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Documentary explores the ‘Talmudic’ relationship between writer Robert Caro and his famous longtime editor
(New York Jewish Week) — Bob Gottlieb, who as editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker ushered into print some of the 20th-century’s most accomplished writers — Nora Ephron, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, John Cheever and Ray Bradbury, to name a few — believes editing is a service job, one that should go unnoticed by the reader.
And yet, it is the relationship between editor and writer that his daughter Lizzie Gottlieb, a documentary filmmaker, explores in her latest film, “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2022 and is now screening at theaters across the country.
Lizzie’s documentary sets out to explore the sometimes tense but ultimately caring relationship between her father, Bob, and one of his longest running authors, Robert Caro, who over the course of 50 years has produced “only” five major books: “The Power Broker,” a classic biography of urban planner Robert Moses, and four volumes of “The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson.”
Jews born and raised in Manhattan, Caro and Gottlieb have worked together since Gottlieb helped cut 350,000 words out of the first draft of “The Power Broker,” bringing it down to a book that ultimately ran 1,338 pages when it was published in 1974.
The thing they squabble over most often? Semicolons, still. Or, maybe, Caro’s overuse of the word “looms.”
The film, seven years in the making, takes on the ways Moses shaped New York City, the mysteries of LBJ’s political power, the sausage-making of bestselling books and the idiosyncrasies of two workaholics. It is also a story of two now elderly men — Caro is 87, Gottlieb is 91 — in what Bob Gottlieb calls an “actuarial” contest to finish Caro’s highly anticipated fifth volume of his Johnson biography.
“My dad and I are very close. We’re in constant contact with each other. If something funny happens, I call my dad. If something sad or confusing happens, I’ll call him. We’re just in each other’s lives all the time, so I didn’t feel that there was a secret I needed to uncover or something unexamined in our relationship,” said director Lizzie Gottlieb, who also teaches documentary filmmaking at the New York Film Academy.
“But the one thing I really knew nothing about in his life was his relationship with Bob Caro,” she said. “Because it was so different from anything else, and it was so kind of private. So really, the whole movie is the process of me understanding something that I didn’t understand before.”
The New York Jewish Week recently caught up with Gottlieb to talk about the making of the film, what it was like growing up in a high-profile family and how Jewishness impacts the work of the two men.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Lizzie Gottlieb is a documentary filmmaker who previously directed “Today’s Man” (2008) and “Romeo Romeo” (2012).
New York Jewish Week: You’ve been working on this movie for seven years. When did you realize you needed to make this movie and how did it get from start to finish?
For a long time, people would say to me, “You should make a film about your father.” I have an incredible father. He’s done a lot of great things. He’s interesting and funny. But I just thought, a film whose message is “look how great my dad is” is not a movie that anybody wants to see.
And then my father was given some award and Bob Caro was presenting the award. Bob Caro gave a speech about working with my dad over what was then 45 years. He talked about how he needs him, and he respects him and how they’re so productive. Then he started talking about their arguments. Somebody in the audience asked what they fought about and he said, “We have very different feelings about the semicolon.” Everybody erupted into laughs and it just hit me like a bolt of lightning. I thought, “This is the movie, this is the story.”
I wanted a story that had forward momentum and had something big at stake. A film about two men in their 60s who had done a lot of great stuff is not that interesting. But a film about two men who are hovering around 90 and are still in it, and engaged in their work, who have a dedication and passion and are in a race against time to finish their life’s work, felt really, really compelling to me.
People say, “Are you sure you should be wasting [Caro’s] time with a movie? He needs to be writing.” My producer Jen Small said we should put on the poster, “No Lyndon Johnson books were harmed in the making of this film.”
Do you think you had a perspective that made you the best person to try and talk about their relationship and document it, or was it challenging to make the leap of them being willing to open up to you?
There was definitely a pursuit of them. I called my father and I was like, “I have the best idea ever. I’m going to make a film about you and Robert Caro.” He said, “No way. Absolutely not. Never. It would not be good for our relationship.”
I just kept pestering and pestering and pestering him. Finally, he said I could call Bob Caro but he would say no and of course Bob Caro did initially say no. Then he said that he’d seen another film of mine and I could come and speak to him. Eventually, Caro said, “I’ve never seen a film about a writer and an editor, and I think this could be meaningful. I don’t think anyone’s ever seen this before.” So he let me start, but he had this kind of hilarious condition, which was that he didn’t want to ever appear in the same room as my father. That seemed funny and a little maddening and sort of endearing. It also seemed like an irresistible challenge to try to make a buddy film where they don’t appear in the same room as each other. A woman came to a screening recently and she said, “It’s a love story, and they don’t get together until the last scene.”
They both say that somehow the making of this movie has brought them closer together and that they have developed a real friendship after 50 years. Maybe just having to articulate what their relationship has meant to each other has made them appreciate it more.
What was it like to grow up in your household, with your father as this major editor and your mother (actress Maria Tucci) on Broadway?
I grew up in a really incredible household. My mother’s an actress, my father’s a publisher and editor. Our house was this kind of vibrant, boisterous household that was always filled with eccentric, incredible people — actors and writers. My dad’s writers would come for dinner and then my mother would go off and do a play on Broadway and then come back at midnight and make another dinner. It was incredible. So I feel that both of their work was kind of integrated into our life and into our family. All of his writers were really like family members, except for Bob Caro, who never came over and who I never met. I think that there’s something particular and peculiar about their relationship that they needed to stay apart and only come together over work. I guess that was something that intrigued me and that’s part of why I wanted to make the movie.
“Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” (Courtesy Tribeca Film Festival)
The Jewishness in the film is a bit more implicit, though you discuss it when talking about their upbringings. How do you think their Jewish identities have impacted their work?
I don’t want to presume to speak for either of them about their Jewishness. I know they both very strongly identify as New York Jews, which probably means something slightly different to each of them, but I think it’s essential to their definitions of themselves. Their humor may be particularly Jewish as well. David Remnick uses a word at the end of the movie, where he says Caro needs to have “sitzfleisch” in order to finish the book. It’s this Yiddish [and German] word that means the ability to sit for long, long periods of time and apply yourself to something. I think that that is something that these two guys have: It’s almost a Talmudic focus on their craft, and without that they wouldn’t be who they are. So to the extent that that’s a Jewish quality, I think that’s essential to their being, to their achievements. There’s something like a Talmudic scholar in going over all these things, the industriousness and the empathy as well, this sort of looking at a thing from all sides and dedicating yourself to this pursuit.
Bonus question: You briefly show the various eccentric collections your dad has, including plastic handbags and kitschy Israeli record albums from the ’60s and ’70s. What is that about?
Yes, he has a lot of collections. He also has a collection of macramé owls. There are many that are not in the movie. Maybe that’s a Talmudic thing as well, like a deep dive into whatever it is that is interesting to him. He says that every subject gets more interesting the deeper you get into it. When something strikes him as charming or funny or curious, he goes all the way with it. My mother doesn’t love them. There’s a little bit of a power struggle there, but he wins. You grow up with something and you don’t really think about it. But I knew I had to find a way to put this in the movie. People kept saying it’s irrelevant, it’s to the side, but I knew I had to because it’s so weird and says so much about him.
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The choice in Michigan between El-Sayed and Rogers is one all American Jews have to make
Sometimes the most important part of making a decision is articulating what the decision actually is. What are the choices?
So it is in Michigan, where Jewish Democrats are asked to choose between Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat who is against providing military aid to Israel and who campaigned with leftist streamer Hasan Piker, and Mike Rogers, a Republican and an election denier who would help keep the Senate in the hands of Donald Trump’s Republican Party, and who is presenting himself as the choice for Jews offended by El-Sayed. Either Rogers wins; El-Sayed wins without Jewish support; or El-Sayed wins with Jewish support. Those are the only possible outcomes.
Two groups have shown two different ways of dealing with this choice. The first, “Nonnegotiable Michigan,” a group of Jewish Michiganders including rabbis and cantors, has listed five “baseline needs,” or “nonnegotiables,” for their support, which include “Jewish sovereignty in Israel” along with full and safe participation in American life for all Jews including Zionists and a vision for a better Middle East.
