments and occupation of buildings in 2024 have given way to states of depressive defeat. For students from more protected backgrounds, there is often a sense of shock. How could these administrators, positioning themselves in their own PR as in loco parentis, beat up on young people on their campuses?

Taking on the power of pro-Israel board members in their schools and pro-Israel lobbies in liberal politics, including the Democratic Party, exposed these students to the brutality of administrative authority in ways many had never experienced.

Responding to students’ distress, I sometimes suggest that the group mood seems melancholic rather than traumatized or depressed. Trauma and depression are part of a clinical vocabulary of emotional impairments and mental disorder. Melancholia, on the other hand, is a more dynamic state of mind. Assaults on shared moral purpose and political agency do hit hard emotionally. And in realizing the power of oppressive forces to crush resistance, activists must face the necessary process of gathering up and holding the ideals and forms of solidarity that have made Gaza a moral compass for our era. This is a form of melancholic work.

Political theorists such as Wendy Brown and Judith Butler, along with Frankfurt School theorists Walter Benjamin and Adorno of generations prior, have contributed to a rich literature on left melancholia. While most of these theorists depart in critical ways from psychoanalytic readings, they all make use of Sigmund Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia as a touchtone text. Freud wrote this essay toward the end of the First World War and his clinical thinking carries the emotional weight of the War’s large-scale death and destruction. For Freud, psychoanalysis offers insights on grief as a necessary human capacity as well as on how grief takes regressive or pathological forms.

Freud distinguishes between normal mourning and melancholic depression: the “inhibition of the melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing him so entirely.” The melancholic (the depressive), unlike the mourner, refuses to accept the reality of the loss. This psychological work that eludes observation—the internal work that “we cannot see”—centers on protecting an internal representation of the beloved lost object (a person, an ideal, a movement) while modifying in some way the relationship of the self (or the group) to that object. The mourner, according to Freud, must eventually accept the loss and reinvest their motional energy in new attachments. The melancholic refuses the finality of the loss and intensifies emotional investment in the lost object. The melancholic remains in a state of unstable revolt against what Freud terms the “reality principle.”

A range of political theorists have drawn on Mourning and Melancholia to frame the disturbing emotional states that follow in the wake of crushing political defeats. Nouri Gana’s recent book, Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World enlists psychoanalysis in arguing for the centrality of melancholic loss to Arab subjectivity and politics. In his analyses of recurring motifs in Arab films, short stories, plays, and poems, Gana defends melancholy as the only ethical and political orientation to the persistence of loss into the present. The ethics of these works center on a refusal to accept the oppressor’s demands for closure, for burying ideas and ideals along with the dead. Unlike post-traumatic stress conditions, there is no “post” for people suffering ongoing violence and displacement. And unlike assertions of postcolonial conditions in the Arab world, there is no postcolonial genuine sovereignty.

The American left has tended toward manic reactions (Fight! Fight! Fight!) in fending off dark moods. In “Resisting Left Melancholia,” a 1999 essay written by political theorist Wendy Brown, melancholia is framed as a pathological political symptom. She diagnoses the problem as centering on leftists’ tendency toward narcissistic identification with past historical possibilities. She draws on the work of critical theorist Walter Benjamin who similarly diagnoses melancholia as a political pathology. “Left-wing melancholy” was the title of an essay written by Benjamin in 1931 for the German newspaper Die Gesellschaft. The left melancholic, from the perspective of Benjamin, retreats into a narcissistic fixation on a dead past. Speaking to different periods of political reaction, Brown and Benjamin frame political melancholia as regressive. It is a conservative backward-looking stance, more attached to cherished ideas than to the world of living struggle.

Peter Gordon takes up the emotional toll of left defeats while offering an analysis more in line with Adorno. In “Why the left needs melancholy,” Gordon begins by noting that melancholia is a mood of defeat.

“In the face of so much suffering and injustice,” he insists, “the melancholic’s refusal to move on with business as usual already bears within itself a kind of resistance, a recognition that all is not right in the world and that something must be done.”

In A Politics of Melancholia, authors George Edmundson and Klaua Mladek suggest that the revolutionary potential of melancholia lies in how we understand the place of loss and grief in movements of resistance. The conservative melancholic refuses to relinquish an idealized representation of the past. It is backward looking. What the authors term the “political melancholic” refuses to give up on a vision of the world that has not yet been realized. It is a world that has been imagined and fought for under conditions that make it seem an impossibility.

There are no immediate antidotes for these melancholic currents in left politics. The challenge for activists is in developing practices that acknowledge and positively value the range of affective currents that accompany long-term struggles. As one of the students offered in our post-screening discussion, “We did not know how hard and long this fight for Palestinian freedoms would be and how much it is part of larger systems of oppression.”

My response, which I often offer to young activists, was to point out that they have rich legacies of struggle to draw on. Oppressed people have found creative ways to resist and to hold onto connections to land and identity, even in the face of genocide. Gaza makes moral claims on all of us to resist. If Palestinians refuse to accept the conditions of their subjugation, then we in solidarity must refuse as well.

I close with a poem written by the late Gazan poet Refaat Alareer shortly before his death. It’s titled “If I Must Die.”

“The Palestine Exception is a searing and unflinchingly honest account of what it means to stand for something, and the immense consequences of speaking up. This is a vital documentary for our present moment, but also a terrifying look at how institutional power has always tried – and will always try – to enforce silence on every last one of its critics.”

Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Winner of National Book Award

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This aphorism was not a prohibition against poetry per se nor a taboo against art that represents the Holocaust. Rather, Adorno was condemning cultural practices that provide a comforting distance from the suffering it represents or from the societal dynamics that give rise to industrial scale murder. At the same time, Adorno insisted that it is “in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.”

