Law & Order: Higher Ed Unit

A professor of Arabic literature on seeing herself on the small screen.

By Huda FakhreddineJuly 16, 2026

• Television

• Politics

ON JANUARY 23, 2024, a fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania came up to me and asked if I had seen the latest episode of Law & Order. The episode, titled “Freedom of Expression,” first aired on January 18 and takes place at a fictional university closely resembling the University of Pennsylvania. The story centers on an Arab professor, Kendra Nasser, who has long dark hair, speaks with an accent, and wears a Palestinian keffiyeh. She organizes a Palestinian media festival, which stirs tensions across campus. The main action of the episode follows the murder of the university’s Jewish president, who is killed by a student. The professor is then accused of influencing the act. (There’s a subplot that concerns a Jewish Zionist extremist who murders a protester, but his swift death at the hands of police limits any deeper examination of Zionist terrorism.) The latter half of the episode shifts to the trial—the professor is the defendant, tried for her role in manipulating the student. The student enters a plea deal and testifies against the professor.

Spoiler alert: The jury finds the professor not guilty, and the student who committed the murder is sentenced to prison. In the final scene, while the young man is led away, the professor leaves the courthouse amid a throng of supporters waving keffiyehs. A babble of voices, presumably meant to resemble Arabic, fills the hall. The camera cuts from this scene of chaotic Arab/Palestinian celebration to a quiet, reflective exchange between the prosecutors, emphasizing that even with arrests and a verdict, the deeper conflict over speech, ideology, and responsibility remains unresolved. The portrayal of Arabs, pro-Palestinian students, and faculty is, to put it bluntly, deeply racist and offensive.

Every episode of Law & Order opens with the same promise: that conflict can be managed, that violence can be contained, that responsibility can be neatly assigned. In this episode, the crime is not only murder. It is also language—language that refuses to behave, language that has been assigned criminal intent: “Intifada,” “from the river to the sea,” “Palestine,” “justice,” “resistance,” “liberation.” Ultimately, the crime of language remains unsolved.

There are several extremely specific coincidences between my own life and work and that of the professor depicted in the show. For the past 10 years, I have worked as a scholar of Arabic literature at University of Pennsylvania. In 2023, I was a co-organizer of a literary festival on campus, and topic director at Penn’s Wolf Humanities Center. The center was renamed in recent years after Dick Wolf became its patron donor—the same Dick Wolf who is the creator and executive producer of Law & Order.

Watching the show crystallized something I already knew: my work was no longer treated as an intellectual or artistic contribution; it was now evidence against me. My field of scholarship had become a legal and criminal minefield.

Of course, I had already seen this play out in real life, across many universities and specifically at Penn. The episode aired during the height of student protests against the genocide in Gaza. It had become clear that certain kinds of speech threaten institutions not because it is “violent” or “offensive” but because it is true—too clear, too grounded in history and geography to be dismissed. More importantly, it is speech that breaks a wall in the “ivory tower.” We were theorizing revolution in the seminar room as an encampment was being erected outside on the green. At the same time, major university donors were abusing power and financial leverage, while Zionist lobbies tried to divert attention from the Palestinian people to Jewish student safety.

Language had become a liability and an accusation. Silence had set in. Obedience in advance.

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The possibility of combining politics and art has been a particularly pressing subject recently. “My” Law & Order episode is just one small example. In February this year, Berlinale jury president and filmmaker Wim Wenders said that “movies can change the world” but “not in a political way.” To me, this seemed no less than him relinquishing his role as an artist and undermining his own legacy. He also went on to desecrate a word sacred to art and resistance alike—the “people”—arguing that overtly political cinema enters the domain of politicians, whereas artists must serve as a “counterweight,” doing “the work of people, not the work of politicians.”

Who are the “people” he was referring to? Are these the audiences or the subjects of these films? Are their lives, irreducibly shaped by power, violence, and survival, not already political? And is his stand there at the press conference of the Berlinale, making the call for apolitical cinema on February 12, 2026, day 859 of the latest live streamed phase of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people, not a political stand? Not to mention a vile and cowardly one? Wenders’s comments followed those of the Polish producer Ewa Puszczyńska, who thought it was “unfair” that she be asked to comment on the support the German government, which funds much of the festival, has shown for Israel. “Unfair,” she insisted on the word. “[F]ilms are not political in the meaning of the word [in the way] I think you think,” she went on. They are about “empathy” and “trying to understand,” and people making up their own minds. “But we cannot be responsible,” she argued, “for what their decision would be—would be the decision to […] support Israel, or would be the decision to […] support Palestine.” She also happens to be one of the producers of The Zone of Interest, an Oscar-winning film that explicitly confronts complicity and its spectrum.

