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Kill it or reform it? Jewish critics of DEI debate the future of campus diversity programs
(JTA) — As director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota, Natan Paradise says he leads a research institution, not an advocacy organization. Yet since Oct. 7, he says his research has been put on pause while he spends his time “just dealing with this.”
“This” refers to fallout from the deadly Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.
“A lot of conversations have had to be had, educating both inside and outside the Jewish community,” Paradise said in an interview thismonth. “That happens daily. People want to know, should we respond and should we respond in an uproar? The donors are in an uproar. Administrators need context.”
At Minnesota, various academic departments issued statements on the conflict that Paradise calls “dismaying,” and others called actionable.
The university chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine plastered the doors of academic buildings with flyers bearing anti-Israel messages. A prominent Republican on the law faculty filed a civil rights complaint that this week resulted in a federal investigation. And the campus was roiled when a candidate for a senior position at the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion office gave a speech accusing Israel of genocide and denying reports that Hamas had committed sexual crimes in the Oct. 7 attacks.
The candidate is no longer being considered for the position, but the incident still ramped up concerns about DEI at Minnesota and beyond. When Paradise joined fellow scholars for a panel discussion about “Jews, Antisemitism and DEI: Campus Experiences” at the Association for Jewish Studies conference in San Francisco last month, emotions ran high.
“We have problems” with the campus DEI office, said Amy Simon, an assistant professor of Holocaust Studies and European Jewish History at Michigan State University, where officials recently backed away from a project that would have addressed concerns about antisemitism. The office is known as the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, or IDI. “Sometimes they’re listening, but there’s never a real hearing from the top of the administration [or] the IDI either.”
DEI is a shorthand for a framework that says employers and institutions should be welcoming to diverse applicants, especially people of color, women and the LGBTQ community. Campus DEI offices offer training to students and faculty in how to be welcoming to marginalized groups, provide support groups for women, people of color and LGBTQ students, and work with the administration in promoting and identifying diverse candidates for faculty and administration jobs.
Members of the Association for Jewish Studies gathered for the organization’s 55th annual conference, held in San Francisco, Dec. 17-19, 2023. (JTA photo)
College campuses have had minority and multicultural affairs offices since the late 1960s and 1970s, focused largely on hiring more diverse faculty and staff and enrolling and retaining more students of color. In the mid-2000s, diversity officers who had been working in isolation formed the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. The organization’s membership has tripled to over 2,000 since July 2020, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, as universities reacted to the police murder of George Floyd and calls to address systemic racism.
As the offices have grown — more than two-thirds of all major universities have chief diversity officers — and as a backlash to the 2020 reckoning on race has deepened, criticism has mounted against DEI. In recent years, it has become a prime target of a group of activists — mostly conservative, and some of them Jewish — who blame DEI for an antipathy toward what they see as traditional American values and a misguided focus on identity over merit in academia.
One leader of the anti-DEI movement is Chris Rufo, a conservative activist who has argued that diversity initiatives undercut the values of the liberal arts. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed him to the board of the New College of Florida as part of an effort to remake it according to conservative values — and one of the first moves was to ax the DEI office. But it’s not just Florida: In 2023, Republican lawmakers in at least a dozen states proposed more than 30 bills targeting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in higher education.
Since Oct. 7, some Jews who would not normally feel at home on the right have found themselves joining the ranks of DEI’s critics. At the Jewish studies conference, many scholars said their schools’ DEI offices ignored Jewish concerns — either not recognizing Jews as a minority or seeing them as white and privileged, and therefore not subject to marginalization.
The seeming failure of many DEI programs to take Jews’ concerns seriously has led some Jewish leaders and conservative politicians to call for their dismantling. But others, particularly on the left, say the core values at the root of DEI initiatives are positive and the programs should be widened to include Jews.
No major Jewish group has called for abolishing the programs.
“We think it is an absolute mistake for anyone to say that DEI is the single cause of the explosion of anti-Jewish intolerance we are seeing,” Adam Neufeld, a senior vice president and chief impact officer at the Anti-Defamation League, said in an interview. “It is a part of it, we’re sure, but it’s not the sole force. Antisemitism has existed for millennia.”
