Duke University Press

In 2017, Duke University Press was accused of antisemitism when it published The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability by Jasbir Puar, “an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.”[7] In a widely reported presentation at Vassar College in advance of the book release, Puar claimed that Israel “mined for organs for scientific research” from dead Palestinians, which the Wall Street Journal described as "anti-Israel sentiment mixed with age-old anti-Semitism [at] a fever pitch."[8]

Puar's book was described in Tablet as "an intellectual and moral hoax, a bit of sizzling sophistry designed to stir the faithful into a frenzy of outrage divorced of any and all observable reality."[9] Commentary magazine describes the book as suggesting that "the Jewish State would love to commit genocide, but it is too greedy, cruel, and duplicitous to follow through."[10] When the book was awarded a prize in the field of feminist disability studies, The Forward reported that the book claimed that Israel both kills Palestinians and "purposefully maims them in order to maintain control over them."[11]

On August 2, 2019 Sara Leone, an editor at Duke University Press, filed a grievance with the university, alleging that her superiors at the press marginalized and unfairly treated her because she is genderqueer. She said that she had been “silenced and bullied” and “subjected to a nonstop, hostile barrage of unethical work practices and verbiage.” Her coworker at the press, Terri Fizer, described the culture as "fraught with employee turnover, overworked staffers, and out-of-touch managers who made arbitrary decisions based on whether employees had 'crossed' human resources."[12]

Duke University Press published Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom by Jessica Krug, who taught African and African Diaspora history and politics at George Washington University until she resigned in September 2020 after admitting that she had falsely lived as a woman of color for years. Krug is white and grew up in suburban Kansas City.[13] Duke University Press editorial director Gisela Fosado wrote on the press's blog that, despite being Krug's editor, her interactions with Krug had been "limited" and that she had believed Krug when Krug told the press that "Krug" was and was pronounced "Cruz."[14] Reporting on the story in The New Yorker, Lauren Michele Jackson, author of White Negroes and a culture critic whose work explores cultural appropriation, noted that the "inattentiveness" of the scholars and editors around Krug had allowed Krug's evolving deception to continue for her scholarly career,[15] which lasted from 2005 to 2020.[16]