(JNS) A 2017 book that is part of a sample reading list for an upcoming Princeton University humanities course has drawn charges of antisemitic blood libels. It also raises broad questions about academic freedom and what kinds of scholarship are appropriate for classroom study.

The controversy surrounds The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, by Jasbir Puar, a professor.

“Puar’s analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel’s policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury,” the press states. “Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies.”

“Re-orienting healing as a decolonizing process enables students to re-politicize personal trauma as it intersects with global legacies of violence, war, racism, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, orientalism, homophobia, ableism, capitalism, and extractivism,” per a description of the course on the Princeton site.

“Every semester, on campuses across the United States, students are shortchanged by their biased, one-sided and virulently anti-Israel syllabi that present materials uncritically,” wrote Miriam Elman, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, on X (formerly Twitter).