The ADL is working to improve rather than abolish DEI programs, he said, from privately consulting with campus administrators, to publicly calling out universities that don’t protect Jewish students and faculty, to supporting litigation in cases alleging schools have mishandled antisemitic incidents.
That approach is a mistake in the eyes of DEI’s most vociferous Jewish critics — many of whom view the campus convulsions after Oct. 7 as proof that they are right. Some of them pointed to the pivotal congressional hearing in December featuring three university presidents, who stumbled when asked whether calls for “the genocide of Jews” would violate their campuses’ speech codes. Two of the presidents, Liz McGill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard, later stepped down. DEI is “the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard,” Bill Ackman, a Jewish hedge fund manager and Harvard donor who led the charge against Gay, said in a lengthy tweet cheering her ouster.
“For Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity,” Bari Weiss wrote in a Tablet essay about how Jews should respond to Oct. 7. Weiss, who runs the news startup The Free Press, argued that under DEI, “equity” has come to mean that people are judged deserving according to their group identities. “If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation — and Jews are 2% of the American population — suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege.”
A protester carries a sign at a “Shut It Down for Palestine” rally outside the Foggy Bottom George Washington University Metro Station in Washington, D.C., Nov. 24, 2023. (Elvert Barnes Photography/Wikimedia Commons)
Abraham Foxman, the former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told Jewish Insider that DEI “cannot be fixed,” saying that “efforts by communal Jewish organizations to include the Jewish community or soften its impact on antisemitism have failed.”
David Harris, the former CEO of the American Jewish Committee, also told Jewish Insider that he doesn’t believe that “outside efforts, however well-intentioned, that nibble around the edges or simply seek to add Jews to the DEI agenda, address the heart of the problem. DEI today poses a major challenge to liberal understanding of American societal aims.”
Other prominent Jews calling for the demise of DEI are Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer and pro-Israel activist; Mark Charendoff, president of the Maimonides Fund, and David L. Bernstein, a Jewish communal professional whose opposition to “wokism” led him to form the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values.
“It’s not that we don’t want to make campuses comfortable places for people of color and gays and lesbians. God forbid,” Bernstein said in an interview. “Unfortunately DEI quickly evolved into an ideological framework that tells people in no uncertain terms who are the oppressed and who are the oppressors. It tends to divide people into racial affinity groups, which can be very divisive. It often imposes political litmus tests with DEI statements that applicants must submit for getting a job or getting promoted.”
Bernstein agrees with Weiss that DEI turns the relative academic and financial success of Jews against them by suggesting they are “riding on the backs of deprived minority groups.”
Bernstein and others also cite a 2021 report from the Heritage Foundation on the “public communications” of DEI professionals, saying they showed a disproportionate tendency to “attack Israel.”
“Against this backdrop, it’s not hard to see why so many DEI programs are loath to acknowledge the antisemitic nature of anti-Zionist behavior that so often leads to the harassment of Jewish students,” Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, co-founder and director of the pro-Israel AMCHA Initiative, wrote in a piece for Sapir, a journal of the Maimonides Fund.
At many campuses, DEI offices have staff who are trained in investigating and resolving complaints about discrimination, and are the main address for such complaints. However, in a college survey the ADL conducted before Oct. 7, more than half of all students surveyed said they had completed DEI training, but only 18% of those said those trainings included topics specific to anti-Jewish prejudice.
“That is a terrible and unacceptable situation,” said the ADL’s Neufeld. “It is dangerous, both in the sense that it excludes a historically persecuted people who are incredibly vulnerable and actually sends the signal that the exclusion is acceptable.”
Jewish critics of DEI frequently say this exclusion is the result of an “oppressor/oppressed” framework that considers Jews as white and privileged, but tend to provide little evidence. Instead, campus insiders say, there are other structural reasons for the exclusion of Jews and antisemitism from DEI offices.
