The Top Ten Jew-Hating Academic Departments in American Universities
#1: San Francisco State University, College of Ethnic Studies
#2: University of California-Santa Cruz, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department
#3: Columbia University, Center for Palestine Studies
#4: University of Pennsylvania, Middle East Center
#5: University of Minnesota, Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies
#6: University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies
#7: University of Colorado-Boulder, Ethnic Studies Department
#8: University of Maryland-College Park, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
#9: University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, Department of Latina/Latino Studies
#10: Northwestern University, Asian American Studies Program
Introduction:
Ever since October 7th, 2023, when Hamas launched its barbaric attack on innocent Israeli civilians—slaughtering over a thousand innocent people, raping and mutilating women, massacring children and the elderly for kicks—the world has borne witness to the atrocious Jew hatred housed in our most prestigious colleges and universities.
Across the nation, on nearly every major university campus, students took to the streets—not to decry Hamas’s brutality but to applaud it as a valid act of “resistance” against their “colonial oppressors.” Chanting genocidal slogans—“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Intifada, Intifada,” “Resistance is Justified, When People are Occupied”—these students, often accompanied by faculty, cheered for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.
The revelation that American campuses are hotspots of Jew hatred may seem sudden for some, but in truth this hatred and prejudice has been percolating for many years, aided and abetted by the universities themselves. For the past two decades, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has shone a rare spotlight on the genocidal Jew hatred emanating from our college campuses and raised the alarm. Now, the world at large is witnessing how much ground we have already given up in this fight.
In the midst of this turmoil, the presidents of our major universities have found themselves trapped by their own complicity, forced to condemn the undeniable Jew hatred that roils their campuses while attempting to obscure their own role in abetting it.
As the Freedom Center has relentlessly documented, American universities have played an undeniable role in funding and providing a veneer of legitimacy to anti-Semitic student organizations like the Hamas-funded Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association. What has received less attention—but should in fact be highlighted as American universities’ worst offense—is the Jew hatred promoted by official departments and institutes of the universities themselves.
Millions of dollars in both public and private money is funneled into academic departments and centers, housed at America’s most prestigious universities. These official organs of the university actively promote Jew hatred, glorify in Hamas’s violence against Israeli civilians, and spread genocidal lies about Israel being an “apartheid” and “settler-colonialist” state. They invite speakers and host conferences whose entire purpose is to cast aspersions on the Jews and their homeland of Israel.
Whole academic departments and institutes, under the official auspices of their prestigious universities, violate every principle of academic integrity to cast their lot with the barbaric Hamas terrorists in order to bring about the destruction of Israel—all while the presidents of those same universities declare themselves horrified by growing anti-Semitism on campus. They fuel the atrocious Jew hatred that has overtaken both students and faculty on campus and turned the halls of academia into training grounds for the next generation of jihadists.
The following report will expose the blatant hypocrisy of American universities and their leaders, who express horror at the outbreak of anti-Semitism on campus yet spend millions funding academic centers and departments which actively promote that same Jew hatred.
We call on the universities implicated in this report to take immediate action to discipline these academic centers and departments which openly defy university policy to promote Jew hatred. If they should fail to do so, we urge Congress to withhold all federal funding until they eliminate this cancer in their midst.
#1: San Francisco State University, College of Ethnic Studies
As an official academic division of the state-funded San Francisco State University, the College of Ethnic Studies should maintain a strict academic neutrality on political issues. Instead, the college is known for blatant pro-Hamas propaganda, the promotion of anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes, and for openly celebrating terrorist violence against the Jewish state and its citizens.
In a “Statement on Gaza” released by the College of Ethnic Studies in December 2023, the Chair of the department, Dr. Falu Bakrania, together with her staff, placed their support in the Israel/Gaza conflict clearly with Hamas. “We vehemently condemn the Israeli genocide and displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. We demand an immediate ceasefire, the provision of humanitarian aid, and a permanent end to the genocide,” began the missive, which failed to make any mention of the facts that Hamas started the conflict by murdering, mutilating, and raping over a thousand Israeli civilians, nor of the fact that Hamas continued to hold Israeli civilians as hostages in horrific conditions.
Citing Hamas-provided statistics, the statement went on to claim that “To date, over 15,000 Palestinians have been murdered, over 60 percent children,” notably using the term “murder” to describe potential civilian casualties caused by Israel’s defensive response to Hamas’s attack. The College added that it joins “the international community… in condemning the genocide of the people of Gaza and the unrelenting apartheid regime of the Israeli state.”
Attempting to disavow the obvious Jew hatred of their sentiments, the College of Ethnic Studies went on to argue against “equating the support for Palestine with antisemitism” and “the equation of criticism of the Israeli nation-state, its apartheid regime, and its expansion through military occupation as antisemitic.” The College’s obvious attempts to delegitimize and demonize Israel (forms of anti-Semitism according to the definition adopted by the U.S. State Department) and its refusal to acknowledge that Hamas’s barbaric and genocidal attack on Israeli civilians was the trigger for the current conflict, only serve to highlight its Jew hatred.
This absurd statement on Israel’s alleged “genocide” in Gaza is only the latest salvo from SFSU’s College of Ethnic Studies which has made promoting Jew hatred a key feature of its identity. The College is home to a unique academic program known as the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program, or AMED for short. For many years, the leader of this initiative, Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, has served as the public face of San Francisco State University’s cult of Jew hatred. She is a rabidly anti-Semitic professor of Ethnic Studies who has turned AMED into her personal vehicle to slur the state of Israel and the Jewish people under the guise of academic scholarship.
Abdulhadi has glorified anti-Israel terrorism in public talks. A letter sent by a coalition of concerned Jewish groups to then-SFSU President Leslie Wong in 2014 describes in chilling detail how an Ethnic Studies Department event organized by Abdulhadi featured “wild inaccuracies, monstrous distortions, and blatant lies — all intended to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state and promote a boycott that would hasten its demise.”
Professor Abdulhadi’s husband, Jaime Veve, a union activist, also spoke at the event to exalt anti-Semitic terrorists and murderers. The letter to President Wong describes how Veve “insisted that Palestinians who had injured or murdered Jews were not terrorists but rather ‘heroes or heroines’ who had ‘committed political acts of defiance and resistance,’ and he justified Palestinian terrorism by calling it ‘the cry of a baby calling for the attention of the world.’”
During her tenure at SFSU, Abdulhadi has sought to build relationships with anti-Israel terrorists. While attending a university-sponsored trip to Israel in 2014, she met with anti-Israel terrorists Leila Khaled and Sheikh Raed Salah. Abdulhadi has praised Khaled, a notorious airplane hijacker, as “an icon in liberation movements and…an icon for women’s liberation.” Salah served a prison sentence in Israel for aiding the terrorist group Hamas. He has also been charged for incitement to violence for giving a public speech in which he accused Jews of using the blood of Palestinian children to bake their bread. Despite this, Abdulhadi has insisted that he does not have terrorist ties.
In September 2020, Abdulhadi and AMED held an event featuring Khaled. Abdulhadi planned to stream the event on Zoom, but the platform canceled its coverage citing Khaled’s terrorist record.
Abdulhadi also attempted to open a formal collaboration between SFSU and An-Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine. An-Najah University has been described by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as “known for its advocacy of anti-Israel violence and its recruitment of Palestinian college students into terrorist groups.”
