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‘Mentally Unsafe’: Jewish Tulane University Students Issue Open Letter Recounting Harassment by Far-Left Group

Tulane University students Yasmeen Ohebsion and Bali Lavine participating in a demonstration to raise awareness of the plight of Israelis still held captive in Gaza by Hamas after being taken hostage during the terrorist group’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7. Photo: Movement to Address Antisemitism at Tulane University

Nearly 100 Jewish students at Tulane University in New Orleans have issued an open letter calling on administrators to levy disciplinary sanctions against the group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) following numerous alleged provocations, including starting fights, antisemitic bullying of those who support Zionism and Israel, and harassing a professor.

“This organization does not support democratic societies; it vehemently opposes them,” said the letter, which was first published last month. “We understand that Tulane’s administration is trying to walk a fine line of not regulating free speech while still protecting students, and we respect that. But Tulane SDS has crossed the line again and again.”

The letter continued: “The chapter at Tulane is made up of agitators looking to cause conflict and draw as much attention as possible, with many of its members not even being Tulane students. These students use the SDS organization as a cover for their hate-filled vitriol. Tulane SDS has repeatedly hailed Hamas terrorist as ‘martyrs,’ called for Zionist Jewish students to be forcibly removed from campus, and publicly doxxed and released the information of Jewish students on Instagram.”

The Jewish students, three of whom spoke with The Algemeiner on Tuesday, are most upset about what they described as SDS’s repeated utterances of antisemitic hate speech and denigration of Israeli hostages held captive in Gaza by the terrorist group Hamas. Since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, they said, SDS has operated as a “proxy group” for Students for Justice in Palestine, which is not recognized by the university, cheering Hamas and acts of terrorism and including in their activities an older adult non-student who was recently arrested on campus.

Numerous complaints to the university have gone unheeded despite the extremes to which SDS has gone to shame Jewish students about their identity and support for Israel, students told The Algemeiner. They added that professors have been affected as well, explaining that a prominent Jewish professor, Walter Isaacson, has been accused of improper conduct for removing an SDS heckler from an event in which they screamed anti-Zionist slogans. The student alleged that the acclaimed historian brutalized them, charges which cannot be substantiated based on footage of the incident that was shared online.

Yasmeen Ohebsion, a senior who earlier this year shared with the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce harrowing testimony about antisemitism at Tulane University, told The Algemeiner that school officials must stop their “lip service” regarding antisemitism and take concrete steps to punish students who violate the school’s anti-discrimination policies and harm Jewish students.

“On a larger scale, there’s no effort being made on the university’s part at all to address any of these issues. The university has and likely will continue to resort to useless lip service to students who have complained again, and again, and again, about feeling physically and psychologically unsafe on campus due to the threat of SDS and of antisemitism as a whole,” Ohebsion said. “And it’s really frustrating that nothing concrete is done when, for example, Jewish medical statements talk about not being able to function in class because their lab partners won’t talk to them because they identify as Zionists or when there’s a swastika carved in the medical school and various other incidents that are never even responded to by the DEI [equity, diversity, and inclusion] office.”

Ohebsion added, “At this point, I feel physically and mentally unsafe on this campus,” and expressed concerned about future Jewish students who will have to endure similar indignities long after she graduates in May.

Sophomore Nathan Miller, author of the open letter, said that SDS’s glorification of terrorists disqualifies them from university recognition.

“All these students are showing their susceptibility to Iranian propaganda, honestly, which supports terrorist groups,” Miller told The Algemeiner.

The Iranian regime is the chief international sponsor of Hamas, providing the Palestinian terrorist group with arms, funding, and training.

“In a larger sense,” Miller continued, “SDS has broken several rules governing student organizations, and it’s only a matter of time before the school steps in. Disrupting the educational process, fostering hate speech, operating with non-Tulane students — all of it merits a revocation of their recognized status.”

Miller added that SDS has invited an individual who is 30-40 years of age to their events. This person, known around campus as “Tony,” promotes antisemitic tropes on their Instagram page and shares content created by Hamas.

Antisemitism at Tulane University has affected Jewish students both psychologically and intellectually, causing many to question their place in a progressive political movement that in their view has become explicitly anti-Zionist. In October, a Jewish student’s nose was broken during a vicious assault by pro-Hamas demonstrators, and throughout campus openly supporting Israel risks being alienated from and mistreated by one’s peers. While Tulane has committed to creating a task force on antisemitism and holding educational programs about antisemitism during pre-orientation for incoming students, their actions so far, according to the students, are lacking in rigor and the task force has never convened for a meeting despite being formed months ago.

“As students of this university, we deserve an update if not an answer about the task force,” junior Bali Levine told The Algemeiner. “Jewish students need to know when we will be able to feel safe on this campus. We deserve answers, and it’s on Tulane to keep it’s promise to us. Maybe they’re afraid about upsetting students on both sides, but in trying to play the middle man, they’re hurting all students. We’re waiting for them to make a move, to make a change, which is the bare minimum.”

Ohebsion added, “In my mind, it’s so simple. If you make a commitment, follow it through. There’s no effort to even do what they say they will do when all we want is for them simply to enforce the rules. We want to be included in DEI. We are not reinventing the wheel.”

Tulane did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post ‘Mentally Unsafe’: Jewish Tulane University Students Issue Open Letter Recounting Harassment by Far-Left Group first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote

Demonstrators holding a “Stand Up for Internationals” rally on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, US, April 17, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.

The University of California (UC) