A lecturer at Stanford University has been suspended after he allegedly forced Jewish and Israeli students in class to stand in a corner, claiming that “this is what Israel does to the Palestinians.”
The allegations were first outlined in The Forward, which spoke with Chabad at Stanford University Executive Director Rabbi Dov Greenberg, who spoke to three Jewish students in the class. The San Francisco Chronicle also spoke to the two co-presidents of the Israel Student Association on campus who had communicated with 18 students from the class. The lecturer is alleged to have asked all the Jewish and Israeli students in class to raise their hands and then separated them from their belongings, putting them in a corner. The instructor allegedly separated the students based on their identities and ethnic backgrounds into “colonizers” and “colonized.”
At one point, the lecturer is alleged to have asked how many people were killed in the Holocaust; a student replied, “Six million.” The lecturer then allegedly said, “Yes. Only six million” before claiming that more people have died from “colonizers” and then accused Israel of being a colonizer.
Additionally, the lecturer is alleged to have called Hamas “freedom fighters” and denied that they are a terror group. He did not say anything about the massacre Hamas committed against Israelis on October 7, per the allegations.
“He’s saying Israel is worse than the Nazis and Hamas is innocent,” Greenberg told The Forward. “This is what Jewish students face at Stanford and other places. They’re feeling isolated, under attack and threatened.”
“I feel absolutely dehumanized that someone in charge of students and developing minds could possibly try and justify the massacre of my people,” Israel Student Association Co-President Nourya Cohen told the Chronicle. “It’s like I’m reliving the justification of Nazis 80 years ago on today’s college campus.”
The university issued a statement on Wednesday addressing the matter. “We have received a report of a class in which a non-faculty instructor is reported to have addressed the Middle East conflict in a manner that called out individual students in class based on their backgrounds and identities,” University President Richard Saller and Provost Jenny Martinez said. “Without prejudging the matter, this report is a cause for serious concern. Academic freedom does not permit the identity-based targeting of students. The instructor in this course is not currently teaching while the university works to ascertain the facts of the situation.”
Anti-Defamation League Central Pacific Regional Director Marc Levine told The Forward, “The reported identity-based targeting of Jewish and Israeli students in a class was unacceptable. At a time when Jews are fearing for their safety worldwide, it’s critical we boldly call out anti-Jewish hate. Students — including Jewish students — deserve to feel safe and respected on university campuses.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is calling for the lecturer to be fired in light of the allegations. “Stanford? This so-called academic behaves like the Nazis and Stalinists did,” Wiesenthal Center Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action Agenda Rabbi Abraham Cooper said in a statement. “It’s time for university leaders to condemn the mass murderers of infants, entire families, rapists, and kidnappers. Act now before it’s too late.”
Saller and Martinez also said in their Wednesday statement that there have been “horrifying new details about the Hamas attack in Israel last weekend, which involved intolerable atrocities including murder of civilians and kidnapping. The likelihood of a lengthy and violent continued conflict in the region has become clearer.” They also said: “As a moral matter, we condemn all terrorism and mass atrocities. This includes the deliberate attack on civilians this weekend by Hamas. One of the advances in international law in the 20th century following the horrors of the Holocaust was the development of international humanitarian law prohibiting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Such crimes are never justified.”
“The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” they later said. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”
The university faced criticism over their initial statement on October 9 on the Israel-Hamas war, as some argued that it didn’t explicitly denounce the Hamas terror attack, per The Forward.
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