“Judaism is seen as a religion, and DEI offices don’t touch religion in the sort of structural ecosystem of how the university works,” explained Samira Mehta, the director of Jewish Studies and an associate professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, during a session at the AJS conference. “The university chaplains’ office is in charge of religion and religious diversity. DEI is in charge of racial and gender diversity. DEI is also not so welcome to Islamophobia, except to the degree that they keep their eye on what’s happening to brown students.
“And the people who come up through these offices do not have training in religious diversity and don’t know how to do it,” she continued. “Also the people who come up in those offices sometimes are coming up from queer and gender diversity standpoints.” Mehta referred to these as “all of those structural ways that antisemitism, while real, is not something they handle.”
Lauren Strauss, a professor of modern Jewish history at American University, said that was the experience of Jewish students on her campus who faced antisemitism in their dorms and classes after Oct. 7. They were told that “they should go see a chaplain because this is a religious matter, not racial, ethnic or social prejudice, and outside the DEI office’s mandate,” she said at the AJS panel on DEI. (This week, an activist law firm filed suit against A.U. over its handling of incidents affecting Jewish students on campus.)
Jewish faculty at A.U. have also pushed, with little success, for discussion of antisemitism, alongside sexism, homophobia and transphobia, in a core curriculum course for first-year students and transfers known as the American University Experience. Even after agreeing to one session on the Holocaust, the university’s Center for Diversity and Inclusion said it was optional.
“The one bright spot in all this,” Strauss said, is the support she’s gotten from “a small group of Jewish studies and general studies scholars” and the campus Hillel director.
Yet Strauss and the other scholars did not say they favored abolishing the programs. While it may be satisfying to condemn the ideology underpinning DEI, they said, campuses need departments whose task it is to increase diversity and make the marginalized feel welcome.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs three higher education bills, including one prohibiting institutions from spending federal or state dollars on “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)” programs, May 15, 2023. (Florida Governor’s Office)
Stacy Burdett, a consultant who helps corporations, colleges and nonprofits enhance DEI programming to address Jewish concerns, said calls to dismantle DEI offices also ignore the ways they in fact advance diversity.
“It’s hard for me to imagine a discussion of DEI that isn’t cognizant of the role that gender equity plays in the DEI movement,” she said, offering one example. “And also that the Jewish community itself is a place where there is a paucity of women leaders.”
Burdett said the current debate over DEI lacks the kind of nuance that Jewish groups brought to debates over a previous era’s civil rights issues, including quotas and affirmative action.
“There’s no question that some of the ideological underpinnings of DEI in some institutions are flawed, and sort people in categories that Jews don’t neatly fit into. I think everyone in the Jewish community wants the American public square to be a safer place for Jews, and there are just different ways of getting at that,” she said. “But we’re in a very polarized debate between two groups of people, one of whom sees diversity as a threat, and the other that sees it as the strength of a pluralistic society.”
At the University of Minnesota, Natan Paradise shares many of the critics’ views of DEI’s shortcomings. But he is wary of joining in attacks that he sees either as politically motivated or hostile to the very idea of racial or gender inclusion.
“Those who want to dismantle DEI are acting in bad faith,” he said. “DEI does a lot of good. It does make a difference for students on campus. It could make more of a difference. It could make a better, more nuanced difference. But I think DEI plays a critical role on campuses.”
He prefers forming relationships with administrators at the university’s Office for Equity and Diversity, and said there have been successes, including a freshman orientation course that now includes discussion of antisemitism, and a change in how the campus Office for Equity and Diversity classifies antisemitism on its website.
“We are just not on their radar and we ought to be, and I have been working very hard at my institution to change that, and we’ve made quite a bit of progress,” he said about Jews on campus. “We have to be present in all the social justice initiatives, in order for us to be present when we need it. And when I mean relationships, that means being in the spaces with the people who are doing the work, so that they see you as an ally, and you can count on them as an ally. In too many instances, we just haven’t done it.”
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The post Kill it or reform it? Jewish critics of DEI debate the future of campus diversity programs appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Weak National Canadian Identity Is Leading to Democratic Values Backsliding
Hundreds of anti-Israel protesters, primarily university students, rally at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square on Oct. 28, 2023. Photo by Sayed Najafizada/NurPhoto
As I sat in an anthropology lecture at the University of British Columbia, we debated the question: What is a unifying national identity for Canadians? In response, I said, “Our national identity is that we aren’t Americans; our identity is contrasted against American identities, for good or for bad.”
