Walk us through some of this as it relates to how you you put together this special issue of the communique.

Well, I'm glad that you mentioned that moment at the UDC conference in 2023, Mickey, because that was actually is what actually made me first say, you know what? Like, let me go to the UDC leadership and propose something.

this special issue of the democratic communique because of what i saw unfolding there so i'll just i'll just go through it quickly and i talk about this in an introduction that i wrote for the special issue there was an opening plenary and because it was just a few days after october 7th two of the speakers who had already been chosen for the plenary paula chakravarti and deepak kumar mentioned you know, what had happened in Gaza and Israel, and then, you know, Israel's, you know, really, really, it's hard to find the words, like, uber aggressive hyper militaristic assault that they claimed was in response to what was a horrible, you know, attack on October 7.

And so they're talking about this and someone in the audience stands up and accuses them of not being sensitive to what had happened to Israelis.

And I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, well, wait a minute, they actually did.

They had mentioned the attack on civilians.

And so my response was, as another audience member, I have to point out the misrepresentation that was happening.

And there might be a few themes you want to address, particularly about the chilling effect that we've seen in higher ed around the issue of what's happening in Gaza.