October 28, 2025
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Anna Feder: fired by Emerson College for supporting Palestine – but fighting back

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US academic, Anna Feder, was fired by Emerson College after 17 years working there, when she spoke up for Palestinian rights. Now she is suing the College for unfair dismissal. The following report is reproduced from Mondoweiss.

25 May 2025

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.

May 18 2025

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.

However, shortly after announcing my program and just before the semester began, I began receiving texts from a member of the board of trustees. He expressed concerns about the film but didn’t appear to have watched it himself. I assured him I had taken great care in planning the screening, as I had with all the films I presented. I emphasized that the post-screening conversation would be led entirely by Jews—myself and both filmmakers. It became clear that the trustee opposed the film screening, marking an unprecedented break from the autonomy Emerson had previously given me in curating Bright Lights.

Before October 7, I had the support of the chair and the college president to proceed with screening my program as planned. However, after October 7, the college administration pressured me to postpone the screening. Despite complying with all the demands regarding the screening, including postponing it, on August 13, 2024, I was informed that the college would be laying me off and closing my program, citing a budgetary shortfall and focus on academic programs as the reason.

My termination was not entirely unexpected; I had been among the most vocal of my colleagues in support of our students. While I had never received any direct communication that my activism could cost me my job, the administration made it clear to me that they did not want me to screen “Israelism” and were monitoring my actions on campus.

Despite Emerson’s aversion to screening “Israelism,” I did not stop my advocacy for a free Palestine. I supported our students in ways that aligned with the college’s mission, which I had dedicated nearly two decades of my energy to uphold. Like many other institutions, Emerson has been proud of its history of student activism.I still remember my visit to the social justice center on the day the encampment began. On one of the tables was a recent copy of “Expression,” our alumni magazine, featuring black student activists on the cover with their fists in the air.

When the students heard the call from the students at Columbia and set up the first encampment in Boston, I had the great honor of showing up in support. The encampment flourished for over 80 hours as a space for learning, art, collective grief, and community care, and I was present for half of that time. It was a space of solidarity, allowing us to exist outside the corporate structures of our institution. During those few days, I participated in an open mic event, attended a class that one of my colleagues moved to the alley, and explored the small library of revolutionary books set up by the students. My contributions involved organizing the overwhelming number of food and supply donations, ensuring that hot meals were distributed, and perishable items were monitored. I greeted community members who offered words of support and handed me cash, which I passed along to organizers for the bail fund. I was aware that, in all likelihood, the police would be allowed to destroy what had been built in that alley. I stayed awake until dawn on the first two nights, keeping watch over the sleeping students who were also working on their final projects and papers in addition to everything else. On the fourth night, that space was violently dismantled by over three hundred city and state police officers.

Students asked me to livestream the assault, which remains on the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine Boylston Alley Instagram account to this day. In truly Orwellian fashion, the breaking of our students’ bones, concussions caused by being slammed into the brick walls of the alley, and the resulting trauma were framed as necessary for student “safety.” I am still haunted by images of police appearing as if they were prepared for war against a group of young people of conscience, who were simply calling on the institution they pay tuition to, to disclose and divest from the genocide in Gaza. I witnessed these armed agents of the state beat and arrest 118 students and community members. When it was over, and I was escorted through the alley to retrieve my belongings, which I had hastily left in a nearby building, I saw campus police and city and state police giving each other fist bumps, celebrating a job well done.

I loved being part of the Emerson community and the program I helped build in collaboration with students, faculty, staff, alums, and the public that filled the seats each week. To say that the series was not ‘core to the academic programs’ at a school where almost half the students are in film-related majors just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. For over twelve and a half years, I worked to ensure Emerson’s cinema was a welcoming place where students and community members could freely express their opinions, no matter their background.

On April 1, 2025, I filed a lawsuit against the college for interfering with my free speech rights in violation of Massachusetts law. I hope Emerson takes the need to protect free expression seriously, as reflected in its motto: “Expression Necessary to Evolution.” If you would like to support my fight, which has broader implications for us all, please consider donating to help cover my legal fees.  I will never stop advocating for a free Palestine. It is the work of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world, that I am called to do as a Jew and as a human witnessing immense suffering. Right now, Israel is turning the Gaza Strip into a mass grave and accelerating its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank- it’s past time for all of us to use the power we have to end these horrors. If our voices weren’t powerful, they wouldn’t be moving heaven and earth to silence us.

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