Students Call to Fire Art Professor Who Posted Video Mocking Palestine Supporters
Two pupil teams at Manhattan’s Hunter College are calling for the dismissal of Israeli-American artist Tamy Ben-Tor, a visiting adjunct professor on the faculty’s MFA Program in Studio Art, after she posted a video performance on her Instagram that activists say mocks Palestinian individuals and their supporters. The four-minute video exhibits Ben-Tor carrying a masks and talking as a Western supporter of Hamas.
Ben-Tor posted the clip on October 19 to the Instagram account she runs with fellow Israeli artist and collaborator Miki Carmi. In the video, the artist delivers a sarcastic monologue whereas carrying a masks that many on social criticized as a “racist caricature” of Arabs or Palestinians. Some critics used the time period “Arabface” in describing the artist’s efficiency.
“Dear Hamas freedom fighters, I’d like to start by acknowledging that I just had a cappuccino on the land of the Lenape people,” Ben-Tor begins. “I’m still on the fence about the massacre of the babies,” she says later within the video, an obvious reference to the widespread however unproven declare that Hamas beheaded 40 infants. “On the one hand, they were colonizing babies, they were Zionist babies,” the artist continues. In one other a part of the video, she says, “I wish there were some Lenape around that I could give a cake to … but there are no Lenape left for me to speak to unfortunately.”
On October 22, two pupil teams — Palestine Solidarity Alliance (PSA) of Hunter College and CUNY for Palestine — shared an edited version of the video to which they added written and visible context detailing the climbing dying toll in Gaza. Israeli airstrikes have killed over 5,000 Palestinian individuals in Gaza for the reason that October 7 Hamas assault that killed 1,400 Israeli individuals; Israel’s siege on Gaza has left the area’s 2.3 million residents with out clear water and electrical energy and 1.4 million individuals with out properties.
PSA for Hunter and CUNY for Palestine say that Ben-Tor’s efficiency “mocks Palestinians and students supporting Palestine” and additional provides to “the onslaught of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic violence around the United States and especially within New York City.”
The pupil teams known as for Hunter to instantly terminate Ben-Tor’s employment and printed an electronic mail template that supporters can ship to the varsity’s management instantly.
“‘Art’ or ‘satire’ does not exist in a non-political vacuum and has been weaponized throughout the centuries to dehumanize marginalized people and to popularize oppressive and bigoted rhetoric,” the e-mail template reads.
In response to Hyperallergic’s request for remark, Ben-Tor stated that the masks “does not depict an Arab” and that the work “aims to depict the Western academics who side with Hamas, pointing it to their own racism of not distinguishing Palestinian civilians from Hamas organization.” She additionally blamed the backlash on the coed teams’ edited model of her unique clip.
Ben-Tor emailed an apology to management and college students in Hunter’s MFA Program in Studio Art however has not eliminated the video from her Instagram web page. Hunter College and the City University of New York (CUNY) haven’t but responded to Hyperallergic’s requests for remark.
