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A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’
(JTA) — Magda Teter’s new book, “Christian Supremacy,” begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalist neo-Nazis who ostensibly gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park broke into a chant: “Jews will not replace us.”
Other writers and scholars would note how antisemitism shaped white nationalism. But Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, saw something else: how centuries of Christian thought and practice fed the twin evils of antisemitism and racism.
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she writes. “These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and then in respect to people of color in European colonies and in the US, before returning transformed back to Europe.”
In the book, subtitled “Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism,” she traces this idea from the writings of the early church fathers like Paul the Apostle, though centuries of Catholic and Protestant debates over the status of Jews in Europe, to the hardening of racist attitudes with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Antisemitic laws and theology, she argues, developed within Christianity a “mental habit” of exclusion and dominance that would eventually be applied to people of color up to and including modern times.
Teter is careful to acknowledge the different forms antisemitism and racism have taken, distinguishing between the Jews’ experience of social and legal exclusion and near annihilation, and the enslavement, displacement and ongoing persecution of Black people. And yet, she writes, “that story began with Christianity’s theological relation with Jews and Judaism.”
Teter is previously the author of “Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth,” winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. At Fordham, the Catholic university in the Bronx, she is helping assemble what may be the largest repository of artifacts and literature dedicated to the Jewish history of the borough.
We spoke Thursday about how groups like the Proud Boys embrace centuries-old notions of Christian superiority, how “whiteness” became a thing and how she, as a non-Jew raised in Poland, became a Jewish studies scholar.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Your book was conceived and written during the COVID lockdown. Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s an accidental project. I’ve been teaching the history of antisemitism for years, and I live in Harlem so questions of race and racism are very stark in my daily life. And since I grew up in Poland, and American history was not something we were taught or studied, I’ve never been satisfied with the various explanations for the strength of antisemitism and history of racism. And as I mentioned in my prologue, I watched the Raoul Peck documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which has a clip with James Baldwin saying that white people have to figure out why they invented the idea of the N-word and must “embrace this stranger that they have maligned so long.” You could also say that the European Christians created the idea of “the Jew” and that sort of caricature had absolutely nothing to do with flesh and blood Jews. I kept noticing these parallels, as an outsider, reading American and African-American history.
I was also thinking about this idea of servitude that was attached to Jews in Christian theology, and then in law.
You write in your book that “Over time, white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” What do you mean by servitude in this context?
In Christian theology, from the earliest Christian texts, the idea of servitude and slavery is attached to the concept of Jews and Judaism. Paul does it in his Epistles. He uses this quote from the book of Genesis that “the elder shall serve the younger,” which becomes really embedded in Christian theology. It is the Jews, the elder people, who should serve the Christians, the younger people. Later on in medieval theology and canon law, Jews are in a servile position, consigned for their sin of rejecting Jesus to perpetual servitude. So even though Jews were free people and could live mostly where they wanted to live, marry whoever they wanted to marry — nobody was sold and some even had slaves — that idea of Jews as confined to perpetual servitude to Christians created a habit of thinking of Jews as having an inferior social status.
That language became secularized in modern times, and we see the development of the [antisemitic] trope of Jewish power: that they are in places where they shouldn’t be. I worked on fleshing out the parallels between the idea and then legal status of Jewish servitude and the conceptual perception of Black people in servile and inferior positions.
Magda Teter’s new book explores how “white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” (Chuck Fishman)
What other kinds of parallels did you find between racism and antisemitism?
In the Christian theology, Black people, like Jews, will be seen as cursed by God. Jews were [portrayed as] lazy because they didn’t work physically — they made money and exploited Christians. Black people were [portrayed as] lazy because they were trying to avoid physical labor at the expense of white men. Both people were seen as carnal, both as sexually dangerous, and so on.
I was struck by the fact that the racist turn of Christian supremacy — justifying the enslavement of Black people on theological grounds — is a fairly late development, taking hold in the early modern period when Europeans established slaveholding empires.
That’s right. In the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we were all thinking about these issues of race and racism and America. And as I was in the middle of writing the article that became the book, I felt that there was a deeper history that needed to be told, and that slavery is not bound by color until the enslavement of Black Africans by Europeans during the colonial expansion of Europe.
After the French Revolution, when Jews were offered “emancipation” in much of Europe, there were deep debates about whether they could be citizens and be entitled to the same rights and protections as Christian citizens of France and England and other countries. How was that debate informed by Christianity?