The notorious professor has not hesitated to use her privileged position as a professor at SFSU to promote her anti-Israel agenda. Abdulhadi is a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), and also supports the wider Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel, an anti-Semitic, Hamas-funded campaign to isolate and weaken the Jewish state. She frequently promotes BDS at university-sponsored events and forums.
In March 2019, she shared a live video and statement on the official Facebook page for the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED). The statement demonized Israel and invoked anti-Semitic conspiracy tropes by accusing the SFSU administration of “collaborat[ing] with the Zionist designs to silence us… staff, faculty and community who view Israel (as I do) as a colonial, racist and occupying power…” and labeled the administration’s conduct as “the weaponizing of free speech in the service of Nazis, Zionists and other white supremacists…” In July 2019, she shared an image of a large banner exhorting “Zionism = Racism, Silence = Death, Palestine is a Queer Issue – Boycott! Divest! Sanction!”
Abdulhadi has repeatedly propagated anti-Semitic tropes accusing Jews of conspiring to orchestrate world affairs and of possessing dual loyalties—a slur implying that Jews have more loyalty to Israel than to America or other nations. In September 2020, the professor said on Facebook: “I think we need to go to [then U.S. vice presidential candidate] Kamala Harris and say to her: ‘…It’s not okay that some of our representatives actually have dual Israeli-U.S. passport. That’s not okay! That’s not okay!…”
While Abdulhadi uses the public resources of San Francisco State to promote her Jew hatred, she is notably less tolerant toward pro-Israel views. When former SFSU President Leslie Wong stated under public pressure that he welcomes Zionists at the University, Abdulhadi responded by equating Zionists with the KKK: “I’m waiting for him to say, white supremacists is welcome, KKK is welcome, David Horowitz is welcome, Richard Spenser is welcome, Neo-Nazis are welcome, homophobes are welcome, misogynists are welcome, why stop only at Zionists? Welcome them all. I mean bring the…whole club. Bring everybody who is right wing and racist, bring them to campus, why only stop at Zionists.”
Nor has any of this Jew hatred abated in recent years. On October 4th, just three days before Hamas barbarically killed and mutilated over a thousand Israeli civilians in an unprovoked attack, AMED posted a quote by SFSU Professor Tomomi Kinukawa on its official Facebook page calling on SFSU to “immediately sever its ties with the apartheid state of Israel, Zionist and white supremacist organizations, and private donors” and claiming that this step is necessary to “Restoring our academic freedom and ending violence and the hostile environments on our campus.” This statement demonizes and delegitimizes the world’s only Jewish state and also promotes the genocidal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel that seeks to isolate it from the world community and ultimately to destroy it. The equivocation of Zionism with “white supremacy” is a common feature of Jew hatred, and also highly flawed as the majority of Jewish citizens of Israel are of Middle Eastern or North African descent.
In the months after Hamas’s barbaric October 7th attack, AMED intensified its efforts to support the terrorist group while demonizing Israel and the Jewish people. An October 12th post on the official AMED Facebook page highlights a local protest, exhorting “STAND WITH PALESTINE. STAND ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY. NO US AID FOR GENOCIDE!” The post continued by demonizing Israel for defending itself from the most deadly and brutal attack in its history: “In the past few days, the Zionist occupation has been relentlessly bombing Gaza and more than 1000 Palestinians, hundreds of them children, have been killed. This is a blatant attempt to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people. We demand an END to the genocide on Gaza!”
Later that month, AMED posted a statement from the group Feminists for Justice in Palestine accompanied by a note stating, “In the midst of the extreme violence against the people of Gaza, we are urging everyone to read and share [this statement].” The statement itself reads: “As the Israeli settler colonial genocidal onslaught against Gaza and the rest of Palestine continues, we reaffirm our unwavering solidarity with, and radical anticolonial support for, the Palestinian people and their ongoing resistance.” A clearer statement in support of Hamas would be harder to find.
During an online panel held by AMED in November on “Gaza: Genocide and Resistance,” AMED director Rabab Abdulhadi, one of the featured speakers, proclaimed: “This has been the worst massacre that is ongoing in order to exterminate and eliminate the Palestinian people, a task that Israel is not going to be able to succeed, but not without the cost, the human toll, of over 11,000 now, martyrs, half of them are children… Israel refusing to allow fuel, refusing to allow food, refusing to allow medical supplies, refusing to allow water, cutting off electricity and the internet, so even the suffering and the disasters that are going on in Gaza cannot reach the world.”
Abdulhadi continued, “All in all, this is a project of attempt to eliminate, and it is the Palestinian people, that the Zionist project has been trying [to eliminate] for over 100 years and Israel has been trying for over 75 years.” Given that charter of Hamas, which was elected to rule Gaza in 2006, literally calls for the destruction of Israel and the extermination of all its Jews, it is laughable that Abdulhadi imputes the same genocidal motive to Israel and the Zionist project which have only ever responded with force when their security has been threatened.
The blatant Jew hatred espoused by Professor Abdulhadi and her colleagues in the College of Ethnic Studies at SFSU earns them the top spot on the list of America’s worst Jew-hating academic departments.
#2: University of California-Santa Cruz, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department
The Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department at UC-Santa Cruz has utterly abdicated its responsibility towards political neutrality and academic freedom, instead choosing to side with Hamas terrorists and their Jew-hating allies on the left in blatant disobedience of university policy.
On October 11, 2023, just four days after Hamas’s massacre left over a thousand innocent Israeli civilians dead and hideously mutilated for the sole crime of being Jewish, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department issued a statement titled “CRES Statement of Support for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.” This inflammatory piece, according to the Amcha Initiative, a group that tracks campus anti-Semitism, “condoned the massacre and maiming of thousands of Israeli civilians by completely negating any mention of the civilian death, torture, rape and kidnapping of Jews by Hamas and instead blaming Israel.” The statement also “denigrated a former Jewish faculty member, and in doing so, jeopardized her safety, [and] denigrated Jewish organizations.”
Instead of expressing outrage over the murder of innocent Jews, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department urged the public to understand that “What we are witnessing needs to be understood in the context of 75 years of settler colonial displacement, military occupation, and enclosure” and expressed that “The study of Zionism in the context of power is more imperative than ever.”
On October 20, 2023, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department again made their clear position on the Israel/Hamas war known, siding with Hamas. On its official university webpage, CRES posted that “As a department, we are observing the Palestinian-led Global General Strike and will not conduct university business as usual on 10/20/23. We are in full support of the strike to stand against Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza, itself an extension of the ongoing Nakba Palestinians have experienced for over 75 years.” Instead of condemning the literal genocide that Hamas attempted to perpetrate on the Jewish people (a genocide called for explicitly in the Hamas charter), CRES chose to accuse Israel of genocide for daring to respond in self-defense to the worst terrorist attack in its short history.
As part of this “Global General Strike” CRES blatantly defied the authority of UC-Santa Cruz by refusing to hold classes or conduct university business. Moreover, they urged students and other faculty at the university to do the same, and to express support and solidarity with Palestine, and therefore, with the party elected to run Gaza, Hamas.
“This is a call for civil disobedience” declared the notice posted by CRES. “To all workers and students: We ask that you take Friday off to participate in the general strike. To all businesses: Do not open on Friday, October 20. To all citizens: Wear a symbol of international solidarity on this day. This day is a day of solidarity with Palestinians in Palestine and around the world. This day is a day of protest against repressive state terror against Palestinians worldwide. Solidarity with Palestine!”
