Open Letter to the City of Dortmund

We write to express our shock and disappointment with the City of Dortmund, for rescinding the Nelly Sachs Award for Literature from Kamila Shamsie because of her commitment to the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights. 

The Nelly Sachs Prize seeks to promote tolerance and reconciliation across cultures. Since Kamila Shamsie not only engages these themes directly in her fiction, but also exhorts the values of justice and fairness in her lectures and public writings, it is a sign of dark times that the City of Dortmund is punishing a writer for her support and advocacy of human rights. 

While the German Bundestad passed a motion in May 2019 labeling the BDS movement anti-Semitic, this judgment has not only been protested by Israeli and Jewish academics, but three German courts have since ruled in favor of the right to boycott. The most recent decision comes from the Administrative Court of Cologne, delivered on September 13, 2019, and with reference to the Bundestad motion stating that such “motions alone cannot justify, from any legal perspective, the restriction of an existing legal right.” Moreover, forty Jewish groups released a letter last year condemning the conflation of anti-Semitism with opposition to Israel’s policies and occupation. In this letter they concluded that such a conflation “undermines both the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality and the global struggle against antisemitism. It also serves to shield Israel from being held accountable to universal standards of human rights and international law.”

Given this background, the decision to rescind the Nelly Sachs Award for Literature from Kamila Shamsie is a disturbing one, and directly contravenes the mission of the prize itself. More disturbing is the City of Dortmund’s refusal to make public Kamila Shamsie’s response to its decision.  Because she deserves to be heard in her own defense, we include that powerful response here: 

“In the just-concluded Israeli elections, Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to annex up to one third of the West Bank, in contravention of international law, and his political opponent Benny Gantz’s objection to this was that Netanyahu had stolen his idea; this closely followed the killing of two Palestinian teenagers by Israeli forces - which was condemned as ‘appalling’ by the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. In this political context, the jury of the Nelly Sachs prize has chosen to withdraw the award from me on the basis of my support for a non-violent campaign to bring pressure on the Israeli government. It is a matter of great sadness to me that a jury should bow to pressure and withdraw a prize from a writer who is exercising her freedom of conscience and freedom of expression; and it is a matter of outrage that the BDS movement (modeled on the South African boycott) that campaigns against the government of Israel for its acts of discrimination and brutality against Palestinians should be held up as something shameful and unjust.”

We Call upon The City of Dortmund, as a steward of this important literary prize, to reverse its decision and so to fulfill the mandate of the Nelly Sachs award by demonstrating its commitment to a writer’s freedom of conscience and expression. 

Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University

Walid Afifi, University of California, Santa Barbara

Huma Ahmed-Ghosh, San Diego State University

Anthony Alessandrini, City University of New York, USA

Dina Al-Kassim, University of British Columbia

Anjali Arondekar, University of California, Santa Cruz

Colleen Asper, Princeton University

Ariella Azoulay, Brown University

Sandra Babcock, Cornell Law School

Ben C. Baer, Princeton University

Paola Bacchetta, University of California, Berkeley

Bobby Banerjee. Cass Business School

M. Theresa Basile, United Methodists' Holy Land Task Force

Wendy Belcher, Princeton University

Nina Berman, Columbia University

Mark Beissinger, Princeton University

Emanuela Bianchi, New York University

Purnima Bose, Indiana University

Elie Bou-Zeid, Princeton University

Brian Boyd, Columbia University

Renate Bridenthal, Emerita, City University of New York, Brooklyn College

Carole H Browner, University of California, Los Angeles

Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley

Susan Buck-Morss, City University of New York Graduate Center

Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley

Eduardo Cadava, Princeton University

Mrinalini Chakravorty, University of Virginia

Iain Chalmers, James Lind Library

James Chandler, University of Chicago

Zahid R. Chaudhary, Princeton University

Eva Cherniavsky, University of Washington

Eric Cheyfitz, Cornell University

Kirk Cheyfitz, Independent

Zinzi Clemmons, Occidental College

Kevin Coleman, University of Toronto

Laurence Cox, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Elyse Crystall, Univ of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Patricia Dailey, Columbia University

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, University of California, Los Angeles