In pre-modern Europe, there was obviously both a religious and legal framework under which Jews existed. They had their place in a social hierarchy. After the French Revolution, people are creating a new political reality. The idea of equality obviously challenged the social hierarchies that existed, including the idea that Christians were the superior religion. And that begins to play a role on two levels. One is the level of, well, “how can you be equal and be our judges and make decisions about us?” It’s fear of power — political power and political equality. That challenges the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude and otherwise insolent and arrogant.
The other level comes from Enlightenment scholars who begin to place Jews in the Middle East and in the Holy Land, in Palestine. Jews are no longer seen as European. They are seen as “Oriental,” and they are compared to the non-European religions and practices that these Enlightenment scholars have been studying. Their differences are now also racialized. “They are not like us, they can’t assimilate. They can never be Frenchmen, they can never be Germans.”
And I guess it’s a short step from that to regarding people with dark skin as inferior and subordinate.
That’s right. Enlightenment scholars are also trying to to understand why it is justified to enslave Black Africans and they do it through “scientific” and other means. They classify Africans as inferior intellectually and they create this idea of race.
I began to think about these European politicians and intellectuals in terms of creating their identities, and what I ended up arguing is what we saw in Charlottesville, what we’re seeing in Europe. It’s not necessarily just about hate, but it’s about exclusion and rejection of Jews and people of color from equality, from citizenship.
And the common thread here is that whiteness and Christianity become inseparable. You write that “freedom and liberty now came to be linked not only to Christianity, but to whiteness, and servitude and enslavement to blackness.”
That’s right. White Christian “liberty” becomes embedded and embodied in law.
Did you see any pitfalls in drawing parallels between the Black and Jewish experiences? I am thinking of those in either community who might say, “How dare you compare our suffering to theirs!”
Yes, I was tempered. I think what some call “comparative victimhood” has paralyzed conversations about this subject, and I kept it in my mind all the time. What I hope comes through is that there’s incredible value in a comparative approach. Coming from Jewish studies as my primary field, the comparison with the Black experience gave me clarity on the nature of antisemitism as well as on the nature of the Jewish experience, and vice versa: The Jewish experience can also give clarity to some of the aspects of anti-Black racism.
What’s an example?
So, for instance, questions like, “Are Jews white? Are they not white? When did they become white?” That’s a whole genre of scholarship. And when you look at it through the lens of law and ideology, you begin to see that from a legal perspective, Jews were considered white in the United States because they could immigrate and they could be naturalized according to law. They did not have to go to court to become American. Their rights to vote were not challenged. There was discrimination, they couldn’t stay in hotels and in some places they couldn’t find employment, but by law, they were considered citizens. The debate about the whiteness of Jews is creating a fog of misunderstanding.
Black Americans were targeted by specific legal statutes from the very beginning in the Constitution and then in naturalization law and so on. And then there was the backlash even after the Civil War to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments [aimed at establishing political equality for Americans of all races].
Statues at the Strasbourg Cathedral depict Ecclesia and Synagoga, representing the triumph of the church, at left, and the servitude of Judaism, which is represented by a blindfolded figure, drooping and carrying a broken lance. (Edelseider/Wikimedia Commons)
How much do modern-day white supremacists, like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, see themselves as Christian? Or is this a kind of white supremacy that doesn’t name itself Christian but doesn’t even realize how many of its ideas are based in theology?
I think they might not be conscious of this legacy, but neo-Nazis take from the legacy of the Nazis who themselves were not thinking of themselves as Christian necessarily. But what I argue in the book is that white Christian supremacy becomes white supremacy. It never discards the Christian sense of domination and superiority that emerges from its early relationship with Jews and Judaism.
In the United States, Black people serve as contrast figures to whiteness, in the law and in the culture. You cannot have whiteness without Blackness. For Christians, Jews serve as that contrast figure. Consciously or unconsciously, the Proud Boys are embracing that. They talk of “God-given” freedoms for white people. That is the Christian legacy.
You said that the Nazis didn’t necessarily see themselves as a Christian movement. But I must ask, even though it is not the scope of your book, was the Holocaust a culmination of white Christian supremacy? Because I think many Christian theologians would want to say that Nazism was godless, and a perversion of the true faith.