Not content to just issue statements condoning Hamas’s barbarism, the Department followed up on this statement on October 24th by co-hosting an event with the notorious Hamas-funded campus hate group, Students for Justice in Palestine. Titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” the event description makes its biases clear, promising to “contextualize the unfolding genocide on Gaza and offer resources for facilitating these discussions in your classrooms.” The Amcha Initiative, a pro-Jewish watchdog group, described the workshop as “an egregiously one-sided event at which CRES faculty presented Hamas talking-points and offered graduate instructors resources for facilitating classroom discussions around the ‘unfolding genocide on Gaza.’”
On the same day that this event took place, flyers were discovered on campus that falsely accused Israel of bombing a hospital in Gaza, thus invoking ancient blood libel tropes against the Jews, an age-old form of anti-Semitism. In fact, as was quickly established and confirmed by numerous mainstream media outlets, it was a rocket launched by another Palestinian terror group, Islamic Jihad, that was responsible for damaging the hospital parking lot. Despite the clear facts of the situation, the poster made hyperbolic claims against Israel, declaring: “ON OCTOBER 17 THE STATE OF ISRAEL BOMBARDED A HOSPITAL IN GAZA KILLING OVER 500 PEOPLE,” “OVER 3000 PALESTINIANS MASSACRED THIS MONTH MOSTLY BY US FUNDED AIR STRIKES,” “THIS IS GENOCIDE.”
Just a few weeks later, on November 7th, CRES again posted on its official university webpage that “The department will be observing the November 9 all-day sit-in at the base of campus. Skip school and work. Do not look away from the genocide. No business as usual! Education, food, art, vigil and ofrenda, and more.” The link for the event directs users to the UC-Santa Cruz Students for Justice in Palestine Instragram page, yet another instance of CRES openly affiliating with the Hamas-funded SJP hate group.
Nor is CRES’s pro-Hamas activism anything new. As the Amcha Initiative revealed in a new report, “the evidence we document dates back to May 2021, when CRES pledged departmental allegiance to ‘the struggle for Palestinian liberation’ and the academic boycott of Israel,” although “incidents involving CRES’s anti-Zionist political advocacy and activism have increased in frequency and intensity since the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel.”
In a letter signed by over 400 University of California faculty members addressed to the UC Board of Regents, and printed in the Jewish Journal, CRES at Santa Cruz is singled out for particular opprobrium for its use of the University of California’s resources and reputation to promote anti-Semitism.
“CRES’s commitment to anti-Zionist political advocacy and activism, as a department and as part of its core mission, harms the University in many ways: it corrupts the most basic standards of scholarship and tarnishes UC’s reputation as a world-class research institution; it coerces the consciences of students and fellow faculty by chilling dissent and marginalizing anyone who disagrees with CRES’s political orthodoxy; it deprives students of accurate and crucial knowledge about a complex topic of global importance and violates their fundamental right to be educated and not indoctrinated; and, as Chair Leib has already noted, it incites animus and harm toward Jewish members of the campus community,” declared the letter.
The faculty missive to the UC Board of Regents also noted CRES’s flagrant refusal to follow university policy and excise pro-Hamas rhetoric from official university spaces: “Tellingly, less than a week after receiving a clear warning from the UCSC Provost highlighting UC policies prohibiting faculty from engaging in political advocacy in educational spaces, an invitation to join Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), a group wholly devoted to anti-Zionist advocacy and activism in collaboration with SJP, was posted to the CRES homepage and linked to the FJP’s founding manifesto, which was signed by more than 60% of CRES’s principal faculty.”
For its abhorrent support of Hamas and its repeated use of university resources to share pro-terrorist and Jew-hating progaganda, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department at UC-Santa Cruz deserves to be named one of the worst Jew-hating academic departments in America.
#3: Columbia University, Center for Palestine Studies
In the days following Hamas’s barbaric October 7th massacre of Israeli civilians, university campuses across the nation became a focal point for—and a symbol of—the Jew hatred that infects our culture. One of the foremost examples on that list is Columbia University, where just one day after the attacks, twenty campus organizations signed a statement excusing Hamas’s butchery as justified “resistance” and claiming that “The weight of responsibility for the war and casualties undeniably lies with the Israeli extremist government and other Western governments.” Students marched through campus chanting for “Intifada” and the annihilation of the Jewish state and the genocide of the Jewish people. An Israeli student was physically beaten with a wooden stick in front of the famous Butler Library on Columbia’s campus after he objected to an individual tearing down posters of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas.
On October 27, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik released a statement claiming to be “shocked to hear of several antisemitic incidents in just the last couple of days” and stating that “antisemitism, like any form of bigotry, is an assault on everything we stand for at Columbia.” President Shafik’s words might carry more weight if Columbia’s own Center for Palestine Studies hadn’t been promoting Jew-hatred and spreading vile Hamas propaganda for over a decade.
Columbia officially opened the Center for Palestine Studies in 2010, the first American university to dedicate an institute to the study of Palestinian Arabs. Specifying that its mission is “supporting and defending the academic freedom of students, faculty and schools in the Occupied Territories,” the Center makes no pretense of intellectual objectivity and makes clear through its events and the faculty it hires that it supports the BDS movement which was designed to further the goals of terrorist groups like Hamas and to delegitimize, weaken and destroy the Jewish State.
The faculty in charge of the Center reads like a who’s-who list of academic Jew-haters. The original co-directors of the Center were Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi and Barnard College professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. Khalidi is known for his extreme hostility to Israel which he has called “racist” and “basically an apartheid system in creation.” El Haj has condemned academic researchers in Israel, claiming that the work of archaeology in Palestine/Israel is a screen for the “ongoing practice of colonial nationhood” and that the assumption that ancient Israelite kingdoms were once located in the land that constitutes modern-day Israel is a “pure political fabrication.” Brian Boyd, the current co-director of the Center with El-Haj, is a leader in the genocidal BDS movement against Israel and has pushed for the American Archeological Association to boycott Israeli universities. While not officially affiliated with the Center, notorious Columbia history professor Joseph Massad also belongs on this list for publishing an article calling the October 7th attacks “awesome” and “the stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance” against “cruel colonizers.”
The official Center website states that it was created to honor “the specific scholarly legacy of Professor Edward Said at the university where he taught for forty years.” The late Edward Said was a Columbia professor who preached in his academic writing and his extracurricular activities that Israel was both illegitimate and also a colonialist state. He was a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Palestinian National Council until 1991 when he resigned because he thought Yasser Arafat’s policies were too moderate towards Israel.
Describing the Center for Palestine Studies as “Ramallah on the Hudson,” author A.J. Caschetta explains that “Columbia has assembled the anti-Israel all-stars of academia, such as Joseph Massad, who has called for ‘the continuing resistance of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories to all the civil and military institutions that uphold Jewish supremacy.’ Another member of CPS is Hamid Dabashi, who wrote that Israel is a ‘key actor’ in ‘every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world.’”
Events hosted by the Center have included a speech from BDS movement co-founder Omar Barghouti, who has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, on “Palestine’s South Africa Moment?” and a Teacher’s Workshop on “Citizenship and Nationality in Israel/Palestine” which included the false Hamas series of maps—a form of cartographic genocide which depicts the invasion and colonization of Arab “Palestine” by the Jews—on its event poster.