Gina Dent, University of California, Santa Cruz

Susana Draper, Princeton University

Hester Eisenstein, City University of New York

Khaled Abou El Fadl, University of California, Los Angeles

Samera Esmeir, University of California, Berkeley

Daniel Garber, Princeton University

Richard Falk, Emeritus, Princeton University

Christiane Fellbaum, Princeton University

Margaret Ferguson, University of California, Davis

Gary Fields, University of California San Diego

Manzar Foroohar, California Polytechnic State University

Nancy Gallagher, University of California, Santa Barbara

Bishnupriya Ghosh, University of California, Santa Barbara

Daniella Gitlin, New York University

Tao Goffe, Cornell University

Van Gosse, Franklin & Marshall College

Yogita Goyal, University of California, Los Angeles

Molly Greene, Princeton University

Inderpal Grewal, Yale University

Larry Gross, University of Southern California

Sarah Gualtieri, University of Southern California

Joshua Guild, Princeton University

Gerry Hale, University of California, Los Angeles

Sarah Hamerman, Princeton University

Gillian Hart, University of California, Berkeley

Laurie Kain Hart, University of California, Los Angeles

Clare Hemmings, London School of Economics

Sang Hea Kil, San Jose State University

Aleksandar Hemon, Princeton University

Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz

Neil Hertz, Cornell University

Charles Hirschkind, University of California, Berkeley

Ivan Huber, Emeritus, Fairleigh Dickinson University

Suad Joseph, University of California, Davis

Persis Karim, San Francisco State University

Zayn Kassam, Pomona College

Suvir Kaul, University of Pennsylvania

David Kazanjian, University of Pennsylvania

Jennifer Kelly, University of California, Santa Cruz

Haider Riaz Khan, University of Waterloo

David Klein, California State University Northridge

Dennis Kortheuer, Emeritus, California State University, Long Beach

Amanda Lagji, Pitzer College

Christina León, Princeton University

Ross Lerner, Occidental College

Mark LeVine, University of California, Irvine

Elliott Lieb, Princeton University Math and Physics

Ralph Litzinger, Duke University

Zifeng Liu, Cornell University

Ania Loomba University of Pennsylvania

Jennifer Loewenstein, Palestine Chronicle

Wahneema Lubiano, Duke University

Dana Luciano, Rutgers University

Nidhi Mahajan, University of California- Santa Cruz

Neepa Majumdar, University of Pittsburgh

John Makhlouf, Independent

Lori Marso, Union College

Bill Martin, Al-Quds Bard College

Cecelia McCall, Emerita, Baruch College,

Monika Mehta, Binghamton University

Natalie Melas, Cornell University

Joseph Margulies, Cornell University

Anne McClintock, Princeton University

V. Mitch McEwen, Princeton University

Zia Mian, Princeton University

Warren Montag, Occidental College

Diane Morrison, Emerita, University of Washington

Nasser Mufti, University of Illinois at Chicago

Ahlam Muhtaseb, California State University, San Bernardino

Barbara Nagel, Princeton University

Jamal Nassar, California State University San Bernardino

Diane M. Nelson, Duke University

Leila Neti, Occidental College

Ilhan Niaz, Quaid I Azam University

Rob Nixon, Princeton University

Adi Ophir, Emeritus, Tel Aviv University

Goldie Osuri, University of Warwick

David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University

Geeta Patel University of Virginia

Charles Piot, Duke University

Ismail Poonawala, University of California, Los Angeles

Margaret Power, Illinois Institute of Technology

Jyoti Puri, Simmons University

James Quesada, San Francisco State University

Nasrin Rahimieh, University of California, Irvine

Shahla Razavi, Mt. San Jacinto College

Rush Rehm, Stanford University

Henry Reichman, Emeritus, California State University, East Bay

Craig Reinarman, University of California, Santa Cruz

Russell Rickford, Cornell University

William I. Robinson, University of California

Stephen Roddy, University of San Francisco

Lisa Rofel, University of California, Santa Cruz

Jordy Rosenberg, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Catherine Rottenberg, University of Nottingham

Parama Roy, University of California, Davis

Srirupa Roy, Professor, University of Göttingen

Jeffrey Sacks, University of California, Riverside

Vida Samiian, University of California, Los Angeles

Paul Sawyer, Cornell University

Stuart Schaar, Emeritus, City University of New York, Brooklyn College

Ellen Schrecker, Emerita, Yeshiva University,

Joan W. Scott, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ

Andrea Scrima, Writer, Berlin

Sherene Seikaly, University of California, Santa Barbara

Mark Selden, Emeritus, State University of New York, Binghamton

Pamela Selwyn, translator, Berlin

Meheli Sen, Rutgers University

Eldar Shafir, Princeton University

Stephen Sheehi, College of William & Mary

Todd Shepard, Johns Hopkins University

David Simpson, University of California, Davis

Elin Slavick, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Judith Stevenson, California State University, Long Beach

Rei Terada, University of California, Irvine

Baki Tezcan, University of California, Davis

Daniel Tiffany, University of Southern California

Saadia Toor, City University of New York

Alberto Toscano, Goldsmiths, University of London

Devra Anne Weber, Emerita, University of California, Riverside

Elizabeth Weed, Brown University

Max Weiss, Princeton University

Robyn Wiegman, Duke University

Howard Winant, University of California, Santa Barbara

Joseph Winters, Duke University

Tamsen Wolff, Princeton University

Maria Woltjen, Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights

Jenny Xie, Princeton University

Nadine Zubair, University of East Anglia