I’ll say that when exclusionary ideology is coupled with the power of the state, that’s where it can lead.
In the years since the Holocaust especially, there have been many efforts by Christian leaders to address the ideological failings of the past. You write about Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church absolving Jews of collective guilt in the death of Jesus and some Protestant documents of contrition. But I got the feeling you were disappointed that many denominations haven’t gone far enough in reckoning with the past.
There was a sort of a moral sense that something needs to be addressed after the Holocaust. But then it is not fully addressed. I don’t think anybody has addressed the issue of power — the roots of hate, yes, but not the dynamics of power. We’ll see where the book goes, but maybe theologians will begin to grapple with this legacy of superiority and domination, and the way hierarchical habits of thinking have been developed through theology and through religious culture.
What other impact do you hope the book may have?
White supremacy is very much in the air. We need to speak up against it, and make connections and allyships. I hope that maybe because the book deals with law and power, it may create bridges among people who care about “We the People” as a vision of people who are diverse, respectful and equal, and not the exclusionary vision offered by white and Christian supremacy.
A cross burns at a Ku Klux Klan rally on Aug. 8, 1925. (National Photo Company Collection)
I’d love to talk about your background. You’re not Jewish but you are chair of Jewish Studies at Fordham, a Catholic university. What drew you to the study of Judaism and the Jews?
I grew up in Poland with a father who from the time I was a little girl would point out to me that there had been Jews in Poland. We would drive through the countryside, and he’d say, “This used to be a Jewish town and there used to be a synagogue and there was the Jewish cemetery.” I grew up being very conscious of the past’s presence and this kind of stark absence of Jews in Poland, where in the 1970s when I grew up Jewish history was taboo.
As soon as Jewish books on Jewish subjects began to be published, including those that dealt with antisemitism, we would read it together. We would talk about it. He wouldn’t just shift the destruction and murder of Jews in Poland on to the Nazis.
There was no Jewish studies program in Poland when I was applying to universities, so I studied Hebrew in Israel, and then studied Yiddish in New York at YIVO. I came to Columbia University to get my PhD in Jewish history and my career went in the direction it did. I was a professor of history and director of the Jewish and Israel studies program at Wesleyan University. I came to Fordham eight years ago and created a program in Jewish studies.
Your previous book was about the blood libel, the historic canard that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. This one’s about antisemitism. I don’t want to presume, but is your interest in these subjects in any way an act of contrition?
I grew up in a very secular household. I did not grow up Catholic. But I think growing up in Poland made me very, very aware of antisemitism and the history of antisemitism. I got my PhD from Columbia University in Jewish history, which did not emphasize Jewish suffering, but Jewish life, and I have studied Jewish life and teach about Jewish life — not just about Jewish suffering.
However, in the last few years, antisemitism has certainly been on the minds of many of us. I also am committed to the idea of shared history, and therefore all my scholarship, as much as it is about Jews, it is also about the church and Poland and the law. Jews are an integral part of that history and culture. And, as such, I’m committed to that, to teaching about the vibrancy of Jewish life as much as the dynamics of what made that life difficult over the centuries.
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The post A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump’s new Gaza plan marks a radical break from Israeli policy — can it succeed?
The United States has in effect broken with Israeli policy, cleverly engineering the Palestinian Authority’s return to Gaza.
President Donald Trump’s plan for the second stage of the Gaza ceasefire, the launch of which was announced Wednesday, involves the creation of a transitional Palestinian technocratic authority with strong ties to the PA. This collapses fictions Israel has sustained for years: that Gaza can be stabilized without the PA, which was ousted from the territory by Hamas in 2007; that the PA is no better than Hamas; and even that Palestinian governance itself is illegitimate, a belief held by the most extreme Israeli nationalists.
Reality has finally prevailed, and that reality is that the PA, flawed though it is, remains the only Palestinian political body capable of replacing Hamas in Gaza.
The logic expressed by those, like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who aim to keep the PA out of Gaza, has brought Israel to the brink. Splitting Palestinian governance between Hamas and the PA, long Netanyahu’s strategy, led to unmitigated disaster, and public anger is at a boil.
Which means that the PA must return to Gaza not only for the sake of Palestinians, but also for Israelis. The Zionist project must be steered away from permanent war, international isolation and internal decay. That means finding a way to work toward a sustainable future with the Palestinians — which almost certainly means, in turn, accepting the PA as their legitimate government.