In recent years, the Center for Palestine Studies has hosted innumerable events featuring anti-Semitic speakers and rhetoric. In November 2018, “The Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University cohosted a three-day “Second International Meeting for Science in Palestine” with the Hamas-funded student hate group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and several other pro-BDS groups. During one panel, Columbia Professor Michael Harris argued that, “Including Israel as a full partner in the European Research Network effectively meant the importation of Israel systemic racism into the European research state.” The academic boycott against Israel is a part of the Hamas-funded BDS movement. Another speaker, Khury Petersen-Smith frequently alluded to “Israeli apartheid” and echoed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by claiming “the playbooks that the right wing [globally] is using to go after progressive academics was developed by Zionists.”
In February 2019, The Center for Palestine Studies (CPS) at Columbia held an event titled “Unsettling Spaces: Technologies of Violence in Palestinian Jerusalem,” during which speaker Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian echoed age-old anti-Semitic blood libels against the Jewish people claiming that “Israel does weapons tests on Palestinian children,” and “They’re making money out of this. Making money over children’s bodies and children’s lives.”
In April of 2023, the Center for Palestine Studies (CPS) at Columbia co-hosted an event titled “Race and Catastrophe: Lessons from Palestine.” During the program, speaker Sherene Seikaly, an Associate Professor of History from UC-Santa Barbara, demonized Israel and promoted the genocidal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel, praising the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) for passing a resolution in support of BDS and calling it “revolutionary.”
The previous month, in March of 2023, CPS held another event promoting Jew hatred titled, “We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I.” Featured speaker Raja Shehadeh, and Professor Rashid Khalidi, one of the original directors of CPS, both spewed anti-Semitic propaganda. Shehadeh repeatedly referred to the founding of Israel as the “Nakba,” an Arabic term meaning “catastrophe” that is used to delegitimize Israel’s status as a nation. He also promoted the “right of return” for Palestinians which would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. Khalidi commented on Shehadeh’s book, demonizing Israel and asserting that it exists on “stolen” land, noting “there are aspects of Israeli planning and its diabolical forward-looking plan to absorb and completely strangle and destroy Palestine in the interest of turning it into the greater land of Israel… this constriction of the Palestinians into enclaves or better described as you did as ghettos is an ongoing process. It’s not done. It continues all the time… Israeli settlements building more settler units, expanding into more stolen land and so on and so forth.”
The events listed above are only a tiny fraction of the anti-Semitic conferences and speakers sponsored by CPS over the years.
For its blatant Jew-hatred, promotion of terrorist violence against Israel, and elevation of Hamas propaganda to the realm of scholarly discourse, Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies clearly belongs among the top Jew-hating academic departments in America.
#4: University of Pennsylvania, Middle East Center
On September 22, 2023, roughly two weeks before Hamas would launch a barbarous and unprovoked attack on innocent Israeli civilians, the University of Pennsylvania hosted the Palestine Writes Literature Festival on campus. The event was sponsored by numerous university departments and centers including the Middle East Center, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Wolf Humanities Center.
Even before the Hamas attacks brought anti-Semitism to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness, the event drew strong criticism and outrage from Jews and supporters of Israel as well as the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. Those latter two groups sent a letter to the University’s then-president Liz Magill back in August of 2023, sharing their “deep concern” that individuals scheduled to speak and present at the event had a history of promoting anti-Semitism. These scheduled speakers included Roger Waters, “whose shows were recently condemned by the U.S. State Department as antisemitic after he dressed in a Nazi-like uniform and shot a prop machine gun into the audience during two concerts performed in Germany.” Another featured speaker was CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill, who was fired by the network after endorsing the genocidal statement “Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea” in a speech at the United Nations and who has glorified convicted terrorist Fatima
Bernawi.
Other speakers at the event which were highlighted in the ADL/JFGP letter included the festival’s co-chair Susan Abulhawa who wrote, following a terrorist shooting outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, that “Every Israeli, whether in a synagogue, a checkpoint, a settlement, or shopping mall is a colonizer who came from foreign lands and kicked out the native inhabitants. They all serve in the racist colonial military. The whole country is one big militarized tumor” and Rutgers University Professor Noura Erakat who “repeatedly expressed complete opposition to Israel’s right to exist and shared her approval for military campaigns to end Israel’s existence. She also suggested Zionism is a ‘bedfellow’ to Nazism.”
Unsurprisingly, these predictions that the Palestinian Writes Literature Festival would openly promote Jew hatred at the university proved to be spot on. As the American Jewish Committee reported, “The festival’s inaugural event includes a screening of the film Farha, which includes a number of toxic antisemitic tropes, including a modern retelling of the blood libel trope that casts Jews as vicious, bloodthirsty, and cruel. The film is a distortive piece of fiction, yet it is often treated as evidence of extreme, unprovoked Israeli cruelty towards innocent Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence.”
The AJC also noted that the perpetual use of the term “settler colonialist” to describe the state of Israel is deeply anti-Semitic and inaccurate. “The term ‘settler colonialism’ refers to a system of oppression in which a colonizing nation engages in ethnic cleansing by displacing and dispossessing a native or pre-existing population,” explained the AJC. “This phrase is false for many reasons outlined here. Referring to Israel as a settler-colonialist state is not only factually inaccurate, it is an antisemitic demonization of the State of Israel.”
Individual speakers at the event also demonized the Jewish people and Israel.
Hoda Fahredin, one of the organizers of the festival who serves as a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Penn, used the genocidal phrase “From the river, to the sea” adding that “Under occupation in refugee camps in the diasporas and around the world, Palestinians are a people who have been facing the daily brutal injustices of an apartheid regime for the past 75 years. We gather here today and in the coming days in their honour.”
The professor also denied the well-established fact that the Jewish people have deep ancestral ties to the land of Israel, stating “And now, as Zionists continued to forcibly remove us from our homes, destroy and build over our ancestral villages, cemeteries and archaeological heritage. They have invented a stunning new tale of indigeneity [that is] propagated in popular culture throughout the West in particular.”
She also invoked anti-Semitic tropes that Jews control the media, stating “An open collaboration with Israel media continues to remove or shadow ban Palestinian content on social media, a phenomena that was verified by an independent investigation commissioned by Facebook itself that revealed unequivocal anti Palestinian bias. Financial platforms like PayPal have been pressured by Zionists to disallow Palestinians even the most mundane of transactions.”
Fahredin dismissed concerns about the potential for anti-Semitism at the festival as “Hysterical and racist accusations that our presence here poses a threat to Jewish students on campus, making them feel unsafe and fearful of wearing their kippas” adding, “Again, this is an old, well worn colonial script of the violent, dark, irrational and savage native. Which I will not dignify with a response.”
In perhaps her most direct statement of Jew hatred, Fahredin alleged that “So many of us in this room have had to watch our elders die in refugee camps that aren’t fit for rodents, all so they [Jews] can have an extra country if they want, the violence of which is on full display on this campus every year when Zionists set up their so-called Birthright Trips propaganda tours to recruit young American Jews to become our colonizers, tormentors and Lords.”
Nor was Fahredin alone in demonizing and delegitimizing the world’s only Jewish state (classic forms of anti-Semitism according the definition used by the U.S. State Department). Speaker Ahmad Zahid claimed not to “hate anybody for who they are” but asserted that “We hate occupation. We hate apartheid. We hate racism,” accusing Israel of all three sins.