As a director of The Palestine Exception and SUMUD: A Doctor’s Report on Genocide and Survival in Gaza, I was invited along with my team to film the opening of Gaza—No Words—See the Exhibit at the Venice Biennale with the aim of producing a documentary that tells the story behind the exhibit.

In filming the event, I was reminded of Adorno’s warnings on the politically repressive uses of art as well as his hopes for art that is faithful to its subject matter.

This hopeful vision was palpably on display at the opening in the main salon of the Palazzo Mora at the European Centre—one of the spaces for the officially recognized Collateral Exhibits. These independently organized projects undergo a competitive review process to be accepted as part of the Biennale outside of the national pavilions. Much like Palestine itself, these exhibits on the periphery are animated by a spirit of persistence.

If the Venice Biennale is the Olympics of the art world (as its often described), the collateral exhibits are its long-distance runners. This most decidedly characterizes Gaza—No Words—See the Exhibit. As large protests and boycotts of Israel’s participation shook many of the national exhibit halls, the embroidery exhibit at the Palazzo Mora offers a consoling space to think, to feel and to recognize what is happening in Gaza.

Faisal Saleh explained the meaning of the “No Words” in the exhibit’s title. Saleh is founder and director of the Palestine Museum US and part of the team that produced the exhibit.

“As the title of this exhibit suggests, no speech and most certainly no set of words from this podium can fully capture what hangs on these walls today,” Saleh explains in his opening remarks. He describes the urgency of the project as global protests fail to stop the genocidal destruction of Gaza. “It was a bold proposal and a painstaking undertaking and the result is this exhibit. It is the result of over 60 embroiderers, five field coordinators and a team of four.”

Two of the team members—Jan Chalmers and Ibrahim Muhtadi—were not able to be present for the opening ceremonies. Team members Faisal Saleh and Jehan Alfarra were there to present the project to the attendees gathered.

Along with Saleh, Alfarra spoke to the meaning of “No Words” in the exhibit title.

“We will make no attempt to explain or describe these stories. The panels speak for themselves. These remarks are simply an offering of gratitude and recognition to all those who made this work possible. And they are in honor of all the women who spent months stitching scenes most of the world could barely bear to look at for seconds. And with that said, I would first and foremost, like to begin by expressing my utmost appreciation for Faisal Saleh standing before you today and for the Palestine Museum, U.S., without whom this exhibit would not have been possible.”

The creativity, caring and deep suffering of the Palestinian people are woven into these magnificent panels. And they collectively present an indictment of Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign. Each of the 100 panels tells a story of horrific suffering. But they project a feeling of deep intimacy as well. The panels are based on photographs, many taken by photographers who took enormous risks in documenting the destruction in Gaza.

The photos were transformed into patterns that became the basis of this use of the traditional cross-stitch craft of tatreez to tell a collective story. The exhibit honors these heroic journalists who documented the genocide, many of whom died in the course of carrying out this vital work.

The exhibit also includes a video titled Cartography of Genocide produced by Forensic Architecture, based in the UK.

“With genocide, like any other military campaign, there’s an architecture to it,” founder Eyal Weizman explains. Their mapping of the systematic nature of the destruction includes definitions from the UN charter of 1948. “It’s about whether the scale of atrocities, whether the patterns between things that are happening constitute a systemic campaign that is designed to destroy people.”

This visual mapping of the structure of the genocide offers a distinctive counterpoint to the mournful beauty and intimacy of the embroideries.

It is an honor to be working with the Palestine Museum on a documentary that brings the story of these embroidery panels into the medium of a film. There will be words in the form of thoughtful observations and insights.

But as a film production team, we are guided by the quietly disturbing spirit of this project. Art can speak in ways that words fail. Art can provide new ways of seeing in the darkest of times.

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Please click the button below or scan the QR code to donate to the film.

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In solidarity,

Jan

It takes close to a day to travel from my home in Portland Oregon to Venice, Italy.

For those transporting the work on display at this exhibit, the journeys take weeks or months. The carriers are part of a global network reaching across the Mediterranean Sea and through various ports, borders, roadblocks and delivery stations to arrive in Venice.

This cargo began in the Palestinian villages and refugee camps where women embroiderers created 100 pieces in a year-long project funded through the Palestine Museum US and their Tapestry History Project. From Ramallah to Lebanon’s refugee camps and as far as New Zealand, Palestinian women have been embroidering panels to create a collective cross-stitched testimonial in solidarity with the people of Gaza. Each piece consists of 55,000 stitches, totaling 5.5 million stitches, and depicts scenes from the genocide in Gaza.

🏛️ The Exhibit

The exhibit is part of the official Collateral Event of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia and on display from May 9 through 22nd November 2026.

The creators of GAZA–NO WORDS have a vision of this work as an enduring record of the genocide. There is deep heartache, grief and mourning etched into the pieces on display. They also express collective outrage over the scale of the ongoing violence and a call to hold the perpetrators accountable.

GAZA - NO WORDS is visually bold and aesthetically moving as well. The 19 by 31-inch tapestries reflect the intricate beauty of tatreez (embroidery) as well as its history as symbol of Palestinian resistance. A centuries-old Palestinian tradition, tatreez is used to adorn wedding dresses and for other celebratory occasions. But much like the keffiyeh scarves, tatreez designs have been taken up as expressions of Palestinian identity and pride.

🎞️ The Documentary

I am honored to be working with Faisal Saleh and others on his team at the Palestine Museum US on a documentary that we hope to produce over the summer of 2026.

As a first step, editor Jeff Harshman and I worked with Faisal to create a trailer on the exhibit.

Watch Trailer

The film (likely 30-40 minutes in length) will tell the story behind the exhibit. That story includes the daunting journey of the carefully wrapped packages as they are passed person to person, via taxis, boats, cars and planes. It is a network born of creative strategies of resistance and movement across inhospitable borders. In following that journey, the film provides glimpses of the embroiderers as well, many of whom live under conditions of displacement and occupation.

