I Was Fired From Emerson College For Speaking Out About Palestine, But I Refuse To Be Silent

Anna Feder is suing Emerson College for firing her over her Palestine activism. She says she will never stop advocating for a free Palestine.

By Anna Feder, Mondoweiss

After 17 years at Emerson College, I was fired for my activism in support of Palestinian liberation. My last day was October 11, 2024, just over one year into the genocide in Gaza and ongoing ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine.

Over my time at Emerson, I established my professional home, weathering the financial crash and the pandemic. During my time, I helped organize the professional staff with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and served my peers as a steward. I started a free, public film series with a strong focus on social justice cinema that I successfully ran for over twelve years. I had just succeeded in rebuilding the audience after we were forced to go online in 2020. Despite facing continual budget cuts most years that required me to maintain my popular program with fewer resources, the series flourished.

I was asked to develop and teach one of the few courses on cinema exhibition available in the country. I organized student trips to Sundance, the Camden International Film Festival, and South by Southwest (SXSW). I was the resident expert in cinema exhibition, connecting filmmakers, scholars, and audiences. The number of alumni who have reached out to me since my termination to tell me that the programs I ran led to opportunities to get their work seen and secure jobs is too many to count.

I spent years developing the Bright Lights program, and was given freedom to make decisions about which films to screen without input from the academic department I worked under or the Emerson College administration. That changed when I included the film “Israelism” in my fall 2023 lineup. I had previously collaborated with filmmaker Sam Eilertsen on a project and followed this film while it was still in production, so I was eager to screen it as soon as it became available. I invited Sam and co-director Erin Axelman to join me for the post-screening discussion on November 9, the date initially scheduled for the screening.