Palestinian poet Dana Dajani vilified Jews for claiming their birthright as citizens of Israel, stating “The insanity of your alleged birthright, Israelis minting fresh citizens. They import entitlement and market it as democracy. And though your apartheid apathy acknowledges 1 million of my friends had second class citizens among you, millions still are caught in between.”
Roger Waters, co-founder of the band Pink Floyd, who spoke via Zoom, endorsed the genocidal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, stating, “I have remained wedded to the idea, of course, that was the year 2006, which was the year that the BDS movement started in Palestine and the whole of Palestine civil society. Sent this message to those of us outside the borders. To say please support us, please support the boycott, please, you know, please.”
The Palestine Writers festival attracted controversy because of its size and scope and the long list of anti-Semites featured as speakers. But the Middle East Center at U. Penn has a much longer and more extensive history of promoting Jew hatred on campus.
In May of 2022, the Middle East Center at U. Penn co-sponsored an event titled “Trauma and Resilience – Mental Health in the Middle East.” At the event, speaker Devin Atallah, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology at UMass Boston, demonized Israel, accusing it of “settler colonization,” “abuses of colonial power,” and treating Palestinians as less than human.
Atallah claimed that Israel exercises “excessive violence” against the Palestinians, claiming “We as the colonized are seen and treated as excessively violent and therefore deserving excessive violence. We’re killable, detainable, displaceable and our belongingness is always in question. This is part of the racialization process.”
He also promoted ancient blood libel tropes against the Jews, stating, “Scholars are using terms in Palestine such as dismemberment, caging, unchilding… unchilding is a really important colonial wound understand as the uncompromising practice and ideology whereby violence against Palestinian childhood becomes part of the war machine. It’s the process by which legal, political, military apparatuses of settler colonial state objectify the Palestinian child as a security threat that must be constantly surveilled, managed and targeted.”
Just two months earlier, in March of 2022, the Middle East Center gave a platform to another notorious Jew-hater, Rutgers professor Noura Erakat, who also spoke at the Palestine Writes festival. Erakat demonized and delegitimized Israel, stating that we should “understand that when we discuss these processes when we discuss the condition of settler colonialism, or what many have become more familiar with is apartheid. That this doesn’t begin at the false partition of the green line but begins within Israel itself and marks all Palestinians for removal regardless of juridical or geographic demarcation.”
She went on to defend the Palestinian Intifada, a series of terrorist attacks, stating, “[T]his is what animates the May through June Unity Intifada. This is what catalyzes this organic movement of Palestinians in Ramallah, of Palestinians in Jerusalem, of Palestinians in Iliad, of Palestinians in Haifa, of Palestinians in Gaza, of Palestinians in Philadelphia, to unite with a singular voice to affirm once again that they are a single nation targeted with a single policy by a settler sovereign seeking to remove them in order to suspend the critique and the protest of Zionist settler sovereignty.”
Since the events of October 7th, Penn has pledged itself to combatting anti-Semitism, although its messaging has been decidedly uneven. Penn President Liz Magill—who was ousted in December after she testified before Congress that calls for the genocide of the Jews did not necessarily violate Penn’s policies—announced an “Action Plan to Combat Antisemitism.”
“Across the country and world, we are witnessing pernicious acts of antisemitism, including on college and university campuses,” Magill said. “I am appalled by incidents on our own campus, and I’ve heard too many heartbreaking stories from those who are fearful for their safety right here at Penn. This is completely unacceptable.”
Despite Magill’s words—and similar ones from her interim replacement J. Larry Jameson—Penn is failing in its promises. Some of the most blatant and obvious Jew hatred on campus comes from the university’s own academic departments and centers, particularly the Middle East Center, which deserves its place on the list of the worst Jew-hating academic departments.
#5: University of Minnesota, Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies
Just a glance at the website for the University of Minnesota Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies reveals it to be a highly politicized unit of the wider university, dedicated to progressive activism. The site declares that “As a place where research, education, and social change go hand in hand, GWSS identifies, analyzes, and challenges structural inequalities, while imagining and creating just and transformative futures for all.” Instead of searching for truth and knowledge, the Department openly acknowledges that its vision includes “social change,” “challeng[ing] structural inequalities,” and “creating just and transformative futures for all.”
So it should come as no surprise, that like much of the progressive left, the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (DGWSS) is a vile font of Jew hatred on the University of Minnesota campus.
Just six days after the brutal and barbaric Hamas attack on Israel, in which innocent civilians were brutalized and raped, parents killed in front of children, children killed in front of parents, bodies gleefully mutilated by terrorists on camera, DGWSS released a “Faculty Statement on Palestine” in which they described the massacre as “Hamas fighters” (not terrorists) who “brought down border fences.” The statement went on to demonize Israel and its defensive response to the worst attack in its history as “not self-defense but the continuation of a genocidal war against Gaza and against Palestinian freedom, self-determination, and life.” The statement declared “We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and with Palestinian scholars and organizers.” DGWSS might as well have said, “We stand with Hamas.”
The statement goes on to make clear that the Department stands for Palestine, and only Palestine. “We strongly reject the media coverage that condemns ‘both sides,’ or seeks to tell a one-sided story of an unprovoked terrorist attack,” it states. “Israeli leaders are wielding a violent power that subjugates the Palestinian people and constructs them as dehumanized terrorists, upon whom any bloodshed can be meted out.”
Ironically, the Department even claims that its glorification of Hamas “fighters,” who raped and brutalized innocent Israeli women en mass, is a stance for feminism. “As scholars and solidarity workers who seek justice everywhere, we respond to the call of Palestinian feminists and Palestinian freedom fighters for transnational solidarity and assert that Palestine is a feminist issue,” claims the statement. “None of us will be free unless the Palestinian people are free and Palestinian land is liberated.”
Unsurprisingly, the statement goes on to “reaffirm support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement,” a genocidal attempt to isolate and destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
At the very end of the lengthy diatribe against Israel, one sentence appears to apparently mediate the clear tension created by an academic department putting forth such a horrific and anti-Semitic tirade: “This statement reflects our individual views and we do not purport to speak for the University.” This caveat is obviously a lie. Individual professors in the department could have put out a statement under their own auspices and promoted it on their personal social media accounts. Instead, DGWSS chose to place it prominently on the official department webpage of the University of Minnesota website, where it remains several months later, amended only by a brief note, added on November 20th, 2023, which states, in part, “This statement was written collectively by the tenured core faculty of the Department of Gender Women and Sexuality Studies. This statement does not reflect the position of the University of Minnesota.” That legalistic note seems unlikely to reassure Jewish and Israeli students who are forced to take classes within the Department.
Largely in response to the DGWSS statement, the U.S. Department of Education is now conducting an investigation into whether the University of Minesota has violated federal anti-discrimination law due to anti-Semitism on campus.
The investigation was prompted by a letter sent to federal officials by former University of Minnesota regent Michael Hsu and law professor Richard Painter who argued, according to MPR News, that the DGWSS statement “is antisemitic because it condemns Israel while ‘justifying the terrorist attacks by Hamas.’”
“This is not about being pro-Palestinian,” Painter told MPR News. “This is about official statements of departments on websites paid for by the Minnesota taxpayers that justify the actions of Hamas.”
For its politicized use of official university resources to promote anti-Semitism and glorify Hamas, the University of Minnesota Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies belongs on the list of the worst Jew-hating academic departments in America.