Please follow this project as the production team and I report from the field.

If you haven’t seen the team’s previous films on Gaza, check out these documentaries from 2025: The Palestine Exception and SUMUD: A Doctor’s Report on Genocide and Survival in Gaza.

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Watch SUMUD Trailer

SUMUD is now available for streaming worldwide on Kinema.

The stream also includes the full panel discussion recorded after our premiere. The conversation is candid, searching, and deeply personal. We talk about what it means to document suffering ethically, about the burden carried by medical workers who return home, and about why storytelling still matters.

The stream will be available to watch anywhere in the world - with a suggested rental of $4.99 and a pay-what-you-can option.

Stream SUMUD on Kinema

I hope you’ll watch these films. I hope you’ll share them. And I hope you’ll continue to stand with those whose steadfast perseverance keeps truth alive.

In solidarity,

Jan

How do we understand the place of Noam Chomsky, one of the most revered intellectuals of the American left, and his place in this dark labyrinth? And is it the case that ideological differences or principles mattered little in resisting the seductive powers of Epstein?

As leftists, as well as people who are trying to understand Epstein’s monstrous network, what grace do we grant this old man who at the same time was seemingly in control of his powers late in life? He suffered a massive stroke in 2023 and now is reportedly incapacitated and living in Brazil where he and his wife Valeria Chomsky own a home. She speaks for him now during his debilitated state. But up through his early 90s, Chomsky remained mentally sharp and publicly active.

Disbelief, grief and outrage course through many indie news sites and podcasts as admirers of Chomsky struggle to make sense of revelations of the longstanding and close relationship between the two men. In the released files and email correspondence, there is nothing suggestive of sexual impropriety, no underage girls, no apparent sexual favors. But there was a kind of pleasure economy operating here even if it was not sexual in nature. As a feminist psychologist, I wanted to go beyond the sensational quotes available online and trace the course of this relationship through their correspondence over a number of years—a correspondence available through jmail.world—a brilliant research tool created by several techies at MIT. The site allows viewers access to Epstein’s personal emails.

Some defend Chomsky the same way that others in the Epstein class defend themselves: He didn’t know how vile Epstein was; he was manipulated by a masterful con artist; he was exploited during an emotionally vulnerable time in his life. Valeria Chomsky released a statement in February 2026 claiming that she and her husband were taken in by Epstein and that they were “careless” not to have thoroughly researched his background.

All of this feels quite lazy and inadequate.

The Linguist Takes on the Behaviorists

Before offering my psycho-analysis of this relationship, ruminations over how to think about it brought to mind memories of how I first learned about Chomsky and became an admirer. It was not in his political theorizing but through his interventions in psychology.

When I joined the psychology faculty at my university in 1980, Chomsky provided an arsenal of arguments to counter the operant behaviorists—the Skinnerians—that still dominated my discipline. I joined the faculty as a feminist psychoanalytic clinician with philosophical interests and an aptitude for attending to the practical tasks of the department. Early on, I found favor with my colleagues through lively intellectual repartee in the department’s conference room. The psychology rat lab on the fifth floor of Cramer Hall was still the epicenter of experimental research but the old paradigms were under strain.

In the famous debates between B.F. Skinner and Chomsky in the 1960s, the intellectual referees I followed called it in favor of Chomsky. He laid out early formulations of what he became most famous for as a linguist—his theory of universal and generative grammar. The theory became more abstract over time. But in that early counter to the behaviorists Chomsky’s model of language exposed the impoverishment of the behavioral models with their blank mental slates.

A Feminist Eye

Years into my academic career, I began to look at Chomsky’s theory of language with a more critical eye.

One memorable scene comes to mind. In Chomsky’s celebrated debate with Michel Foucault in the 1980s, Chomsky lays out what he views as the evidence for complex innate mental structures relatively independent of the influence of culture. “A person who is interested in studying languages is faced with a very definite empirical problem,” Chomsky asserts.

What is this empirical problem? Chomsky goes on to explain that the core scientific problem is “that of accounting for the gap between the really quite small quantity of data, small and rather degenerate quantity of data that’s presented to the person, to the child, and the very highly articulated, highly systematic, profoundly organized resulting knowledge that he somehow derives from this data.”

What is he saying here? The “degenerate quantity of data presented to the child” reflected Chomsky’s disregard—intellectually and emotionally--for the complex and sensuous surround of this world of the child.

Language for Chomsky was an internal affair and only indirectly related to social connection or culture. Imbued with Rousseauian romantic currents, Chomsky argued that humans are innately wired for creativity and freedom and that human realization centers on casting off the repressive constraints of capitalism and state structures. One can read in Chomsky echoes of Marx’s early theory of species-being and alienation as well—how capitalism estranges workers from their very nature as creative social beings. Chomsky’s increasingly abstract linguistics became a kind of defensive, intellectual edifice, however, disconnected from the messy currents of life. It confessed to a certain autistic way of thinking.

The Development of a Friendship

In the months before Epstein’s death in jail in 2019 Chomsky emails his friend to say that Valeria “is putting together documentation about the matter that I can use in a case around the children.” Chomsky’s adult children had expressed alarm over how funds in an estate set up through his deceased wife were being transferred to a marital fund for Chomsky and his new wife 35 years his junior. Noam and Valeria had sought Epstein’s counsel as someone with acumen in managing delicate financial problems.

And then Chomsky turns to Epstein’s own mounting problems in a passage widely cited and condemned in online discussions:

Beyond the glib tone of this email, Chomsky endorses the excessively defensive reactions associated with right wing men.

