Alexa Smith, the University of Michigan student who first brought to light a slide from a required lecture that compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, revealed another anti-Semitic slide from the lecture.
University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel issued an apology to Jewish students on Oct. 9 about the two instructors who denied writing letters of recommendation to students who wanted to study abroad Israel as well as the slide. However, Smith said in a statement to the Journal that Schlissel’s apology was not sufficient.
“It is perverse and profoundly offensive for President Schlissel to play down the seriousness of our community’s concerns by declaring that the slide equating the Prime Minister of Israel to Hitler was ‘one of nearly 200 slides’––as if, in context, this was ‘no big deal,’” Smith said. “President Schlissel is not recognizing the unequivocally anti-Semitic content of this entire lecture, or the effect it had and continues to have on U-M’s Jewish students––some of whom were REQUIRED to sit through it in order to obtain our degrees. Either way, his indifference and misrepresentation is unacceptable.”
Smith also mentioned that she has another slide that “shows Jews drawn as pigs, drinking from bottles of money and holding a wand with a Jewish star, as if they have supernatural control and power.”
The Journal has obtained a copy of the slide:
The YouTube video of the lecture doesn’t show the Star of David wand and cuts out “the Zionist Puppet State” text:
“These images come from the playbook of Hitler and Goebbels,” Smith said. “They invoke the most classical––and most genocidal––anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”
Smith added that the lecture “dehumanized an entire group of people.”
“This is not thought-provoking. This is not educational. This is university-endorsed bigotry,” Smith said. “The University of Michigan must define anti-Semitism so an incident like this does not happen again under their supervision.”
Smith has been leading students into calling for the university to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism. The university has said that they’re reviewing the matter.
Rick Fitzgerald, the vice president for public affairs at the university, pointed the Journal to the video of the event when asked about Smith’s comment. When pressed further, he said that the university had no additional comment at this time.