#6: University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies
The Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill has repeatedly abdicated its responsibility to conduct legitimate scholarship and the free exchange of ideas by inviting rabid Jew-haters and Hamas propagandists to campus.
On November 28, 2023, less than two months after Hamas indiscriminately slaughtered and mutilated over 1200 Israeli civilians and took several hundred more hostage, the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies co-hosted an event with other university departments titled “No Peace Without Justice: A Round-Table Talk about Social Justice in Palestine.” Speakers at this official university-sponsored event had zero compunction about celebrating Hamas’s mass-slaughter and announcing their ultimate goal—to see Israel annihilated.
Dr. Rania Masri, an invited speaker at the event, declared: “Oct. 7 for many of us from the region was a beautiful day. It was the day in which we saw that, we saw our brothers, we saw our fathers, we saw men break out of a concentration camp.”
She went on to heap praise on Hamas and their paragliders who have become a symbol of terror for Jews and Israelis: “So for many of us, the question is, how did they learn that? How did they develop those paratroopers? Where did they get those skills? How, how, after a hundred years of having a military boot on your neck, could you still develop the technique and the resilience to literally fly? That is what Oct. 7 means to many of us. And I just want to be very frank about it and not be in the least bit apologetic of the violence of the oppressed or the occupied.”
Instead of condemning Dr. Masri’s words, other speakers voiced their agreement with the Reverend Mark Davidson proclaiming, “I agree with everything my colleagues have said” and UNC doctoral student Kylie Broderick, who also served as a panelist, nodding along to Masri’s statements.
Lest celebrating October 7th wasn’t a clear enough signal of Jew-hatred, Masri labeled Zionism a “cancer,” and called President Biden a “racist Zionist.” “Let us demand the eradication of Zionism. Let us have that be our goal,” Masri declared, promoting the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.
A film screened at the event, titled “Gaza Concentration Camp,” backed up Masri’s narrative, stating that on Oct. 7, “Palestinians didn’t break through a border to enter Israel. They destroyed a fence separating them from the homes they were forced out of.” The film failed to mention the brutal slaughter, rape, and maiming of innocent civilians that followed.
According to The Algemeiner which covered the event, “There were seven panelists, two moderators, and UNC professors present. No one appeared concerned by what Masri said, or challenged her. Further, the absence of a question and answer period meant that nothing could be challenged by audience members.”
Other recent events hosted by the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies have brought prominent anti-Semites to campus, including Princeton Professor Cornel West who spoke at the university on January 30, 2024 for a special event titled “Intertwined Histories of Social Justice within Middle Eastern American and African American Communities: A Conversation with Dr. Cornel West.” West has dismissed the Jews’ historic claim to the land of Israel, stating that “Jews jumped out of the burning buildings of Europe in a Jew-hating Europe led by a gangster named Hitler, right? They landed on the backs of some Arabs in 1948 when they founded their state.” West has also equated the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) with the terrorist group Hamas and claimed that Israel’s defensive actions during Operation Protective Edge in 2014 showed “Israeli state terrorism in action and its Jewish racism in motion.”
One of the Center’s most prominent voices is that of Dr. Nadia Yaqub, author of several books on Palestinian filmmaking. Yaqub is a supporter of the genocidal BDS movement against Israel and has repeatedly demonized and delegitimized Israel, claiming that the actions of the world’s only Jewish state are comparable to the Nazis during the Holocaust: “Israel’s repeated and disproportional attacks on Palestinian and other Arab civilians are rooted in a worldview that is very similar to that which produced the genocide against European Jews.”
The Center’s failure to the truth and its Jewish students can also be seen in its message to students and faculty following Hamas’s October 7th massacre against Israeli civilians. Instead of condemning Hamas and its barbaric atrocities, the Center merely spouted platitudes about how
“The events in Israel/Palestine over the past few days have been terrifying” and how “we extend our sympathy to everyone in our community who is feeling grief and pain at this time.” Rather than decry Hamas as the aggressor, the Center stated that “We also recognize that this is not an isolated incident and must be understood within the context of a history that stretches back 100 years” and “To that end, we will be holding listening sessions, roundtables, and/or teach-ins in the coming weeks for those interested.”
This statement is a complete moral and intellectual failure on the part of the Center. Instead of having the courage to call out Hamas’s barbarism, the Center attempts to put the rape and mutilation of women and the slaughter of children in “context.” For its dismal record of truth-telling about Israel and promotion of Jew-hating speakers and events, the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill is among the worst Jew-hating academic departments at American universities.
#7: University of Colorado-Boulder, Ethnic Studies Department
The Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado-Boulder has demonstrated its Jew hatred by demonizing the world’s only Jewish state as a perpetrator of ethnic cleansing and genocide and ludicrously claiming that Israel is guilty of the worst violence in its conflict with Hamas.
In a statement released barely two weeks after Hamas’s barbaric slaughter and mutilation of over 1200 innocent Israeli citizens, the Department absurdly attempted to argue that Israel was the aggressor in the conflict with Gaza and that Hamas’s actions should not be labeled “terrorism.”
The Ethnic Studies Department’s narrative of the conflict is so entirely inverted from the truth of the matter, that while reading it one could be forgiven for thinking one had plunged down Alice’s rabbit hole.
“Unfortunately, starting October 7, 2023…we witness another unprecedented genocidal attack on the Palestinian people, an intentional collective punishment and forced displacement with unprecedented levels of air bombings on civilians,” begins the statement, which attributes no responsibility for the conflict to Hamas or the Palestinians whatsoever. Reading the statement in a vacuum, one could be persuaded that Israel, rather than Hamas, had launched an unprovoked attack on an innocent party.
Labeling Israel’s military response as “war crimes,” “collective punishments,” and “genocide,” the Department questions Israel’s “supposed ‘right to defend itself,’” arguing that this critical freedom of all nations is a mere excuse “to ethnically cleanse Palestinian peoples (with support of the ‘west’) through constant bombardment driving them southward away from their homes and communities to free up more land for the ongoing Israeli settler colonialist occupations.”
Instead of condemning Hamas’s barbaric acts of terrorism, the Department takes issue with the use of that term, writing, “We also reject the language of ‘terrorism’ used by the US and Israel to justify the Israeli state killing machine.”
While acknowledging in a single sentence that “historically, Jews have been victims of genocide”—without mentioning that they continue to be the targets of genocidal rage from Hamas and much of the Muslim world—the Ethnic Studies Department “caution[s] against false equivalences between the settler colonial violence of disproportionately powerful militarized states on one hand and colonized peoples on the other,” adding that, “The state of Israel’s violence against Palestinians in Gaza and other parts of occupied Palestine is not a ‘conflict’ that is equally violent ‘on both sides.’”
The Department’s statement here is so ludicrous that it invites ridicule. Does the Department really mean to claim that Israel—the only Jewish nation in the world, attacked on the day of its founding by five Arab neighbors, which witnessed the murder, rape, mutilation and torture of over 1200 innocent men, women, and children by Hamas terrorists—has been disproportionately violent? Israel, which hinders its own military impact by warning Palestinian civilians to vacate before air strikes? Israel, whose offers of a ceasefire in exchange for the return of all hostages were summarily rejected by Hamas? The pure gall of the Ethnic Studies Department in arguing that Israel is the more violent party and the aggressor in this conflict illustrates the absolute ideological corruption and desecration of the truth in academia.
