Antisemitism

Kathryn Palmer
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: Some faculty members at Indiana University at Bloomington fear academic freedom on their campus is under attack by a local congressman reacting to claims of antisemitism among some members of the student government association.

The lawmaker, U.S. Representative Jim Banks, a conservative Republican and evangelical Christian who is running for U.S. Senate in 2024, has asked the university’s president to address allegations of antisemitism on campus related to the Israel-Hamas war or potentially risk losing federal funding

Matt Hamilton
Los Angeles Times

Excerpt: Until recently, USC professor John Strauss was known mostly for his research on the economics of developing countries, with decades of fieldwork in Indonesia and China. That changed Nov. 9, when Strauss stopped before students staging a walkout and protest calling for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and holding a memorial to thousands of Palestinian civilians killed in the Israel-Hamas war.

The economics professor’s interactions with students that day ended with the 72-year-old Strauss, who is Jewish, declaring: “Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are killed.” Within a day, an associate dean told Strauss that he was on paid administrative leave, barred from campus, and that he would no longer teach his undergraduates this semester.

Joseph Goldstein
New York Times

Excerpt: A prominent doctor is suing NYU Langone Health after he was fired as director of its cancer center over his social media postings about the Israel-Hamas war. The lawsuit could propel NYU Langone — a major New York hospital — into the center of a national debate over how much power private institutions have to fire employees over their online postings.

Laws protecting employees from being fired for what they say or do outside of the office vary widely by state. In New York, the law is somewhat unclear, lawyers say. But as tensions and protests escalate over the violence in the Middle East, the issue of what sort of speech is protected or acceptable has roiled American businesses and campuses.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: A University of Arizona faculty member who was penalized last week over classroom comments she and another instructor were recorded as making about the war in Gaza revealed new details about the controversy in a conversation with The Chronicle on Wednesday.

Rebecca Lopez, an assistant professor of practice in the College of Education, said she and her co-instructor, Rebecca Zapien, received letters last week informing them that they were being placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.

Natasha Lennard
The Intercept

Excerpt: A week after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, by which time Israel’s all-out assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip had killed thousands of civilians, the online editors of the prestigious Harvard Law Review reached out to Rabea Eghbariah.

Eghbariah submitted a draft of a 2,000-word essay by early November. He argued that Israel’s assault on Gaza should be evaluated within and beyond the “legal framework” of “genocide.” In line with the Law Review’s standard procedures, the piece was solicited, commissioned, contracted, submitted, edited, fact checked, copy edited, and approved by the relevant editors. Yet it will never be published with the Harvard Law Review.

Hannah Meyers
National Review

Excerpt: New York has the world’s largest diasporic Jewish population, yet its public university system has a long-standing antisemitism problem so pronounced that it inspired both federal and statewide legislation this year. Last month it was reported that, following a City University of New York (CUNY) law-student commencement speech featuring an anti-Zionist blood-libel rant, future ceremonies will not include student speakers. And two weeks ago, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that, next spring, an independent reviewer will issue recommendations for antisemitism policy at CUNY.