During this same period, Epstein offers: “You can stay in my apartment in New York as long as you live.”

Phases of an Intimate Relationship

In reading many hundreds of these email exchanges that took place from 2012 until just before Epstein’s death in jail in 2019, I noticed patterns that suggest phases in the development of their relationship. There was the courtship phase, then the challenges that produced a form of working alliance between them, and a later phase of renewed commitment and vows of their enduring bonds.

Close friends, much like romantic couples, often go through such phases. Epstein began his courtship of Chomsky in 2012 –a phase that continued over several years with Jeffrey’s regular offerings of gifts, dinners and visits to his many homes, interspersed with intellectual games and playful exchanges on topics of mutual interest. There were giddy expressions of affection on the part of both Epstein and Chomsky, joined by Chomsky’s new wife Valeria after they married in 2014. Emails are laced with Epstein’s frequent offers of sumptuous retreats and exciting dinner parties. The courtship between the two men extended early on to Valeria—a kind of third term in this bromance.

In 2015, the relationship turned to decidedly serious personal matters. On Feb 2015, Jeffrey writes to Noam. “I think we should set up the foundation so that valeria [sic] is taken care of if something were to happen to you…you can count on my help. but let’s not wait too long.”

The joyous meetings and playful emails of the courtship phase shifted to what clinicians often term the working alliance. Couples face life challenges and find out whether their capacities and interests are sufficiently aligned to continue on the road ahead. This opened a period of consultations that continued through 2019 on Chomsky’s tax issues and a lawsuit from Chomsky’s children that centered on claims around their father’s assets. Epstein regularly advised the Chomsky’s on legal and financial countermoves and how to protect their assets.

From the courtship phase through these somber consultations, we can see a consistent stylistic through line that Epstein adopted. It was notable in his other email correspondence but quite pronounced with Chomsky. Epstein would pick up a fragment of an idea, an element of Chomsky’s theorizing, particularly around generative language and linguistics where Chomsky’s influence was waning.

From November 2018, Jeffrey writes (verbatim from email): “What I’m suggesting is that what the term culture means is the same as what consciousness means. Culture can be described as Russell did for consciousness, the physics and math envy habit of trying to reassure things. We experience culture at a stubborn, transmitted, localized, contains memories, boundaries, dictum.” And so on.

Epstein’s intellectual overtures are stream of consciousness with many typos and sentence fragments. It was as if the restless mind of this would-be genius can’t settle down enough to keep up with the mundane task of writing. He is always flying somewhere and meeting interesting people. This frenetic, cryptic style of correspondence gives Epstein a kind of intellectual cover.

In his responses, Chomsky would gather up/cover up the fragments, often reframing what psychiatrists would call a “word salad.” And Chomsky expressed deep appreciation for Epstein’s brilliant insights.

In February 2018, Chomsky writes to Epstein, “Can’t thank you enough for what you did on this (advice on handling the legal problems with his children) -- a very small fraction of what we have to thank you for, by no means least, in fact most, just the gift of friendship over these years. And now off to prepare a class later today on the impending end of civilization.”

Indeed, in a character reference letter written on behalf of Epstein somewhere around 2017, Chomsky ends with lavish praise: “the impact of Jeffrey’s limitless curiosity, extensive knowledge, penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals is only heightened by his easy formality without a trace of pretentiousness. He quickly became a highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation.”

As Epstein coached Chomsky and his wife on their legal moves, Chomsky was advising Epstein on how to manage his own public relations problems. So this letter by a dear old man who is presumably bamboozled by this con artist grew from commitments made over an extended period of time that overlap with growing public knowledge of the seriousness of Epstein’s crimes.

The Ties that Bind

The centrality of Epstein’s ability to procure girls and young women for wealthy men can blind us to a recurring undercurrent in this sexually exploitive, misogynist world. The girls and women on display did grant these men a form of uber-class status. But their presence—too young or vulnerable to assert any real agency-- allowed for the free expression of homoerotic bonds as well. The exchanges around sex take on the tone of anxious immature boys. Girls and women are mere fetish objects in Epstein’s world. (Note: Freud developed the psychological concept of the fetish around this form of masculine anxiety and fear of women’s bodies. The boy or man fixates on an exciting part—a shoe, a foot--as a defense against the whole of what woman represents.)

In the course of couples counseling, the therapist often turns to how the two people met and what drew them together. For many of us as clinicians, we listen for fantasies and unconscious desires that can be part of the field of attraction.

And so in closing, I turn to the first emails between Chomsky and Epstein. It was March 30th, 2012, and it started with Lawrence Krauss asking Noam if he would like to be introduced to Jeffrey. Krauss himself had been accused for close to a decade of sexual misconduct by students and fellow faculty members (situations for which he had sought Epstein’s advice). Chomsky stood by his friend saying he had no knowledge of any inappropriate behavior.

Krauss writes: “If you are willing, is there anyone I can have him (Epstein) contact to set up an appointment? I will owe you. He is an interesting fellow in any case.”

Noam responds: “Just suggest to him to write to me. It’s a Sunday, I think, so it won’t be when I’m at work.”

Lawrence replies: “You are in. He will meet with you. You of course owe me big time now. I was hoping I would get him out to Arizona for our deception [sic] meeting. So all I got out of the email was a meeting for you. Enjoy. Lawrence.”

This was before the troubles with his children were on the horizon and before the new wife. There was something Noam was to enjoy here and something that would be owed through this meeting.

In conclusion, I would say that as important as Chomsky has been as a left scholar, he is no friend to feminists. This kind of willful blindness and what Valeria Chomsky describes as their “carelessness” do matter.

After spending many days reading these emails, I was left with a sense of disappointment and disgust but not with the crushing loss of a hero. As feminists, we may be less vulnerable than our male comrades to over-idealization. We have had to collectively work through our daddy issues.