Given the Department’s inverted narrative of the conflict, it is no surprise that “The Department of Ethnic Studies stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination. Full stop.” Nor that the Department denies the right of Israel to exist, stating, “We join the Palestinian call for liberation in every corner of Palestinian lands, adding our voice to the protests that have been taking place across the world, including in Colorado, in support of Indigenous Palestinians’ right to life, land, and return.” The reference to “every corner of Palestinian lands” is clear—it is a call for the dismantling of all of Israel, a call for the destruction of the homeland of the Jewish people.
So egregious and counter-factual was this statement, that even in the far-left echo chamber of academia, it proved controversial. In a statement released just three days later on October 26, CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip DiStefano distanced the university from the Ethnic Studies Department’s statement. “While the principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression protect the speech of University of Colorado Boulder faculty, staff and students, that does not mean their points of view represent the perspectives of the university—nor that we endorse them,” he wrote. “The statement recently posted on the Department of Ethnic Studies website is not an official CU Boulder position on the Israel-Hamas War. The University of Colorado president and chancellors shared a joint leadership statement on Oct. 11.”
In an interview given later in December, DiStefano went further, admitting that he thought the Department’s statement was anti-Semitic. This statement is seemingly at odds with DiStefano’s insistence that the statement was protected by academic freedom. Individual faculty members are granted academic freedom in determining what topics to study and what papers to publish. Academic freedom does not entitle an official department of the university to use university funds and resources to promote Jew hatred.
A week after it was posted, the Ethnic Studies department removed the statement from its website—although the removal was not meant to convey that its sentiments were in error. Instead, the Department claimed that it was pulled due to “intersectional oppression and attacks” which allegedly put its faculty and students in danger. In an ironically-titled “Statement for Peace” issued on October 30th, the Department explained: “Because the Department of Ethnic Studies and our faculty, staff, and students find ourselves under attack for the statement we had previously shared on our website, we are removing the statement because we do not wish anyone in our community to feel unsafe. As scholars and academics, we remain committed to our research and teaching mission,” and adding, “This removal should in no way be seen as a lack of commitment to our mission statement.”
For its heinous refusal to acknowledge Hamas’s acts of terrorism against Israel and its blatant demonization of Israel through a contorted narrative that denies the Jewish state the right to its own defense, the Ethnic Studies Department at CU-Boulder deserves its place among the top Jew-hating academic departments in the nation.
#8: University of Maryland-College Park, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at the University of Maryland has repeatedly promoted Jew hatred and demonstrated its disdain for academic neutrality by using official university channels to demonize Israel, condone Hamas terrorism, and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state.
On October 13, just six days after Hamas’s barbaric attack that killed over 1200 innocent Israeli civilians in the most brutal ways imaginable, WGSS posted a statement on the official department website concerning “violence in Gaza and Israel.” The statement was attributed to the National Women’s Studies Association and was reproduced in full on the Maryland WGSS departmental page as an obvious show of solidarity and agreement with its precepts.
Instead of condemning Hamas for its brutal and unprovoked attack on Israeli civilians or excoriating their use of rape as a weapon of war, the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department attempted to whitewash the terrorist group’s action, urging that “The current escalation must be viewed in the context of decades of illegal Israeli military occupation and systemic violent campaigns.”
Using anti-Semitic language which demonized and delegitimized Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, the statement went on to condemn “the ongoing and persistent U.S. government’s support for Israel’s apartheid regime” and to characterize the Palestinians and Hamas as exemplars of “liberation and resistance movements led by other indigenous, colonized, and oppressed peoples everywhere.”
Lending a note of irony, the statement claimed that “As feminists, we recognize that violence and war often inflict gendered and sexualized harms on women and queer, trans and non-binary people.” It is clear from the context of the statement, that its authors believe such “sexualized harms” to stem from the actions of Israel, a laughable claim given that Hamas forces literally raped and mutilated women and children on video during the October 7th massacre and punish homosexuality in Gaza with death.
The statement also vowed its support for the genocidal and Hamas-directed Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel: “Today, we reaffirm our unwavering support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) resolution, which NWSA passed in 2015.”
Not content to let this tribute to Jew hatred stand on its own, approximately a week later, WGSS posted a second statement on the official department website “in solidarity with the people of Gaza.” The statement was attributed to the executive committee of the American Studies Association.
Making absolutely no mention of Hamas’s unprovoked atrocities on innocent Jews at a music festival and elsewhere in Israel, the statement instead alludes only to “the escalation of violence in Palestine and Israel” as if Hamas—which controls Gaza—was not the sole instigator of the recent barbarity. It goes on to explain that the organization “continues to stand with the Palestinian people and their ongoing struggle for liberation” and to offer “support [to] those who speak out against the intensifying onslaught on Gaza, whose destruction has killed nearly four thousand Gazan residents and displaced hundreds of thousands more.” Instead of condemning Hamas’s brutal terrorism and violence to civilians, the statement urges the “need to situate today’s events in a historical, political and regional understanding.”
Rather than demanding that Hamas immediately cease its genocidal war on Israel and the Jews—an objective stated plainly in the Hamas charter—the statement instead called for “an immediate ceasefire and release of humanitarian aid to Gaza” as well as for “the US to end support of Israeli apartheid and work toward negotiations.”
Such language demonizing Israel—the only liberal democracy in the Middle East which counts millions of Arabs as full citizens—constitutes blatant anti-Semitism. It has no place on the website of an official university department. Moreover, demanding an Israeli ceasefire while Hamas continued to hold over 100 innocent Israeli and other civilians as hostages, just weeks after the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history, is tantamount to asking Israel to surrender to Hamas, their genocidal enemies.
Just in case the promotion of terrorist violence was not clear enough in the rest of the statement, the last paragraph goes on to valorize Fatima Bernawi who is described as “the first female Palestinian imprisoned by the Israeli army” and an “Afro-Palestinian of Nigerian descent” who “served 10 years in Israeli prisons.” What this description leaves out is that Barnawi was arrested along with other terrorists after she attemped to bomb the Zion Cinema in downtown Jerusalem in October 1967, an attack that could easily have been fatal if the explosive was not discovered in time. “The Palestinian struggle is also the struggle for global Black solidarity in our collective liberation,” explains the statement, choosing to overlook Barnawi’s attempted homicide in favor of highlighting her role in the Marxist struggle against the Israeli oppressors.
For its blatantly anti-Semitic characterization of Israel and whitewashing of Hamas’s barbarism, the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland deserves its place among the worst Jew-hating academic departments.
#9: University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, Department of Latina/Latino Studies
In a “Letter to Our Students on Palestine” dated from December 18, 2023, the Department of Latina/Latino Studies sought to whitewash the atrocious actions of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas and demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state. The date of the letter’s posting is significant in that it came two months after Hamas’s October 7th genocidal attack on Israel, long after the barbaric details had been established and confirmed—women raped and mutilated, children set on fire, and over 1200 civilians butchered for the sole crime of being Jews.
The narrative set out by the Department of Latina/Latino Studies in their letter, which was posted on their official university department webpage and co-signed by the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and African-American Studies, focused not on Hamas’s brutal attack but exclusively on the “historical context of Israel’s ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestine.” It placed all blame solely on Israel, the victim of this brutal ethnic crime, instead of condemning Hamas. The atrocities committed by Hamas are described merely as an “attack against Israel…which led to the deaths of over one thousand Israelis, both civilians and soldiers.” The mention of “civilians and soldiers” is an obvious attempt to whitewash Hamas’s genocide. The terrorist organization attacked solely civilian targets—a music festival, a kibbutz—and overwhelming killed and raped civilians. The handful of “soldiers” who met their deaths were only present by happenstance or raced to the defense of the civilians who were attacked.