Decades of misleading rhetoric
Since the establishment of a ceasefire, brokered by Trump’s administration, in September, Hamas has reasserted control over large parts of Gaza. Militarily weakened, it survived politically — because Israel still refused to empower any viable Palestinian alternative.
That return to the status quo in many ways serves Netanyahu’s agenda. Keeping Hamas in power allows for a state of permanent emergency and despair about the chances for peace — the very forces that Netanyahu has, for decades, successfully turned into political capital. “There is no difference between the PA and Hamas” became a mantra — as if a political bureaucracy and a theocratic militia that massacres civilians and rejects coexistence on principle could be legitimately compared.
Now, as long as Hamas rules Gaza, its very presence constitutes an emergency narrative that Netanyahu can use to delay the accountability over his responsibility for Oct. 7: Wartime is no time for politics.
The Palestinian Authority, by contrast, has been treated as dangerous because it represents a measure of pragmatism.
The PA, ineffective as it has been, could be the basis of a functional political framework that would force Israel to confront the need for separation from the Palestinians, real borders, and eventual Palestinian statehood. That’s especially true because there’s the potential for actual peace with a Palestine run by the PA, which already coordinates with Israel at enormous political cost in the West Bank, where its security forces arrest militants and dismantle extremist cells.
New governance for Gaza
The technocratic committee put forward to govern Gaza under Trump’s second phase plan is formally nonpartisan, but its personnel and legitimacy are largely drawn from the ranks of the PA, with Ali Shaath, a former PA deputy minister, set to lead the effort. Others come from the same institutional ecosystem, because there is simply no other reservoir of Palestinian administrative experience. The PA has publicly endorsed the framework. Israel must now also meet its own obligations under the Trump plan — no matter how distasteful its leaders might find the plan’s endorsement of the PA to be.
That means, chiefly, that Israel must declare clearly that once Gaza is stabilized by the technocratic committee, it is prepared to enter negotiations toward a Palestinian state, with final borders to be determined later. Israel can openly state its intention to retain major settlement blocs in the West Bank and seek long-term security arrangements in the Jordan Valley. But it should also affirm in principle its readiness to recognize a Palestinian state and guarantee access arrangements in Jerusalem.
These statements would not resolve the conflict, by any means. But they would go some way toward restoring credibility.
To get there, Hamas must surrender its weapons in Gaza, with an international stabilization force present to keep the peace. The best chance for disarmament is if the weapons are handed to Palestinians. By default, the PA security forces will be the best candidates for the job, as the new technocratic government lacks a security arm. Hamas’s senior leadership should probably be allowed to exit into exile.
To build a Palestinian consensus in this direction, regional powers — Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey — must make reconstruction conditional on disarmament. The choice must be unmistakable: real recovery without any trace of a Hamas militia – or years in tent cities.
If all this is achieved, the real work begins. Areas under the new authority must visibly improve. Adequate housing, electricity, water, education, employment, and free movement must return in ways Palestinians can measure. The comparison with Hamas rule must be obvious.
Reformations in the PA — and Israel
Such a process with the PA should also be made conditional.
As existing U.S. proposals suggest, the PA must be required to undertake concrete reforms, including by overhauling educational materials that appear to condone violence against Israelis and ending payments to the families of imprisoned militants.
Senior PA officials have already signaled willingness to move on both fronts. These are achievable changes,
The payoff would be immense, potentially including normalization with Saudi Arabia, broader reconciliation of Israel the Arab and Muslim worlds, the gradual erosion of the global delegitimization campaign against Israel, and renewed international cooperation — especially in confronting Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and regional militias. In time, Zionism would once again be seen as a serious national project capable of difficult, mature decisions.
The catch: Little of this is likely to happen under the current Israeli government.
That is the central truth of 2026, an election year: a change of leadership in Israel is not optional for anyone who wants a better future. The disaster of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack was the culmination of years of strategic failure, ideological paralysis, and the reckless empowerment of Hamas. This is what happens when complacent societies repeatedly elevate unfit leadership in the face of existential danger.
So Israelis must decide: will they support a government that thrives on permanent conflict, or endorse the possibility of peace?
The post Trump’s new Gaza plan marks a radical break from Israeli policy — can it succeed? appeared first on The Forward.