Targeting “Wokeness” in the Military

Early in his tenure as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth targeted the problem of “wokeness” in the US military. The US lost the wars it fought in the 21st century, the Secretary asserts, because of a corrosive feminizing of the war machine. After repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Hegseth became a Fox News host. He gained prominence for rallying around service members convicted in military courts of war crimes—an ominous portent of things to come.

Outrage over “wokeness” has circulated in rightwing media for years now, initially as attacks on student groups and academic programs associated with race and gender studies. The Trump regime has extended this war against wokeness to all branches of government, including calls for the erasure of the contributions of women and racial minorities to the armed forces. The rhetoric resonates deeply with white Christian nationalists and their fascistic whitewashing of US history.

Reactionary Masculinity

But most palpable in this crusade is its reactionary vision of masculinity. Hegseth vows to return the military’s focus to killing the enemy unconstrained by the law or rules of war. “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” he raps. “Violent effect, not politically correct.” And as the US and Israel wage war on Iran, Hegseth barks threats like a playground bully: “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” As the US escalates into genocidal attacks and threats to destroy an entire civilization, Iran is showing that it can very much punch above its weight.

Mental Health, War Stress, and Military Adaptation

In 2010, I submitted a proposal to the US Army to make a documentary on how the military was handling mental health problems among troops in Afghanistan. Repeated deployments—some service members signing up for third or fourth deployments after being offered cash bonuses—raised public alarm over the emotional costs of the Long War. Further, the Defense Department’s expanded reliance on Reserve Units, as well as rising suicide rates in veterans, added to public concerns. In response, the Department of Defense for the first time in the history of American wars embedded Combat and Operational Stress Control (COSC) units in forward operating bases in Afghanistan. Multidisciplinary teams—psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and occupational therapists—were placed in military bases in combat zones to provide short-term interventions for soldiers suffering psychiatric symptoms or acute stress reactions. The mission of the stress control units centered on returning soldiers to duty quickly rather than evacuating them.

Proposal to Document Combat Stress Control

My proposal to the Army went something like this: There is a military literature that dates back to Freud after the First World War discussing ethical conflicts for military clinicians in treating soldiers showing symptoms of emotional breakdown while returning many of these same soldiers to duty. The public needs to be educated on how the military is responding to these conflicting demands and to learn about the expanded role of combat stress control in the war in Afghanistan. As a clinical psychologist, academic and documentarian, I am uniquely equipped to tell that story.

The proposal process through the Army and clearances through the Pentagon and ISAF/NATO in Afghanistan were indeed daunting. As a feminist scholar and anti-war activist, my chances of approval would seem doomed from the start. But a convergence of forces opened space for this project.

A Moment of “Wokeness” in the Military

Indeed, 2010 was a year of wokeness in the military. The officer in the Oregon Army Reserves who supported my project and recommended me to her superiors had just been promoted to Colonel. She had also married a woman in Oregon earlier that year as the military was assessing the costs of its policies on homosexuality. (By 2008, more than 12,000 officers had been discharged from the military for publicizing their homosexuality.) On December 18, 2010, the Senate overturned the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy by a 65-31 vote, which President Barack Obama signed a few days later. The repeal allowed gay and lesbian military members to serve openly in the armed forces.

It was the year when military units across the country were required to create task forces on sexual assault in the military and when military commanders were required to investigate complaints of sexual abuse or harassment.

It was the year when training for units deploying to Afghanistan included lectures on the oppression of women under the Taliban and on boosting public support for the mission by positioning the US military as the defender of Afghani women.

It was the year when service members were encouraged to get counseling and to interpret their feelings of vulnerability and disabling symptoms as strengths. Posters in VA clinics invited veterans to see that “it takes a strong warrior to get help.”

The New Military

At the center of this era of the New Military was the expanded role of mental health professionals in the management of warfare.

My film, MIND ZONE: Therapists Behind the Front Lines–stayed true to the promise of my proposal. But like wars themselves, documenting wars carry unintended consequences. Some of the supporters of MIND ZONE felt betrayed by the film while others–including featured clinicians–defended the documentary as presenting a respectful picture of the pressures they were under and the complexity of their mission.

The Army had given me complete editorial control with two conditions: 1) that the film not expose information or sites that would risk the military operation and 2) that the film not include images disparaging of US service members. After reviewing a cut of the film for distribution in early 2012, the U.S Army Office of the Chief of Public Affairs in Los Angeles signed off that those two conditions were met.

Colonel David Rabb

Filming started in 2011 as my crew and I interviewed Colonel David Rabb whose story is closely followed in the film. He often expounded on the new ethos of the military. He was a social worker and Army reservist working in a VA center in California and as a Black man he had complaints about racism in the promotion of people of color to higher ranks. But he was a true believer in progress in the military and of the righteousness of campaigns ushered in with the War on Terrorism.

“This is a very different leadership in the Army than the one of my father’s generation,” he explained. “This is no longer the world of the drill sergeant barking orders and humiliating those under his command.”

Ethical Tensions

In June of 2011, my crew and I filmed Col Rabb’s unit—the 113^th Medical Detachment—as they trained at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) in Washington State and as they prepared to deploy to Kandahar, Afghanistan later that month. The previous year, reports circulated in the media of soldiers with a Stryker Brigade based at JBLM accused of killing Afghan civilians.

Members of this platoon were accused of staging combat situations to deliberately murder unarmed Afghan civilians for sport in Kandahar province and collecting body parts as trophies.

Further, military psychiatrists at JBLM were under Congressional investigation for reclassifying service members diagnosed with PTSD to make them re-deployable. These cases weighed heavily on the 113^th as they navigated the daunting mission ahead.

