Pulitzer winner author rejects NYC museum award over keffiyeh ban

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author has been widely praised for refusing to accept an award from New York City’s Noguchi Museum over the institution’s ban on wearing the black-and-white keffiyeh scarves, which indicate solidarity with Palestine.

Author Jhumpa Lahiri, who was due to receive the prestigious 2024 Isamu Noguchi Award, turned down the award on Wednesday in a gesture of support for three former employees of the NYC museum who were fired over wearing keffiyeh last month.

Social media users around the world, as well as pro-Palestinian activists, praised the author’s move, saying the “principled” and “moral” stance of a respected icon in the literary world is of great influence.

Giant Keffiyeh revealed at Ontario Legislature in response to ban

In a powerful display of solidarity, activists in Toronto unveiled a giant handcrafted keffiyeh, the second largest in history.

“Jhumpa Lahiri has chosen to withdraw her acceptance of the 2024 Isamu Noguchi Award in response to our updated dress code policy,” the museum said in a statement.

“We respect her perspective and understand that this policy may or may not align with everyone’s views,” it added.

Back in August, the museum, which was founded nearly 40 years ago by Japanese-American designer and sculptor Isamu Noguchi, announced that employees could not wear clothing or accessories that expressed “overt political messages, slogans or symbols” during working hours.

Lahiri was born in London, England, and moved to the United States when she was three. In 2000 she won the Pulitzer for fiction for her debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies. She has since published several books of fiction and nonfiction in English and Italian, after living in Rome, Italy.

She was one of thousands of scholars who signed a letter in May to university presidents in the US, expressing solidarity with university campus protests against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, calling it “unspeakable destruction”.

US campus protests against Israeli war on Gaza going global

Students across the US are demanding that their universities and colleges disclose their ties to the Israeli regime, and at the same time divest from them.

In May, a surge of encampments and building takeovers swept across the US and subsequently globally, as students organized large-scale demonstrations demanding that their educational institutions sever ties with companies associated with the Israeli regime.

The University of California, Los Angeles, experienced a particularly violent police response to a student protest encampment in early May, during which dozens of people were arrested, tear-gassed or hit by rubber bullets.

In many instances, universities and public institutions have frequently issued bans on the keffiyeh over the last eleven months of the war on Gaza, with many public figures wearing it despite receiving backlash.

Israel waged the war on Gaza on October 7 last year after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas conducted Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Since the start of the aggression, the Tel Aviv regime has killed over 41,534 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and wounded 96,092 others.

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