The second, Michigan Jews for Democracy, has pledged its support for El-Sayed while noting some reservations and concerns. As one signatory, David Jaffe, put it in a statement released along with Michigan Jews for Democracy’s declaratory letter, “I am a proud Jew. I’m voting for El Sayed despite our disagreements, to support domestic policies that reflect Jewish values. I’m voting against grave threats to the safety of Jews and to American democracy. Rogers unquestioningly supports an authoritarian administration, its arbitrary arrests, its white Christian nationalism, and myriad terrible policies that have never in history been ‘good for the Jews.’”
In other words, one group has said the Democratic candidate cannot count on their support because of their disagreements with him, while the other has said that he has their support despite them. One is trying to get a candidate to say what they want to hear before the election; the other, that they will support him in the election and hope to be a “voice at the table” after.
Jewish groups are, of course, not the only ones who have grappled with such questions (“Nonnegotiable” calls to mind the “Uncommitted” movement to press for a ceasefire in Gaza and to end military aid to Israel from the 2024 presidential election). But to consider these two specific groups together is to consider a choice that an increasing number of Jewish Democrats — which is to say, the vast majority of American Jews — all over the country can expect to be making soon if they haven’t already had to.
Democrats (and younger Republicans) are less supportive of Israel and of US support for it. Candidates will need to speak to their voters and make campaign promises that are aligned with what those voters want to hear. And Jewish Democrats will have to be honest with themselves about the limited options before them and decide for themselves whether they want these candidates to win with or without them.
Per an AP-NORC poll from this summer, about 58% of Democrats think the United States is too supportive of Israel, while roughly half think Israel carried out a genocide in Gaza. Not every candidate who makes it out of a primary and into a general election will say the same, but many will, both because of their own conviction and because they want to win Democratic votes.
For some Jewish Democrats, this presents no tension or contradiction; the same poll said that roughly three in 10 Jewish adults agree that Israel carried out a genocide in Gaza. There are American Jews for whom El-Sayed’s vision for the Middle East is not threatening but comforting and correct. But about half of American Jews rejected the idea that Israel carried out a genocide. And, as JFNA found, the vast majority of American Jews want Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state (though just 37% now identify as Zionist). Many may feel a tug of war between their support for or attachment to Israel and their liberalism.
There will be some who say that American Jews should reject the idea that this is a choice, that there is no contradiction between being a liberal Democrat and supporting Israel. That is all well and good in theory, but, come election day, voters in Michigan will make a choice between these two men. There is El-Sayed, who does not want to send military aid to Israel and who said “hurt people hurt people” after Temple Israel was attacked, referring to the fact that the perpetrator’s family was reportedly killed in an airstrike in Lebanon (El-Sayed has since apologized). And there is Rogers, who says he loves Israel and also denies the results of the 2020 presidential election (and pushed to ban abortion and opposed marriage equality, to take two examples from his record).
While Jewish Democrats can, of course, try to influence where Democratic candidates and voters are on Israel, they do not get to dictate it. They do not, in the Michigan general election, get to choose a candidate who supports democracy and also talks about how much they love and want to support Israel. They get to choose whether they want El-Sayed to win and Mike Rogers to lose and, if so, whether they want to be a part of making it happen regardless of El-Sayed’s views on Israel. Every Jewish Democrat, like every other voter, will have to make that choice, and can withhold their vote for whatever reason. But they should be clear about the reality of what they are choosing between.
There are only so many choices in Michigan. And outside of Michigan, too.
The post The choice in Michigan between El-Sayed and Rogers is one all American Jews have to make appeared first on The Forward.
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Will today’s Netanyahu speech at the UN be his last as Israeli Prime Minister?
Benjamin Netanyahu has stood at the United Nations podium more often than any Israeli leader, using the world stage to warn about the threat from Iran, defend Israel’s policies and make his case with maps and other props.
On Thursday, Netanyahu is set to deliver his 15th address to the General Assembly, where he is expected to tout Israel’s military successes against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, push back against mounting criticism of Israel and lash out at New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has called him a war criminal. His U.N. appearances have served him politically back home. But with Israelis heading to the polls on Oct. 27 and Netanyahu facing another tough reelection fight, the question hanging over his familiar appearance at the green marble podium is: Will he be back next year?
The stakes in Israel’s election
American Jews and Washington insiders have watched Israeli elections closely from afar for decades. But the Oct. 27 Knesset election may feel unusually close to home.