There were other haunting pictures that complicated the mission of stress control. In a training session for Oregon Army Reserve members joining the 113^th, one extensive presentation showed torture scenes at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq—pictures that circulated widely in the media—as a lesson on the risk of troops descending into sadism. The Department of Defense had faced a full-blown crisis over images of American service members torturing and sexually abusing prisoners. Stripping prisoners of their clothes was a common form of sexual humiliation and degradation there. Obama, who had initially agreed to release photographs, changed his mind after lobbying from senior military figures. Obama stated that their release could put troops in danger and “inflame anti-American public opinion.” Further, pictures of political prisoners tortured through “enhanced interrogation techniques” at Guantánamo Bay represented another public relations crisis for the military.

For many parents who sent sons and daughters into these conflict zones, the fear was that the military was turning their children into monsters.

War Narratives

The war in Iraq had become a bad story. The war in Afghanistan was a better story for the military and for President Obama as he authorized in 2009 a massive troop surge. For Obama, too, the campaign in Afghanistan was “the necessary war.” In that classical psychological defense of splitting, of cordoning a messy situation into good and bad elements, Obama sought political refuge in Afghanistan. It was a righteous cause, unlike the war in Iraq that his predecessor George W. Bush had launched against the protests of much of the world.

I was authorized to embed with a Combat Stress Unit deploying to Afghanistan because commanders were proud of this expanded form of caregiving in the theater of war. As a psychologist, the film became a case study in the problematic role of my own profession and other mental health professionals in the conduct of war.

Reception, Decline, and Historical Context

MIND ZONE was produced by Herzog & Co and completed in 2012. After Obama drew down troops and declared the war in Afghanistan to be essentially over that year, distributors lost interest. The film was now an old story.

Spanning four presidencies, the war cost over 2 trillion dollars and resulted in massive casualties before ending with a troop withdrawal in 2021 and the Taliban’s return to power.

The war killed an estimated 176,000–212,000 people, including 46,319 civilians.

None of the political or military leaders promulgating the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been brought to justice or faced demands for accountability. We shall see if the current regime of warmongers confronts a different fate.

We met last month at the Al Ard Film Festival in Sardinia. It’s wonderful to continue our conversation after the festival.

You can subscribe to Dr. Claudia Ortu’s newsletter on Substack for more of her work.

This was one of the most wonderful festivals I’ve attended. You also joined me for the Q&A after the screening of my film The Palestine Exception. Can you tell us a little about the festival and how you became involved?

The festival has been running for 22 years. I initially became involved as a translator and subtitler for the films. I also helped with Q&As conducted in English, since my academic background is in English linguistics and discourse analysis.

Because of that expertise, I’ve always contributed to the linguistic side of the festival—translation and interpretation. But over time I’ve managed to reshape my role as an interpreter making it less technical and hybridising it with that of an interviewer/interlocutor.

Have you seen a blossoming of film culture focused on Palestine as you’ve reviewed submissions this year? It seems like a golden era for Palestinian filmmakers, though of course there is also a long history of cultural work through film. What stood out to you this year?

It is becoming harder and harder to select films, that’s for sure. As you said, there has been a flourishing of creative work about Palestine, and we have seen an increase in submissions both this year and last year.

I should admit something that feels strange to say as a scholar of discourse analysis. I have been losing faith in words lately.

Yes, I know—it sounds crazy. But we use words in every possible way to try to defend Palestinian life and rights, and at the moment it feels as if no word is strong enough.

That’s why cinema can be so powerful. Film brings together images and language, and meaning emerges from their interaction. Communication is always multimodal, but cinema highlights that in a particularly powerful way.

Our societies have become increasingly image-based. Perhaps the “naked word” now needs the support of images in order to reach people—to speak to those who share this moment in history with us.

I was curious about the challenges of translation during the festival, especially in the Q&A discussions around the film. The Palestine Exception examines words and slogans that have become controversial or condemned in the pro-Palestinian movement. Movements often develop slogans as a kind of shorthand speech, but these can later be repressed by dominant powers. How did those ideas translate to audiences in Italy?

That’s a very interesting question. Many of the concepts and slogans explored in your film are actually the same ones that are debated and criticized in Italy.

Take the phrase “From the river to the sea.” In demonstrations here, we often chant it in English rather than Italian. Partly that’s because the English version rhymes with “free,” while the Italian translation does not.

So sometimes we keep expressions in English when they have been adopted by the movement. They become part of the shared language of activism.

The word “Zionism” is another interesting example. Before the events in Gaza intensified, it was mostly used within activist circles. It belonged to a relatively small speech community.

But after Gaza, the term entered wider public discourse. For me, words are like coins—they only have value if people recognize them and agree on their meaning. Zionism has now become a word with broader “currency” in public debate.

People may disagree with you when you use the word, but they understand what you are talking about. And that is an important step.

Were there particular parts of the film that resonated especially strongly with Italian audiences?

Yes. The scenes showing police violence against encampments and demonstrations resonated deeply. Italian audiences recognize that kind of repression.

Police forces around the world increasingly use similar tactics, and many of those tactics have been developed through cooperation with Israeli security institutions.

Exactly—and that includes surveillance technologies as well.

But also the methods used to control crowds and suppress protests. Many activists argue that tactics first tested on Palestinian bodies are later used elsewhere.

This is why activists often say, “We are all Palestinians.” It is not just a symbolic statement. Palestinians are often on the front line, where certain forms of repression are tested before they spread globally.

So their struggle becomes connected to struggles elsewhere.

One of the things I noticed while making the film was how many young people identify with the Palestinian cause. They see connections between settler colonialism, capitalism, racism, and other systems of oppression. They are horrified by the violence but also inspired by Palestinian resistance. Is that something you see in Italy as well?

Definitely.