Some students laughed, and my professor nodded approvingly. How I wish we could laugh about our lack of Canadian identity today, as we watch university student encampments support the repressive tyrannical terrorist regime Hamas, the antithesis of democracy.
I am not Jewish, but I have watched in awe as the Israel Defense Forces fights to defend the Jewish nation from Hamas, and free the remaining hostages. The parliamentary democracy that governs Israel acts as a beacon of light in the Middle East. The strong national identity that interlocks the state and the people propels the continued hostage rescue operations.
It is my greatest hope that Canada, my country, would feel as strongly in their national responsibility to rescue me, my family, or fellow Canadians if we were ever taken hostage, or if Canada was invaded by a terrorist group. However, I fear that the national Canadian identity would not be strong enough to withstand the international pressure that Israel has withstood to continue the hostage rescue missions.
Across Canada, university students are assuming pro-Hamas identities — many after reading ill-informed or false Instagram posts. In the name of social justice, they are aligning with a cause that approves the intentional targeting of Jewish civilians, calls for the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state, and ignores the fact that Israel is waging one of the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty wars in the history of armed conflict.
Here in Canada we, as the Gen Z’ers, don’t have a strong national identity. We haven’t grown up with a strong appreciation for our democracy, military, or a high respect for our veterans. Many of us under the age of 30 do not know the words to “O’Canada.” We have taken for granted the freedom that is our democratic right in Canada. I hypothesize that so many of our younger generations have fallen for terrorist propaganda because we lack rootedness in a national backbone.
There is nothing wrong with advocating for civilians in war zones. It’s exactly because of our democratic freedoms that we can have differing dialogues around war. But what is taking place on campuses is not pro-peace, pro-innocent civilians, pro-hostage release, or pro-democratic values.
These university encampments are anti-peace and they promote hate, propaganda, and terrorism. Before our eyes, since the Oct. 7th massacre carried out by Hamas, many university students have sided with the terrorist organization.
I am nearly infuriated to the point of tears most days, in what feels like a never-ending battle of terrorist propaganda being shared by my leftist friends. I have always been a politically center-left person, but as the left moves further to the extremist side, I feel the need to call this extremism out.
As a non-Jewish Canadian university student, I have had enough of this childish behavior. If we want to be treated like adults, we need to act like them. As silly as that sounds, my peers are using their democratic rights to advocate for a terrorist group. A terrorist group who would kill us if given the chance.
Without a strong national backbone, we have lost ourselves to incompetent “social justice” causes that cease to make rational or logical sense. Canadian democratic values are about peace, respect, and diversity. Hamas is a radical Islamist military movement that does not believe in equal rights for men and women, let alone LGBTQ+ individuals. It does not make democratic sense to advocate for a terrorist group who are fanatical Islamic extremists.
Intense false realities have been created by the extreme left that fantasize and romanticize terrorists as resistance fighters — a desperate attempt to create a false narrative that implicates Israel as the terrorist organization. Instead of calling for accountability and disbandment of Hamas, the blame has been unfairly placed on Israel. These dangerous terrorist-sympathizing ideologies need to be met with harsh repercussions, as the democratic values of future adult Canadians rest in the balance.
Many of us on the left have lived in fear of falling victim to cancel culture, and have instead allowed the extremism on the left to grow. The hypocrisy and privilege of these protestors have stripped them of their credibility for a social justice movement.
Putting up signs stating “F*** KKKANANDA” at the University of British Columbia, painting “F*** Quebec” in Montreal on the face of a new Holocaust museum poster, and chanting “Death to America” on campuses, is life or death for Western democratic values.
The (false) colonial narrative about Israel has become dizzyingly amplified on campuses, commonly stating that Israel is a colonizer of the land and the Palestinians are the oppressed. Instead, the ancestral and Indigenous right of Jewish return is the ultimate act of decolonization.