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California’s Gavin Newsom Proposes Budget Increase for State Universities Amid Federal Funding Threats
California Gov. Gavin Newsom in Sacramento, California, US, on Aug. 8, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a rumored potential candidate for US president in 2028, has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in new funds for state universities amid the Trump administration’s policy of canceling federal grants and contracts held by institutions which it accuses of failing to combat campus antisemitism.
Newsom previously sought to cut funding to the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) by 8 percent during the 2025-2025 fiscal year (FY), before dropping that figure to 3 percent. Then on Friday, the governor proposed a new budget which would increase next year’s appropriation by $350.6 million for UC and $365.7 million for CSU, raising the state’s general fund for the schools to $5.3 billion and $5.6 billion, respectively.
“The budget introduced today by Gov. Newsom continues to provide critical support for the university and our students,” UC president James B. Milliken said in a statement responding to the news. “State support is more important than ever, as we face tremendous financial pressures stemming from rising costs and unprecedented federal actions. UC campuses rely on funding stability to serve students and maintain the academic and research excellence that has made UC the world’s greatest research university.”
He added, “An investment in UC is an investment in California’s future. I look forward to our ongoing partnership with Gov. Newsom and the legislature to ensure that our students have what they need to succeed at UC and beyond.”
The move, even as it defers $129.7 million for UC and $143.8 million for CSU to a later date, gives the schools breathing room as they fear the Trump’s administration’s confiscation of funds. Last year, for example, the administration impounded $250 million from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
US President Donald Trump ordered the money canceled in August after determining that the school exposed Jewish students to discrimination by refusing to intervene when civil rights violations transpired or failing to correct a hostile environment after the fact. He ordered the move even after UCLA agreed to donate $2.33 million to a consortium of Jewish civil rights organizations to resolve an antisemitism complaint filed by three students and an employee.
UCLA was sued and excoriated by the public over its handling of a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that an anti-Zionist student group established on campus in the final weeks of the 2024 spring semester. Witnesses said that it was a source of antisemitism from the moment it became active, and according to the lawsuits, students there chanted “death to the Jews,” set up illegal checkpoints through which no one could pass unless they denounced Israel, and ordered campus security assigned there by the university to ensure that no Jews entered it.
Many antisemitic incidents occurred at UCLA before the institution was ultimately sued and placed it in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
Just five days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner, anti-Zionist protesters chanted “Itbah El Yahud” at Bruin Plaza, which means “slaughter the Jews” in Arabic. Other incidents included someone’s tearing a chapter page out of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, titled “Loudmouth Jew,” and leaving it outside the home of a UCLA faculty member, as well as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) staging a disturbing demonstration in which its members cudgeled a piñata, to which a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was glued, while shouting “beat the Jew.”
On the same day that UCLA settled the suit, the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division ruled that UCLA’s response to antisemitic incidents constituted violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
“Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic antisemitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement at the time. “This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: the [Department of Justice] will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”
Newsom has positioned himself as an ally of higher education throughout its clash with Trump. In August, he demanded that Harvard University president Alan Garber resign rather than reach a deal with the Trump administration that would restore federal funding to Harvard in exchange for the school’s agreeing to conservative demands for addressing campus antisemitism and shuttering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
“You don’t work with Donald Trump — only FOR Donald Trump,” Newsom protested, writing on the X social media platform. “Looks like Harvard has chosen to surrender. Alan Garber must resign. An absolute failure of leadership that will have demonstrable impacts to higher education across our country. He should be ashamed.”
He added, “California will never bend the knee.”
Newsom had days earlier criticized Trump’s effort to combat antisemitism and reform higher education, denouncing it as “disgusting political extortion.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Ex-Yale Law School Professor Dismisses Iran Protests Over ‘Zionist’ Backing, Justifies Regime Oppression
Protesters march in downtown Tehran, Iran, Dec. 29, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
A former Yale University professor who was fired over her connection to a fundraising front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a US-designated terrorist organization, has drawn scrutiny again for dismissing anti-regime protests in Iran due to “Zionist endorsement,” defending Tehran’s crackdown on dissent, and castigating US law enforcement.
“In the imperial countries, the police function as the domestic arm of the empire,” Helyeh Doutaghi wrote in an essay published by the far-left Progressive International on Jan. 6. “They suppress dissent, criminalize resistance, and enforce accumulation through violence particularly against Black, Indigenous, and other Peoples of Color.”