You reminded me of an idea discussed by the scholar Saree Makdisi in the film: oppression exists because there is resistance. Oppression is a response to people refusing to submit.

Palestinians refuse to accept a life reduced to mere survival. Because they refuse, they are punished.

The same dynamic appears elsewhere. When people refuse to live only as consumers or producers within a system—when they say, “I am a human being with ideas and principles”—that challenges the system.

Students demonstrated this very clearly. They said: “My career is not the most important thing. My humanity is.”

That is something the state and the economic system struggle to tolerate. They prefer individuals who only pursue personal success within the existing structure.

When people insist on being human beings rather than cogs in a machine, that becomes threatening.

I’d like to conclude with a quote from the Marxist cultural theorist Antonio Gramsci, who was from Sardinia. His famous line reads: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” He wrote this while imprisoned by Italian fascists. How does that quote resonate with you today?

Yes, that quote—about the “morbid symptoms”—is very well known here.

I’ve actually used it recently in an article I wrote about the criminalization of protests. In Sardinia alone, 79 people are currently under investigation for participating in demonstrations.

So I wrote that these prosecutions are exactly what Gramsci described: the “monsters” that appear when the old world is dying but refuses to disappear.

The system senses its own decline and reacts violently in order to delay that process.

But we must remember the other side of the quote: the new world struggling to be born. Our task is to organize so that this new world can emerge.

And in many ways, we are learning from Palestinian resistance. Resistance can take many forms—from students pursuing their education despite everything, to mothers caring for their children, to people simply insisting on their right to dignity.

All of these are forms of resistance.

So the key word for me is organizing. We organize so that the new world can be born.

And perhaps, continuing your metaphor, there are many midwives helping to bring that world into being.

Exactly.

Thank you so much for joining me today, Claudia Ortu. It was an honor to present The Palestine Exception at the festival this year, and please extend our solidarity to your colleagues and comrades.

Thank you.

The Palestine Exception is a searing and unflinchingly honest account of what it means to stand for something, and the immense consequences of speaking up. This is a vital documentary for our present moment, but also a terrifying look at how institutional power has always tried – and will always try – to enforce silence on every last one of its critics.

Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Winner of National Book Award

Watch on Watermelon Pictures

Watch on Amazon Prime Video

▶️ Now Available for Streaming on Kinema

I’m excited to let you know that SUMUD is now available for streaming on Kinema.

The stream also includes the full panel discussion recorded after our premiere. The conversation is candid, searching, and deeply personal. We talk about what it means to document suffering ethically, about the burden carried by medical workers who return home, and about why storytelling still matters.

The stream will be available to watch anywhere in the world - with a suggested rental of $4.99 and a pay-what-you-can option.

Stream SUMUD on Kinema

🎥 Free Screenings for Teachers, Community Organizers, and Groups

For teachers, community organizers, and groups, SUMUD is also available directly through our website for educational screenings. I have long believed that films do their deepest work in shared spaces - in classrooms, union halls, community centers - where difficult conversations can unfold collectively.

We are making the film available free of charge to activist organizations and educators.

Host a Screening

From our theatrical premiere to festival screenings and online conversations with colleagues and audiences, these gatherings have been powerful reminders of how film can open space for collective reflection and engagement. I’m grateful to the many organizers, collaborators, and viewers who continue to bring these conversations to life and sustain the broader movement for justice and dignity for Palestinians.

“The closest sort of English analogy to sumud is steadfastness--this notion of standing your ground, of withstanding. A large part of the reason why it has come to take on the meaning it has, particularly with respect to the occupation of Palestine and to the myriad indignities to which the Palestinian people are subjected on a daily basis, is because it relates to the notion of not just steadfastness, but steadfastness in the face of glaring asymmetry, asymmetry of violence, asymmetry of resources, and so on and so forth.”

- Omar El Akkad, SUMUD documentary

🎞️ The Palestine Exception Screening at Al Ard Film Festival

In February, I was honored to screen The Palestine Exception at the Al Ard Film Festival, held annually in Cagliari, Italy. The festival brings together filmmakers, scholars, and audiences committed to exploring Palestinian history, culture, and political struggle through cinema.

Sharing the film in this international setting created space for thoughtful dialogue about academic freedom, censorship, and solidarity movements on university campuses, and we were grateful for the engaged audience and the meaningful conversations that followed the screening.

🎞️ SUMUD Screening at Doctors Against Genocide

On March 1, Doctors Against Genocide hosted a special webinar featuring a screening of Sumud: A Doctor’s Report on Genocide and Survival in Gaza. The film was followed by a discussion with Travis Melin, the anesthesiologist and intensivist featured in the film who has completed multiple medical aid missions to Gaza, working at Al Aqsa, Al Awda, and Nasser Hospitals and supporting medical evacuations from northern Gaza.

🎞️ SUMUD Screening at Glia

On March 8, I will join an online event hosted in support of the work of the Glia Institute of Collective Care, beginning with a screening of SUMUD followed by a conversation about the ethical responsibilities of storytelling during times of mass violence. The discussion will explore filmmaking as a form of social memory - how narratives are shaped, whose voices are centered, and what responsibilities filmmakers carry when documenting suffering in real time.

Registration will be offered through a capacity-based donation supporting Glia’s wound care clinic in Gaza. In the spirit of shared responsibility, I invite you to contribute to help sustain the clinic’s essential work and keep participation accessible for others.

Donate to Register

❤️ Thank You for Your Support

Last month, we held the theatrical premiere of SUMUD in Portland, Oregon. I was deeply grateful for the many people who came together to support the film. The evening was a powerful reminder that filmmaking is always a collective effort. From the healthcare workers who shared their experiences, to the organizers, volunteers, and audience members who contributed their time, energy, and donations, the event reflected a spirit of solidarity and care.

I extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped make the premiere possible. Your support strengthens the ongoing movement for justice, dignity, and freedom for Palestinians.

Watch SUMUD Trailer

▶️ Now Available for Streaming on Kinema

I’m excited to let you know that SUMUD is now available for streaming on Kinema.

The stream also includes the full panel discussion recorded after our premiere. The conversation is candid, searching, and deeply personal. We talk about what it means to document suffering ethically, about the burden carried by medical workers who return home, and about why storytelling still matters.

The stream will be available to watch anywhere in the world - with a suggested rental of $4.99 and a pay-what-you-can option.

Stream SUMUD on Kinema

🎥 Free Screenings for Teachers, Community Organizers, and Groups

For teachers, community organizers, and groups, SUMUD is also available directly through our website for educational screenings. I have long believed that films do their deepest work in shared spaces - in classrooms, union halls, community centers - where difficult conversations can unfold collectively.

We are making the film available free of charge to activist organizations and educators.

Host a Screening

I hope you’ll watch this film. I hope you’ll share it. And I hope you’ll continue to stand with those whose steadfast perseverance keeps truth alive.

In solidarity,

Jan

In Arabic, SUMUD means steadfast perseverance. It is a word I have heard again and again over the past year - spoken quietly in hospital corridors, in the exhausted voices of doctors, and in the testimony of those who continue to bear witness as the world looks away.

As increasing numbers of journalists in Gaza are killed by Israeli forces, Gazan health care workers and international medical volunteers serve as vital reporters bearing witness to the ongoing genocide.

🎞️ Theatrical Premiere

On February 8, 2026, we held the theatrical premiere of SUMUD: A Doctor’s Report on Genocide and Survival in Gaza in Portland, Oregon. The film follows Dr. Travis Meleen, an American anesthesiologist volunteering at Nasser Hospital in Gaza as he works with Palestinian surgical teams that continue training at Nasser Hospital even as the medical center is under siege. The film includes commentary from Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian-Canadian journalist and writer reporting on the genocide. He is the author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

The premiere was followed by a panel discussion and audience Q and A with Dr. Meleen, El Akkad and myself.

Watch SUMUD Trailer

▶️ Now Available for Streaming on Kinema

I’m excited to let you know that SUMUD is now available for streaming on Kinema.

The stream also includes the full panel discussion recorded after our premiere. The conversation is candid, searching, and deeply personal. We talk about what it means to document suffering ethically, about the burden carried by medical workers who return home, and about why storytelling still matters. The total program running time is 66 minutes.

The stream will be available to watch anywhere in the world - with a suggested rental of $4.99 and a pay-what-you-can option.

Stream SUMUD on Kinema

🔊 Podcast on NPR Think Out Loud

Dr. Meleen and I joined Think Out Loud to discuss the making of SUMUD. In that conversation, we spoke about what compelled him to go, what compelled me to film, and what we hope these stories might move viewers to do. You can listen to the episode online through NPR. The exchange reminded me that documentary filmmaking is never a solitary act - it’s a web of conversations, risks, and responsibilities.

Listen to Podcast

🎥 Free Screenings for Teachers, Community Organizers, and Groups

For teachers, community organizers, and groups, SUMUD is also available directly through our website for educational screenings. I have long believed that films do their deepest work in shared spaces - in classrooms, union halls, community centers - where difficult conversations can unfold collectively.

We are making the film available free of charge to activist organizations and educators.

Host a Screening

I hope you’ll watch this film. I hope you’ll share it. And I hope you’ll continue to stand with those whose steadfast perseverance keeps truth alive.

In solidarity,

Jan

This year we’ve had over 110 screenings of The Palestine Exception across the country, at the Capital City Film Festival, Chicago Palestine Film Festival, and Morehouse College Human Rights Film Festival. And in Europe, Palæstina Film Festival (Denmark), Exile Film Festival (Sweden), and London Palestine Film Festival (UK). We are honored to receive the award of Best Documentary Feature at Morehouse College’s Human Rights Film Festival.

The Palestine Exception is a searing and unflinchingly honest account of what it means to stand for something, and the immense consequences of speaking up. This is a vital documentary for our present moment, but also a terrifying look at how institutional power has always tried – and will always try – to enforce silence on every last one of its critics.

Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Winner of National Book Award

Watch Trailer

New Release

J Haaken Productions has created a sequel to The Palestine Exception, SUMUD: A Doctor’s Report on Genocide and Survival in Gaza.

As increasing numbers of journalists in Gaza are killed by Israeli forces, Gazan health care workers and international volunteers serve as vital reporters bearing witness to the ongoing genocide. This film follows an American anesthesiologist volunteering in Gaza, with commentary from an Egyptian-Canadian journalist and writer reporting on the genocide. The doctor calls out the medical profession in the US where the “Palestine exception” on genocide in Gaza speaks volumes.

Watch Trailer

Global Spotlight

We were delighted to participate in the Climate Tipping Point 2025 film festival in Taipei, Taiwan where we screened Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance.

This film follows anti-nuclear activists, tribal leaders, scientists and attorneys as they draw lessons from the decades-long campaign to shut down the Trojan Nuclear Power plant in Oregon and extend those lessons into a new struggle to stop small modular reactors (SMRs) from being built across North America.

Watch Full Film for Free

Thank You to Our Friends & Supporters!

We want to express our deep appreciation to the many people who contribute to these documentary projects and who have helped us to maintain momentum. We continue to expand our networks to build our “anti-nuclear renaissance!” and to challenge institutional power that collaborates with the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

And finally, welcome to our new Communications Coordinator, Sarah Chivers. Most of us on the team are volunteers but we do have paid staff roles and hard costs associated with screening events. So please help us keep these shows on the road! Support independent activist cinema!

Thanks so much,

--Jan