ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
Ann Arbor, Michigan
michigandaily.com
SPORTSWEDNESDAY
statement
Ford School to offer new minor next school year
Dean expects to enroll approximately 25 students in 16-credit program FRANCESCA DUONG Daily Staff Reporter
Members of Witnesses for Peace, an anti-Israel protest group, have protested outside of the Beth Israel Congregation for the past sixteen years.
ALLISON ENGKVIST/Daily
Federal lawsuit challenges anti-Israel demonstrations at local synagogue Litigation addresses 16-year protest at Beth Israel Congregation BARBARA COLLINS & SAMANTHA SMALL Daily News Editor & Daily Staff Reporter
Every Saturday morning since September 2003, members of Witnesses For Peace — an antiIsrael protest group — have stood outside the Beth Israel Congregation on Washtenaw Avenue in Ann Arbor. Members
of the group hold signs reading “Resist Jewish Power,” “Jewish Power Corrupts,” “Boycott Israel,” “Stop U.S. Aid to Israel” and “End the Palestinian holocaust.” Their demonstrations last from about 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., taking place during Shabbat services. After 16 years and more than 800 protests, a Beth Israel Congregation member, Marvin Gerber, motioned to
sue the group on Dec. 19, 2019, claiming Witnesses For Peace have demonstrated anti-Semitic rhetoric. The lawsuit also claims the city of Ann Arbor has not taken the appropriate action to put an end to the demonstrations. According to the litigation, the protests defy Ann Arbor regulations on public gatherings and stretch the legal limits on a person’s right to free speech. Gerber requested the city either
eliminate the protest altogether or install certain restrictions. The plaintiff is also seeking financial retribution due to the protester’s constant “harassment.” “The First Amendment right of free speech does not entitle a speaker to use that right repeatedly to bludgeon, for weeks and years at a time, in the same location,” the lawsuit reads. See LAWSUIT, Page 3A
Starting this April, undergraduate students can apply to the Ford School of Public Policy for acceptance into the new public policy minor for Fall 2020. The minor will be open to students from LSA, the College of Engineering, Ross School of Business, School of Information and School of Public Health. Sharon Maccini, faculty director of the undergraduate program at the Public Policy School, said the impetus for the minor came from hearing students express interest in studying public policy without necessarily majoring in it. “The idea was to attract students who are primarily committed to another discipline and to supplement their education with public
AR game Independent journalist discusses increases ‘myth of objectivity’ in industry access for Lewis Raven Wallace reflects on personal experience as LGBTQ+ activist children TECHNOLOGY
Research team creates gaming system for kids with differing abilities ANGELINA BREDE Daily Staff Reporter
A team of University of Michigan faculty and students have created iGYM, an augmented reality system allowing both able-bodied individuals and those with mobile disabilities to engage in physical games together. iGYM is designed to mimic physical sports by projecting an interactive court onto the floor. It can host multiple games featuring virtual goals and balls. Players interact with the projections to virtually kick and pass the ball to score goals. Art & Design professor Roland Graf, one of the team’s leaders, said the game creates an even playing field for children with disabilities so they can compete and play with their able-bodied peers. The team consisted of students and faculty from the School of Art & Design, the School of Information, the College of Engineering and the School of Kinesiology. Graf stressed the importance of having an interdisciplinary team to bring the research project to life. “What united us was really a shared mission,” Graf said.
JASMIN LEE
Daily Staff Reporter
Lewis Raven Wallace, an independent journalist from North Carolina, spoke at Literati Bookstore on Tuesday evening to a crowd of about 70 people. Wallace discussed his new book “The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity” at an event sponsored by the store. Wallace is an Ann Arbor native who turned his activism to journalism. He currently hosts his own podcast, “The View from Somewhere.” In
See GAME, Page 3A
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addition, Wallace started his own company called Press On, a Southern journalism collective providing training and education about challenging harmful bias in the journalism industry. During the book reading, Wallace read passages describing how his early career as a journalist was affected by the LGBTQ+ activism he participated in as a teenager. The excerpts detailed how he was fired from a job at a daily paper when he wrote a blog post titled “Objectivity Is Dead and I’m Okay With It,” which would come to define the rest of his
career. Wallace, who is transgender, said he knew his opinion about objectivity would be controversial but did not realize the extent to which it would change his career. “I wrote about my experience as a transgender journalist, never neutral on the subject of my own humanity and rights, even as they were being debated in ‘both sides’ journalism,” Wallace said. “When I posted the blog, I knew it might be controversial. What I didn’t know was how dramatically it would change the trajectory of my life, as my own story became part of a tense
national conversation over truth and journalism.” Art & Design senior Brooks Eisenbise said it is important to challenge the idea of journalistic objectivity. “I like the message of pushing against journalistic objectivity because I feel like in our current fact climate where people can say whatever, it takes more than objectivity to tell people the truth and to know what’s real and what’s not,” Eisenbise said. “Talking to the source and talking with people on the ground is important. Telling the full story is really cool.” See JOURNALIST, Page 3A
Author Lewis Raven Wallace speaks about his book “The View From Somewhere Else” during an event at Literati Bookstore Tuesday evening.
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INDEX
Vol. CXXIX, No. 40 ©2019 The Michigan Daily
policy studies,” Maccini said. “We offer essentially a toolkit, various types of skills and ideas that can be useful for pursuing effective change and leadership in essentially any field.” According to the press release, sophomores and juniors are able to apply from April 1 to May 15. The application consists of an online form, resume, transcript and two short essays. Students will hear their results by mid-June, and 25 students are expected to be offered admission into the minor. LSA sophomore Sarah Abdelbaki intends to major in economics and international studies. However, she said she is also interested in public policy. After learning about the new minor program, Abdelbaki said she was excited about the opportunity. See MINOR, Page 3A
RESEARCH
‘U’ study: longevity impacted by stress
Results show early-life stressors may lead to increase in lifespan HANNAH MACKAY Daily Staff Reporter
Good news for stressed-out students: there may be a link between stress in early life and longer lifespans, according to researchers at the University of Michigan. The research is being conducted at the Jakob Lab, a molecular, cellular and developmental biology laboratory, and focuses on oxidative stress, a natural byproduct of metabolism, and its potential ability to increase lifespan. The lab uses genetically identical worms to study aging. Postdoctoral fellow Daphne Bazopoulou, a key contributor to the ongoing project, explained what oxidative stress is and why the group chose to study it in worms. “These are oxidants that every organism produces, and these are byproducts of metabolism, and these have been linked to oxidative damage which contributes to aging,” Bazopoulou said. “Worms produce those oxidants at very high levels during development and they do that naturally … so this was a little bit weird because we knew from studies before that excessive oxidants might do harm, however, these juvenile worms were able to recover by themselves.”
ALEC COHEN/Daily
NEWS.........................2 OPINION.....................4 CLASSIFIEDS................6
See STRESS, Page 3A
SUDOKU.....................2 ARTS...................5 SPORTS.................7