The intense leftist approach to teaching makes race the center of every issue, causing students to view indigeneity and colonization in simplified forms without historical context. I am an Arts student who has always been politically and socially left, and an active feminist.
However, I have been inundated with intense frameworks of colonialism, racism, and intersectionality since beginning my undergraduate studies — and these claims are not always based in historical reality.
I never thought I would write these words, but I am dismayed by how my leftist peers are acting, and it is becoming more extreme every day. They are acting like puppets for terrorism, amplifying propaganda and disinformation about what occurred on Oct 7th.
I do not want to live in a society that denies rape, denies accountability, and denies basic human rights to Israelis and Jewish people. I love that my friends in the LGBTQIA2S+ community get to live freely here in Canada and that my friends who choose to receive an abortion for personal or life-saving reasons, can do so. Also, as a woman, I can live equally in a society that promotes my human rights. None of these rights are awarded by Hamas in the society they govern. With the privileged position of having access to basic human rights, I am thankful to call myself a Canadian citizen.
If we don’t fight for our Canadian democratic values, we will be flattened by external forces. It is time to build and cultivate a strong national backbone that holds us accountable for upholding our country. Maybe we will one day be able to look back with humor on this dark period in academic spaces that have allowed this ideology to foster. Until then, we must fight for our country to remain the “True North, strong and free.” If we stand for nothing, we will fall for everything.
As a Gen-Z Canadian, I refuse to allow my peers to degrade our freedoms by romanticizing terrorism.
Zara Nybo is a student at the University of British Columbia, and a Campus Media Fellow with HonestReporting Canada and Allied Voices for Israel.
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University of Pennsylvania Suspends Pro-Hamas Rioters for Full Semester, Activist Group Says
Pro-Hamas encampment at University of Pennsylvania on May 5, 2024. Photo: Robyn Stevens Brody via Reuters Connect
The University of Pennsylvania has suspended four pro-Hamas protesters who participated in illegally occupying the campus, according to an activist group that helped organize the demonstration.
“The [university’s] administration has continued to endorse Zionist ideology and bent to the will of their donors in order to prioritize their profit and image. In their most recent attempt to stifle pro-Palestinian speech, they have suspended four of their own students,” a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) splinter group — Freedom School for Palestine — wrote on Instagram.
“It is clear that Penn is not an institution of education but a corporate power which serves to oil the gears of the global war machine (and then beat, jail, and suspend those who protest this) [sic],” the post continued, adding that the students were “placed on semester-long or year-long suspensions.”
Freedom School for Palestine — which helped organize a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” in which pro-Hamas students lived for weeks and refused to leave unless administrators agreed to boycott and divest from Israel — also implored the public to flood the administration’s office with messages demanding revocations of the suspensions, claiming that the students have been “robbed of their income, health insurance, and access to education.”
The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) commented on the report on Wednesday.
“Penn continues to review student conduct cases in connection with campus demonstrations this spring,” it said in a statement shared with The Algemeiner. “The university affords due process to all students in accordance with our policies and recommends sanctions as appropriate on a case-by-case basis.”
Penn’s handing down disciplinary sanctions came nearly two months after it finally cleared protesters from school property with the help of the Philadelphia Police Department. The university had attempted to negotiate with the protesters, but its patience wore thin amid their escalating conduct. After hours of discussions failed to yield a settlement acceptable to both sides, interim president Larry Jameson publicly called the protesters a safety hazard while noting that they had committed acts of vandalism, including defacing a statute of Benjamin Franklin, one of the United States’ Founding Fathers, and “The Button,” a sculpture built in the early 1980s.
In addition to divestment from Israel, the demonstration’s leaders demanded that the university vacate a suspension of Penn Students Against the Occupation of Palestine, which the school shut down after multiple rules violations. Frustrated with the university’s refusing to grant them any concessions, masses of new people joined the encampment, expanding it over a larger area of school property and forcing the university to request additional security on campus.
“The protesters refused repeatedly to disband the encampment, to produce identification, to stop threatening, loud, and discriminatory speech and behavior, and to comply with instructions from Penn administrators and Public Safety,” Jameson said after the tents were dismantled. “Instead, they called for others to join them in escalating their disruptions and expanding their encampment, necessitating that we take action to protect the safety and rights of everyone in our community.”