After years of war in Gaza and Iran, and a right-wing government in which far-right cabinet ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have wielded significant influence, Israel’s standing in the United States has fallen sharply. Benjamin Netanyahu has become deeply unpopular among Democrats and American Jews, and many find themselves caught between a strong emotional attachment to Israel and growing discomfort with the actions of its government.
That makes this election more than the latest referendum on Netanyahu. Israel’s longest-serving prime minister is seeking a seventh term after surviving political crises that repeatedly appeared likely to end his career, most significantly after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
The election could help determine Israel’s direction after years of growing divisions over the Palestinians, the power of the religious right and Haredi parties and the future of the country’s democratic institutions. And if Netanyahu loses, a new government could try to repair Israel’s battered image in the United States, rebuild ties with Democrats and reconnect with parts of the American Jewish community — even without bringing nearly as much change in Israeli policy as some might hope.
The candidates and coalitions on the ballot
Six weeks before Israelis vote, at least 10 lists of 38 parties that submitted a slate have a viable chance of crossing the 3.25% threshold to win seats in the 120-member Knesset: The current ruling coalition, the Likud Party; the far-right Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism party; and the Haredi parties Shas and United Torah Judaism. Another Party competing for votes on the right is Amcha Yisrael, led by retired general Ofer Winter. The center-left vote is split among three parties: Yashar, headed by former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot; Beyachad, the alliance of former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid; and the left-wing Democrats, headed by former IDF major general Yair Golan. There is also Avigdor Lieberman, a headliner whose secular, nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu Party has been part of the anti-Netanyahu bloc since 2019.
The two Arab lists — the United List, a coalition of three Arab Israeli parties, and Ra’am led by Mansour Abbas — are generally counted outside either bloc. But their seats could determine who governs after the election. Ra’am, which joined the Bennett-Lapid government in 2021, has allied with Yoav Segalovitz, who formerly headed the Israel Police’s Investigations and Intelligence Division, to seek a role in a future government, while the United List has left open the possibility of supporting an opposition-led government.
Polls show neither Netanyahu’s bloc nor the parties seeking to replace him have a clear path yet to the 61 seats needed for a Knesset majority.
That leaves three possible outcomes for Oct. 27 amid a larger question being asked from Jerusalem to Washington: Will the Netanyahu era finally end? And if it does, how much would Israel actually change?
The most likely scenario: Anti-Netanyahu bloc wins — without a majority
Recent polls point to a familiar problem in Israeli politics — the kind of deadlock that paralyzed the country for nearly two years in 2019 and 2020. The Zionist parties opposed to Netanyahu could win more seats in this election than the bloc that made up the current coalition government of Likud, the religious right and Haredi parties, but still fall short of the 61 seats needed for a majority.
Eisenkot, who has emerged as Netanyahu’s chief rival, has floated a path to a government that does not require a majority in the Knesset.
He could attempt to establish a minority government while Arab lawmakers abstain during the confidence vote rather than formally joining his coalition. Eisenkot has carefully called this a “Zionist minority government,” saying he would make no deals with Arab parties. Netanyahu has made the prospect of an Eisenkot government dependent on the left and Arab parties a central campaign argument. He is betting that after the collapse of the Bennett-Lapid government in 2022 and the trauma of Oct. 7, even voters who want change may be wary of such an arrangement.
Israel’s Channel 12 reported earlier this month that Eisenkot’s campaign is concerned that some candidates on the slate could refuse to support such an arrangement, so he is considering internal measures to ensure that lawmakers who cannot support the government’s formation resign rather than break away.
But getting sworn in could dramatically transform the political landscape. Netanyahu would no longer be prime minister.
Eisenkot could then try to expand his government by attracting parties or members currently aligned with Netanyahu, consider a split-power government with Netanyahu, and if Netanyahu stepped aside after losing power, a new Likud leader might consider joining a government led by Eisenkot, Bennett or Lieberman.
Or the minority government could quickly fall apart, sending Israel to another round of elections. But this time Eisenkot would run as the incumbent prime minister, while Netanyahu would have to decide whether to try to return to power as the opposition.
