At Columbia College Chicago, Lecturer’s Oscar-Nominated Film Leads To Courses Being Pulled

by Sally Blood Last fall, shortly after Columbia College instructor Iymen Chehade showed the documentary 5 Broken Cameras in his course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he was summoned to a meeting with Steven Corey, chair of the Department of Humanities, History, and Social Science. The Oscar-nominated film is a nominally Israeli work (an Israeli codirected, and it had some Israeli funding) with an entirely Palestinian point of view. Mostly filmed by its protagonist, Emad Burnat, it chronicles the life of his young West Bank family, along with six years of protests against Israel’s wall of separation, which had cut off part of […]