Unlike Puszczyńska, that film’s director Jonathan Glazer didn’t have a problem taking a stand in his acceptance speech at the Oscars. This makes sense: if we condemn genocide here, we must condemn it there. If we see complicity in one moment, it is our responsibility to call it out in every moment. Otherwise, what use is history? What use is art? What use are we and our memories?

For those of us who work in the field of Middle Eastern studies—those sentenced to the margins of the humanities, the rough lands—the limits of acceptable “politics” were clear decades ago. Now, after nearly three years of genocide, we have come to understand, without a shadow of doubt, that the “political,” that which supposedly taints art, corrupts scholarship, and disrupts institutional harmony, is code for “Palestine.” This is not the “political” as we encounter it in films or works of art whose makers enjoy the privilege of being as political as they wish without jeopardizing their artistic integrity. There are people to whom empire grants depth, nuance, and sophistication, and whose political interventions are therefore accepted, even welcomed, and turned into models to emulate. Others, however, are not afforded that distance. The world as seen through the prism of academia and especially the field of Middle East studies (which is nothing but a reflection of the power dynamics in a neocolonial capitalist order) is made up of people who have politics and people who are politics, who are the victims and symptoms of other people’s practice of politics.

Middle Eastern studies was built and named after fictions produced by imperialism and its foundational racism, which disguises itself as condescending expertise. Middle Eastern studies, also known as Near Eastern studies and, in a bolder and slightly more distant past, as Oriental studies, is not a field designed to produce “interesting work” by “scholars whose allegiance is to a discipline defined intellectually.” Like Orientalism, or Orientalism rehabilitated, Middle Eastern studies is a field “defined either canonically, imperially, or geographically,” Edward Said reminds us in Orientalism (1978). Not only that, but it often also denies itself, or rather willingly relinquishes, its intellectual commitments in favor of the “service” it offers other, more powerful, central, and established disciplines and fields of study.

Scholars in Middle Eastern studies, as are their colleagues across the humanities, are now dealing with the problem of “the political” in academia and the cultural sphere. We talk about its “befores” and “afters” as if it is an event that begins and ends, when we know that what we are tiptoeing around, and that we are struggling to accept as a new mode or condition of our times and an investment of the institutions we serve, is genocide.

We sit in a contradiction: one that is worth stating plainly even if nothing comes of it. It is “obscene to think about genocide in a conference room,” as scholar Rana Barakat once said when she found herself, like many of us in academia, called upon yet again to perform her pain and “revolution” in a designated space in the academy. No matter how brave and liberated our thinking pretends to be, we not only silence ourselves within the walls of the system that barely allows us this space, but we also give the system credit for the very thinking it curtails yet still permits to happen within it. Institutions sustain themselves through such forms of violence; that is how they endure. Every organization, no matter how “good” or how much “better,” distracts us through bureaucracy, through the obedience and labor required for its upkeep. And this is how fields across the humanities have spent their energies and channeled their anxieties and inadequacies in these years of genocide.

The performativity of fighting to defend our academic freedom and our right to think critically within the bounds and by the rules of the very institutions that silence us and co-opt us is obscene. What use are freedoms and our critical thoughts in a closed room when, at the same time, children are being massacred and starved, and an entire culture vilified and reduced to rubble? Yes, people in our line of work have never been the ones to change “the reality on the ground,” but as Arundhati Roy put it in The God of Small Things (1997), “change is one thing. Acceptance is another.” Acceptance is also complicity.

The ongoing live streamed genocide and its accompanying institutional response has brought to the surface something we all already knew, especially those of us who are Arab scholars. We are never thinking beings. We are not afforded a voice, not permitted real intellectual contributions in our respective fields. We are native informants; we ourselves are objects of study.

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Here is what that Law & Order episode did not show. In the academic year 2023–24, I was the topic director of the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and my topic was “revolution” (a topic decided on the year before). A major part of my role was to plan a calendar of public events. Our first major event, which took place September 22–24, 2023, after almost a year and a half of planning followed by much back-and-forth, threats, and donor pressures, was to cosponsor Palestine Writes Literature Festival. What happened between September and December 2023 is now history—not history with a capital H, but the small, petty, and despicable American history culminating in a congressional hearing that led to the resignation of four university presidents, including Penn’s Liz Magill. As we all know, the string of assaults against higher education unraveled from then on.