Antisemitism fueled by anti-Zionism exploded at the university long before the “encampment” was set up, an action which was precipitated by Israel’s military response to Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7. In September, it hosted “The Palestine Writes Literature Festival,” which included speakers such as Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta, who once promoted antisemitic tropes, saying in an interview, “Jews were hated in Europe because they played a role in the destruction of the economy in some of the countries, so they would hate them.” Another controversial figure invited to the event was former Pink Floyd vocalist Roger Waters, whose long record of anti-Jewish snipes was the subject of a documentary released last year.
One day before the event took place, an unidentified male walked into the university’s Hillel building behind a staffer and shouted “F—k the Jews” and “Jesus Christ is king!” before overturning tables, podium stands, and chairs, according to students and school officials who spoke with The Algemeiner. Days earlier, just before the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah, a swastika was graffitied in the basement of the university’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design.
Former Penn president Elizabeth Magill, who refused to stop the university from hosting the festival, resigned from her post in December, ending a 17-month tenure marked by controversy over what critics described as an insufficient response to surging antisemitism on campus.
The University of Pennsylvania will continue to deal with the events of this academic year for some time. Last month, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit challenging a US congressional investigation of antisemitism there, which the House Committee on Education and the Workforce launched after Magill failed to provide acceptable answers about her handling of the problem during a hearing in December. The ruling cleared the way for Congress to continue an inquiry that could complicate Penn’s attempts to repair a perception that it coddled antisemites because they claimed to be partisans of the progressive left.
As part of its inquiry, the committee, led by US Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), subpoenaed the university for a trove of documents, including reports and correspondence, which would provide a window into how administrators discussed antisemitism on campus.
Such documents have already proved injurious to Columbia University, which according to reports by The Washington Free Beacon, derided Jewish students’ concerns about rising antisemitism, calling them “privileged” and “wealthy.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Roger Waters Defends Hamas, Claims There’s ‘Filthy Lies’ and ‘No Evidence’ of Sexual Violence on Oct. 7
Piers Morgan, left, and Roger Waters discussing Israel and Hamas on “Piers Morgan Uncensored.” Photo: YouTube screenshot
Former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters defended the Hamas terrorist organization for perpetrating the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel in a combative interview with British broadcaster Piers Morgan on Tuesday.
Waters, a longtime critic of Israel who has been widely accused of antisemitism, also rejected the use of the term “terrorism” to describe the attack, in which 1,200 people were murdered and some 250 others were taken as hostages by Hamas. Most of the victims were civilians.
“To kill a civilian is a war crime,” Waters, 80, said about the Oct. 7 attack during an appearance on the talk show “Piers Morgan Uncensored.” When Morgan asked him if it’s considered “terrorism” as well,” Waters replied, “Well, to use the word ‘terrorism’ is really dangerous and difficult. You have to remember that the people fighting on behalf of Palestine liberation have a legal and moral, not just a right, they have a right to fight back against the oppressor.”
He added: “If someone invades your country, kicks all the people out of their home, steals everything and is stealing all your land and occupies all your land for 75 years, you have an absolute right to armed resistance against that invader.” When asked if Hamas committed war crimes on Oct. 7, Waters replied, “probably.”
Rogers further denied there is proof that Hamas terrorists raped some of its victims on Oct. 7, despite widespread evidence to the contrary, including testimonies from former hostages.
“All the filthy disgusting lies that the Israelis told after Oct. 7 about burning babies and women being raped — No they weren’t,” he claimed. Morgan shot back, “Actually women were raped. It’s been established by the United Nations. There is extensive evidence of assault and rape.” But Waters repeatedly replied, “You can say anything you want [but] there is no evidence.”
“All those piles of cars that were destroyed by Apache missiles from helicopters… Hamas didn’t have helicopters,” Waters added, referring to the site of the Nova music festival in Israel where Hamas murdered more than 350 party-goers on Oct. 7.
