The ministry of education in Israel ban Gary Yourofsky from lecturing in high schools during his second visit to Israel in December 2013. We asked Nobel Prize winner in Literature, John Maxwell Coetzee, for his opinion on disallowing Yourofsky from speaking in high schools.
“Children are naturally sensitive. They can easily be shocked and disturbed by spectacles of gross cruelty. It is therefore understandable that education authorities in Israel should be reluctant to allow animal advocates like Mr Yourofsky access to the classroom. On the other hand, there is an argument to be made that the treatment of animals by the food industry is so excessively heartless, and such an affront to natural justice, that we who by our silence tacitly consent to these outrages deserve to be shocked out of our sleep. In the long run, Mr Yourofsky may well be doing us a larger moral service by confronting us, including the most sensitive of us, by the spectacle of the crimes we participate in.”
~J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize winner in Literature
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