Since then, and for several semesters, the locations of my classes were not disclosed as a security measure. Enrollment in my classes have gone down because students fear for their safety. I am isolated within my department. My community of so-called experts on the Middle East at Penn and beyond seemed to have turned over their senses, their eyes and ears, their thinking faculties—their basic human decency—to the institution. The university proudly and shamelessly continues to this day to announce its full cooperation with the McCarthyesque congressional House Committee on Education and the Workforce, apparently trying to justify its violations of First Amendment rights, privacy, and academic freedom through the false, racist, ignorant, and antisemitic conflation of Zionism and Judaism.

The university, along with many of its peers, has gone on to build processes and mechanisms to turn this violent conflation into policy. Hillel International, for example, has openly partnered with far-right, white supremacist, and antisemitic organizations to suppress campus speech and events in support of Palestinian liberation. As anthropologist Maura Finkelstein, who was fired from a tenured position at Muhlenberg College for her anti-Zionist positions, puts it: “Until these programs are dismantled, US campuses are nothing more than Zionist re-education camps.”

This happened on the Penn campus as well, where the Hillel center instructed students to drop out of classes that might invite them to think or rethink the ideology to which they are subjected from an early age. An unabashed directive sent from the Hillel rabbi’s email to Hillel-affiliated students enrolled in Arabic language classes waived their assignment to attend any one event in the three-day festival, which showcased cuisine, children’s literature, translation, music, dance, crafts, and so on. Some students showed up prepared to antagonize their instructors, disrupt the classes, and announce their feelings of unsafety. The headline in the school paper on the first day of the festival was “Penn Students in Some Arabic Courses No Longer Required to Attend Palestine Writes Festival.” Arabic language and culture were framed as a crime and a threat to campus security.

There was also palpable pressure from the big donors at Penn. Dick Wolf, the namesake of Penn’s Humanities Center, joined other Penn donors in a campaign to bully the university by compromising its academic integrity and threatening to cut off its funds. All on account of a literary festival that this benefactor of the humanities saw as a “hate fest” and an “abomination.”

I wanted to end with something profound, something on language, its possibilities, limits, and ends—something that would rise above the pettiness of the Law & Order episode—but I couldn’t. I am injured and bitter. And so, I turn to poetry, which transcends time, collapses it, and triumphs over it. I think here of a colleague who once advised me to leave my activism “at home.” Anti-genocide speech “hurt their feelings.” “You do medieval Arabic poetry so well. Why not focus on that?” they advised. I turn to one of the most remarkable works of medieval poetry and criticism, al-Ḥamāsah, to find language for this moment (translation mine):

لو كنت من مازن لم تستبح إبلي
بنو اللقيطة من ذهل بن شيبانا
إذاً لقام بنصري معشر خشن
عند الحفيظة إن ذو لوثة لانا
قوم إذا الشرّ أبدى ناجذيه لهم
طاروا إليهم زرافات ووحدانا
لا يسألون أخاهم حين يندبهم
في النائبات على ما قال برهانا
لكن قومي وإن كانوا ذوي حسب
ليسوا من الشرّ في شيء وإن هانا
يجزون من ظلم أهل الظلم مغفرة
ومن إساءة أهل السوء إحسانا
كأن ربك لم يخلق لخشيته
سواهمُ من جميع الناس إنسانا
فليت لي بهمُ قوًما إذا ركبوا
شدّوا الإغارة فرساناً وركبانا

If I had other kin, the bastards would never have plundered me. To my side would have risen people who do not bend when cowards falter.

When evil bares its fangs, they would stand up against it, together and each alone. They would have come to my aid. No questions asked.

But my people, though many, have no bite, even when slighted.

They repay oppression with pardon and wickedness with kindness. As though God created none but them to fear him.

If only I had people who would rise for justice with everything they have.

This is the first hamasiyyah, the first poem in al-Ḥamāsah, a poetry anthology compiled by the medieval poet, critic, and theorist Abu Tammam. He attributes this poem to a pre-Islamic poet named Quraydh b. Unayf whose camels where stolen but whose tribe refused to come to his aid even when he asked. He had to seek help from others. He was injured and bitter.

The word “ḥamāsah” has a history and a life that long precedes the creation of the State of Israel, as well as the many political and social pathologies it gave rise to in the region. It’s a powerful example of how language registers injury and bitterness, the ways it insists on justice and achieves it, even if only in a fleeting moment, in a structure, an arrangement of breath, an echo, a turn of phrase. Ḥamāsah. Look it up.

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Featured image: Still from “Freedom of Expression,” Law & Order, January 18, 2024.