Probable scenario: Netanyahu does it again
Netanyahu could outperform polls and receive enough seats to either block the opposition from forming a government or win an outright majority.
Netanyahu pulled off a surprise victory in 2015 and made a remarkable comeback in 2022 after losing power. In the last few years he has survived a long-running corruption trial and the failures of Oct. 7, which many predicted would end his political career. Instead, he’s kept his coalition together through a full four-year term.
Netanyahu is still considered the preferred candidate for prime minister by more than a third of the Israeli electorate and is dominating among voters identifying with the center-right.
In what would likely be the final term for the 76-year-old longest-serving Israeli leader, Netanyahu could seek a different legacy by moderating his tone and pursuing a unity government with Eisenkot or Bennett. But that would mean breaking campaign promises and abandoning some of the political partners who helped keep him in power. And his opponents would have to put aside years of deep distrust and disagreements – and justify the move in the name of political stability.
Possible scenario: The end of an era — but who becomes prime minister?
If Netanyahu’s bloc loses and he cannot find a way to stay in power, the election would not automatically make Eisenkot prime minister. Ending the Netanyahu era is one thing for the three opposition leaders. Deciding who replaces him is another.
Bennett and Lieberman come from different backgrounds than Eisenkot, with years of political experience and ambitions of their own. They could offer very different styles of leadership, with a dramatic change in tone and relationships but little change in policy from Netanyahu’s.
Bennett, 54, now polling as the head of the third-largest party, has done this before. After the 2021 election, his party Yamina won only seven seats. Yet the deadlocked political map allowed him to negotiate a rotation agreement with Lapid and become prime minister as head of a diverse coalition that, for the first time in Israeli history, included the participation of an Arab party.
During his short tenure as prime minister, he demonstrated calm and unity, and proved that removing Netanyahu would not automatically be interpreted as Israel moving left. He maintained good relations with former President Joe Biden and speaks fluent English. His stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — he opposes the creation of a Palestinian state and backs an aggressive approach toward Hamas — resonates with current Israeli public opinion. He also prioritizes military and civic service for all Israelis, an issue that has strained Netanyahu’s coalition and deepened tensions over exemptions for the growing Haredi population.
Lieberman, 68, may be the longest shot for prime minister, but perhaps the most experienced Israeli politician after Netanyahu. Serving in key government roles — leading the defense, finance and foreign ministries — in the past two decades, Lieberman has long warned about the dangers posed by Hamas and has criticized the government’s strategies in Gaza. In 2018, he resigned as defense minister over a ceasefire in Gaza, which he called “surrendering to terror.” His strong opposition to exemptions and subsidies benefiting the Haredi community has previously positioned him as a spoiler in earlier elections.
Recent polling puts his party at an average of eight or nine seats — enough to give Lieberman leverage in who leads the government.
After so many elections centered on whether Netanyahu could survive, this one may finally answer a different question: What does Israel look like without him?
The post Will today’s Netanyahu speech at the UN be his last as Israeli Prime Minister? appeared first on The Forward.
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One university canceled Hasan Piker. Another has him going to the chapel tonight.
University of Washington canceled him. University of Texas offered limited seating. On Thursday, Cornell University will open the doors of its historic chapel to host Hasan Piker, a controversial left-wing pundit with a history of antisemitic comments.
Three universities, three different receptions for the far-left Twitch streamer who has attracted millions of fans with his raw rhetoric that has veered, on more than one occasion, into antisemitism. Most recently, Piker warned American Jews who “keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel,” that someone could eventually “take action against” them.
Universities seem torn about whether – and how – to host him. Jewish campus groups are divided too. Jewish Voice for Peace invited Piker to Cornell, along with other student groups, while Cornellians for Israel opposed his appearance.
A statement released by leaders of Hillel at Cornell University emphasized their commitment to the campus as a place for disagreement, pluralism and debate, but put Piker in a different category.
“Mr. Piker’s views… go against our values as Americans and Jews, and his hateful, antisemitic rhetoric is repulsive,” the statement said.
That outrage has not discouraged campus groups including College Democrats, democratic socialists and pro-Palestinian organizations from booking the rising influencer, who has campaigned with a number of progressive Democratic candidates leading up to the midterm election. They say Piker, 35, is the voice their generation needs to hear to get out the vote.