The tension between Morgan and Waters escalated when the singer questioned Hamas’ abduction of infants and seniors on Oct. 7. Talking about now 1-year-old Kfir Bibas, who at nine months old was the youngest Israeli abducted on Oct. 7 along with his mother and four-year-old brother, Waters falsely claimed that the child has been released in a hostage exchange. Morgan corrected him, saying that the child has not been released, but an annoyed Waters replied, “Piers, you may or may not be making it up — I know you believe nonsense that you’re told by ZAKA or people who have made up tons of lies about Oct. 7.”
ZAKA is a volunteer-led rescue and recovery organization that assisted with the collection of bodies of victims from the Oct. 7 attack so they could be buried in accordance with Jewish law.
Waters repeatedly refused to condemn the Oct. 7 attack, telling Morgan, “I’m not going to have this conversation.”
“I condemn the killing of civilians, always. Whoever does it,” he said. “I condemn war crimes. If Hamas committed war crimes on Oct. 7, I condemn it.” Waters reiterated a claim he made earlier this year that it was impossible to know what really took place on Oct. 7, because “Israelis won’t allow any real investigation,” he told Morgan.
Morgan told the singer that Hamas terrorists were open about what they did on Oct. 7 and even broadcasted live footage on social media during the attack. Waters went on to say, “I’m not saying that part of the Palestinian resistance movement didn’t cross that wire fence into what’s called Israel. I’m not saying that didn’t happen. What I’m saying is, there’s all this talk about, ‘Does Israel have a right to defend itself?’ Why didn’t Israel defend itself that morning? Why did they wait seven hours before they started machine-gunning everyone?”
Waters, who has repeatedly denied accusations that he’s antisemitic, also defended a video he previously published on YouTube in which he told Israelis to “go back to Eastern Europe or the United States or wherever you came from.” He said in the clip that Israelis who chose to stay in their homes would be “welcome” in a new Palestinian state.
Commenting on the video, Waters told Morgan: “I am in tears over Gaza every morning when I wake up. I’m only 80 years old, I have never experienced the genocide of a whole people in front of my eyes happening every day.” He said what’s happening to the Palestinians in Gaza now during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war is “a disgusting, awful crime” akin to what Jews experienced during World War II. He also accused Israel of currently carrying out the “extermination of the indigenous people of Palestine” and committing a “genocide” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
At various stages of the interview, Waters began talking out loud to himself, urging himself to calm now and not let Morgan get him riled up or angry. He also talked to Morgan during the interview about the “Israeli lobby” and Israeli “war machine” being “very powerful” and critical of him in the past. He additionally called Israel “oppressors” and “torturers,” and Zionism a “failed experiment.” Numerous times he accused Israel of “committing genocide” in Gaza, additionally claiming that the Jewish state aims to “killing every single Palestinian.”
“They’re not gonna kill every Palestinian, obviously,” Morgan cut Waters off by saying.
“Oh, they’re not? Well they’re trying to,” Waters replied.
“No,” Morgan clarified, “they’re trying to kill every member of Hamas.”
An utterly frustrated Waters then looked straight into the camera and told viewers, “The oppressor, the stare of Israel, is committing genocide on a whole people. Some of the people, in the prison where the genocide is being committed, resisted the genocide on Oct. 7 and some people in Israel were killed. And I feel for them and their families. But let’s not forget where this started … It’s one set of people trying to steal a whole land from another set of people.”
When Morgan asked him to respond to accusations of him being antisemitic, Waters said, “I’m not antisemitic even very faintly. You know who would know if Roger Waters were an antisemite? Roger Waters would know, because I would have feelings about Jews!”
Last year, an explosive documentary showed fellow musicians detailing Waters’ long record of anti-Jewish barbs. In one instance, a former colleague recalled Waters at a restaurant yelling at the wait staff to “take away the Jew food.”
Morgan tweeted about his interview with Rogers, saying, “I interviewed Pink Floyd star @rogerwaters yesterday, after calling him ‘the world’s dumbest rock star’ and a ‘complete and utter moron.’ It went as well as could be expected.”
Watch Waters and Morgan’s full interview below.
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