Doutaghi then claimed that law enforcement in New Haven, Connecticut, the location of Yale, is “trained by the Israeli military” and that “policing is inseparable from imperial colonial violence.”
In contrast, she argued, Iran’s “Law Enforcement Command,” notorious for atrocities such as killing a young woman who was in custody for not wearing a head covering in accordance with the country’s Islamic dress code, “exists within a radically difference context,” having faced “sustained attempts at regime change operations and color revolution tactics.”
Doutaghi appears to see Jewish maneuvering behind the Iranian people’s efforts to resist their government’s theocratic, authoritarian rule. She argued that the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022, which erupted in the wake of the regime’s killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, were commandeered by “Zionist endorsement, coordinated diasporic networks, and sustained media warfare” to achieve “regime change.”
The article came out as the Iranian regime began cracking down on a new round of anti-government protests with an unprecedented scale of violence, reportedly killing thousands of demonstrators over the past two weeks.
In a viral post, Paul Mason, contributing editor for The New World, said Doutaghi’s essay represents the “logic of decolonization’ theory,” in which, he added, “Western cops bad; Iranian cops good. Woman rights good — but not if it leads to revolution in Iran.”
Yale Law School (YLS) fired Doutaghi in March after independently verifying a report by Jewish Onliner which exposed her membership in Samidoun, which identifies itself as a “Palestinian prisoner solidarity network.”
Founded in 2011 in the Canadian province of British Columbia, Samidoun is a “front group” for the PFLP — which gained infamy in the 20th century for perpetrating a series of airplane hijackings — according to the US and Canadian governments. The US and Canada each imposed sanctions on Samidoun in October 2024, labeling the organization a “sham charity” and accusing it of fundraising for designated terrorist groups such as PFLP.
Samidoun also described the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel as “a brave and heroic operation.”
Yale noted that Doutaghi was publicly listed on Samidoun’s website as a member.
Doutaghi denounced the inculpatory facts uncovered by the university as “fabricated claims” and lodged counteraccusations which blamed her being outed on Zionists.
“Yale has engaged in bad faith throughout this ‘process,” she wrote in a statement posted on X after being placed on leave. “YLS’s singular concern with maintaining the approval of the Zionist backers who bankroll their complicity in genocide led the organization to pressure me into an interrogation that I had every reason to believe was designed not to uncover the truth, but to justify a predetermined outcome.”
She continued, “What is clear is that YLS actions constitute a blatant act of retaliation against Palestinian solidarity — a violation of my constitutional rights, free speech, academic freedom, and fundamental due process rights. I am being targeted for one reason alone: for speaking the truth about the genocide of the Palestinian people that Yale University is complicit in.”
Doutaghi is another example of the higher education establishment’s embrace of scholars who promote anti-Israel animus, an issue that is driving the campus antisemitism crisis, according to a recent survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN).
Fifty percent of survey respondents said that anti-Zionist faculty have established de facto, or “shadow,” boycotts of Israel on campus even in the absence of formal declaration or recognition of one by the administration. Among those who reported the presence of such a boycott, 55 percent noted that departments avoid co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups and 29.5 percent said this policy is also subtly enacted by sabotaging negotiations for partnerships with Israeli institutions. All the while, such faculty fostered an environment in which Jewish professors were “maligned, professionally isolated, and in severe cases, doxxed or harassed” as they assumed the right to determine for their Jewish colleagues what constitutes antisemitism.
Meanwhile, the faculty’s activism provided an academic pretext for the relentless wave of antisemitic incidents of discrimination and harassment which pro-Hamas activists perpetrated against Jewish and Israeli members of campus communities following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, the groups said.
Another faculty source of campus antisemitism is the Faculty and Staff for Justice (FSJP) group.
FSJP is a spinoff of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group with links to Islamist terrorist organizations. FSJP chapters have been cropping up at colleges since the Oct. 7 atrocities, and throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, its members, which include faculty employed by the most elite US colleges, fostered campus unrest, circulated antisemitic cartoons, and advocated severing ties with Israeli companies and institutions of higher education.
In September 2024, AMCHA Initiative, a higher education watchdog, published a study offering evidence that FSJP inspired antisemitic hate crimes, anti-Israel divestment measures, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Using data analysis, AMCHA found a correlation between a school’s hosting an FSJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FSJP on college campuses increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.