“This is a guy that has a modern media presence,” one student told the Yale Daily News when Piker appeared there in April. “He reaches to our demographic exactly, people that are our age.”
But Piker, who told students that empathy was the core philosophical underpinnings of his political beliefs, has laughed at the suggestion that campus antisemitism is on the rise. In one livestream, he called a Jewish man a “bloodthirsty, violent pig dog,” accusing him of wanting to execute every Palestinian in the street. In another, discussing efforts to compel ultra-Orthodox Jews to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, he described them as “inbred.”
At Northwestern University, where he appeared in March, a student asked Piker how to talk about the Middle East conflict with his Zionist friends without ending the friendship.
“I think you shouldn’t give up on your friends and try to have normal conversations with them about how they probably don’t care about Israel as much as they think they do,” Piker responded, according to The Daily Northwestern, “because if they did, they’d probably live there.”
In his remarks at Yale, Piker called the wars that have cemented America’s imperial roots “an endless series of butcheries, each more perverse and more tragic than the last.”
“What was the point of defeating the Nazis if we went on to dominate so much of the globe as violently as we have?”
‘Heckler’s veto’
Ryan Ansloan, senior program counsel in the policy reform department of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), says those comments are not enough to bar Piker from speaking on campus.
Ansloan warns against canceling or preventing events based on what is known as a “heckler’s veto,” or the possibility that a percentage of the campus community is not going to like it.
“Ultimately it sends a bad message to the campus community that if you complain enough or threaten to disrupt an event you don’t like, you can get your way and prevent that event from even taking place,” he told the Forward. “That has implications that go beyond that single event and can have a chilling effect. As long as that student body remains on campus, that incident is going to stick in their minds.”
Conservatives have long championed free speech on campus, often accusing activists on the left of wielding safety concerns to disinvite alt-right speakers to campuses. Think British far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and his tour a decade ago; or Ann Coulter, who was harassed off the stage coincidentally at Cornell, her alma mater.
But since the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University last year, safety has been raised by activists on both sides of the political aisle, Ansloan said. According to FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database, many objections are tied to speakers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
For example, after opposition from the right, the University of Southern Maine in February revoked seven invitations and canceled a one-day conference titled “The Consequence of Palestine.”
Around that same time, the Catholic University of America rejected a request from the campus chapter of the Students Supporting Israel (SSI) to host U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, a Jewish congressman from Florida, who has drawn public condemnation for his anti-Muslim rhetoric, and Dany Tirza, a retired IDF colonel and security fence architect to speak on the West Bank barrier.
With Piker, outrage has paled to the demand. At Cornell, tickets for Piker’s appearance in the 600-seat university chapel were claimed within hours of their release. Piker also will be live streaming the event on his Twitch channel.
At the University of Texas, University Democrats planned to host the Sept. 30 event in a 466-seat auditorium, but 2,500 people signed up. Despite suggestions from campus police to find a larger venue, the university has not been willing to provide one with more space.
“This has the potential to be the largest political event in Austin since like 2018,” the group’s president Adit Raha told a local TV station, adding that he hasn’t ruled out shifting the event off campus.
“This event will be happening no matter what. We’re not going to cancel the event.”
But even Democratic politicians in Texas are concerned.
“Free speech allows difficult and controversial views, but it does not require anyone to stay silent when someone has a history of hateful comments about Jewish Americans, 9/11 and Hamas terrorism,” U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) wrote on X. “Jewish students at UT should not be made to feel targeted or unsafe on their own campus.”
Cancellation was the solution at the University of Washington for an upcoming talk in January 2027. While the university insisted in a statement that it’s “dedicated to the free exchange of ideas, including on controversial topics and involving provocative speakers,” it reviewed the process by which the Piker lecture was planned and determined it along with six other events “did not meet the necessary level of rigor for University-hosted events in the Speaker Series.”
A university spokesman clarified that those seven invitations, including Piker’s, did not undergo the committee review. No effort has been made to reschedule Piker and submit the invitation for review.
The statement continued: “Going forward, procedures will be updated to ensure the standards we have for University-hosted events like the Speaker Series are met, particularly so that we can help elevate the level of dialogue on divisive topics during a polarized time in our country.”
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