In that same passage, the letter refers to Israel as “the U.S.-backed nuclear power” which “has intensified its long-running siege on the Gaza Strip”—again, entirely obscuring the history of Gaza which Israel handed over to the Palestinians in 2005, as well as the Palestinians’ unceasing attempts to wipe Israel and its Jews off the world map. The letter goes on to quote Hamas-generated statistics—acknowledged by all independent observers to be highly suspect—that “the Israeli bombing campaign has killed over twenty thousand Palestinian people –the average age of the dead being just five years old.”
“We have a responsibility to name clearly what is happening, and to hold space and honor the grief, fear, and anger so many are feeling right now,” states the Department’s letter, adding, “we must recognize and name continuing settler colonial violence against Indigenous peoples everywhere.”
The entire content and tone of the letter is rife with Jew hatred—from minimizing Hamas’s atrocities, to obscuring the historical record of Jewish settlement in Israel dating back over two millennia, to demonizing and delegitimizing Israel, a form of anti-Semitism condemned by the U.S. State Department. The Department of Latina/Latino Studies makes its biases and priorities unmistakably clear.
The letter goes on to ludicrously claim that “expressions of solidarity with Palestine are regularly criminalized and repressed at institutions of higher education”—it is not expressions of solidarity with Palestine that are criminalized but rather the blatant refusal of hate groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association to operate within the law and university regulations that leads to their censure—and even then, only rarely.
“We are aware that many of our students are targeted, alienated, or harassed while navigating a climate that erases their suffering and dehumanizes their existence,” states the letter, speaking not of the Jewish students on UIUC’s campus, who could understandably fear for their lives given such blatant departmental support for their enemies, but rather of students who support Palestine.
“We denounce the virulent anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Black racism, erasure, and dehumanization circulating around us, from peers, administrators, political leaders, and mainstream U.S. media,” continues the Department’s official communication. “We also condemn anti-Semitism and the erasure of a rich tradition of Jewish critique that refuses the conflation of Judaism with Zionism.”
This one small aside to condemn “anti-Semitism” is rendered insincere by the anti-Semitic vitriol underlying the entire letter.
The conclusion to the letter reads like a caricature of woke DEI-speak: “Finally, we stand with and beside those targeted by colonialism, racism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and state-sanctioned violence. And in the absence of its recognition in the current moment, we affirm the value of all Palestinian life, and we know a free Palestine is only possible through queer, racial, gender, reproductive, and environmental justice. We offer our classrooms as a space for you to take refuge and find the strength to change the world together.”
The notion that Palestine—an entity ruled by a terrorist Islamic tyranny which criminalizes homosexuality, denies women any semblance of rights, and uses its citizens as human shields—could be freed through “queer, racial, gender, reproductive, and environmental justice” is so ludicrous that it almost defies comment. That the Department of Latina/Latino Studies supports such a barbaric and backwards culture over the liberal democracy of Israel where women, gays, and ethnic and religious minorities actually have constitutional rights, is yet more evidence of their Jew hatred.
The letter was accompanied on the departmental website by an extremely one-sided and anti-Semitic list of “Resources to Learn About Palestine” including links to the Palestinian Feminist Collective and a No Pride in Apartheid Toolkit.
Roughly two weeks after its posting, the letter was removed from the official website of the Department of Latina/Latino Studies, apparently at the behest of administrators who rightly felt that academic departments should not be weighing in on controversial political topics.
The blatant Jew hatred evidenced in the letter and the misuse of university resources to promote it earns the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at UIUC a place on the list of the worst Jew-hating academic departments.
#10: Northwestern University, Asian American Studies Program
The Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University has repeatedly used university resources and official communications channels to promote Jew hatred and condone Hamas’s actions against Israel and its Jewish citizens.
Roughly a week after the barbaric October 7th Hamas massacre of over 1200 Israeli civilians, the Asian American Studies Program (AASP) published a statement on the official department website and reproduced it on the official department Instagram page. Rather than condemning Hamas’s brutality and the innocent loss of Jewish lives in Israel, AASP instead decried “Islamophobia” on campus and chastised the Northwestern University administration for their “silence at the loss of life in Palestine.”
The statement blatantly whitewashed the atrocious actions of Hamas, claiming that “On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the political group that has controlled Gaza since 2006, attacked Israel. Israel subsequently declared war, marking the latest in a long line of armed struggles between the two nations since their formation in 1947-48.” No mention was made of the sheer brutality of Hamas’s actions—raping women, slaughtering children, mutilating civilians both before and after death. In fact, AASP mocked reports that Hamas beheaded babies as “baseless claims [that] are meant to incite hate against Palestine and equate supporting Palestinian civilians with antisemitism.”
Showing almost no concern for the Israeli victims of October 7th, and the citizens of Israel threatened by Hamas’s intended genocide, AASP instead chose to demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state, referring to Gaza as the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” and blaming the “civilian death toll” in Gaza solely on Israel—rather than on Hamas who started the war by attacking civilians and taking hostages and who then used Palestinian civilians as human shields.
The Asian American Studies Program also critiqued the “visible Islamophobia expressed in pro-Israel posters on NU’s campus falsely claiming that ‘Hamas is ISIS.’” Notably, the Program did not explain why they felt that comparison to be inaccurate or Islamophobic. Both organizations are Islamist terrorist groups known for their brutal treatment of women and ethnic minorities. The comparison seems apt.
Lest the message of support for Hamas and its aims was not clear enough, the Program statement went on to clarify that “The Asian American Studies program stands in solidarity with Palestinians, Arab Americans, the SWANA diaspora, and victims of Islamophobia worldwide.”
“As Ethnic Studies scholars, we are pro-Palestine and against antisemitism because we understand that all systems of oppression reinforce one another, and none can be fought in isolation,” continued the statement. “Islamophobia and antisemitism must both be eradicated if we are to live without violence. We offer our program as a haven for those who support or are Palestinian Americans, Arab Americans, SWANA diaspora, and anyone experiencing Islamophobia at NU who seeks a safe space.”
It is notable that the statement condemns both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, but offers only those experiencing Islamophobia or those of Palestinian or Arab origin, a “haven” and a “safe space” within their program. No Jews need apply.
The Asian American Studies Program has also promoted Jew hatred by partnering with the Hamas-funded campus hate group Students for Justice in Palestine to hold a “Teach-In About Palestine” on campus. Held on November 7, just a month after Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians, the event description claimed it would concern “Palestinian liberation and building solidarity with other liberation movements, and what action we can take to support Palestine in this moment.” Northwestern University’s chapter of SJP proudly declares the genocidal slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free” on its social media accounts and demands “The complete Northwestern boycott, divestment, and sanctioning of Israel’s apartheid and genocide,” thus demonizing and delegitimizing the Jewish state.
That the Asian American Studies Program saw fit to partner with an organization clearly known for its promotion of Hamas and its anti-Semitic rhetoric illustrates the lack of academic standards and rampant Jew hatred promoted by the Program. It is abundantly deserving of its place on the list of the worst Jew-hating academic departments.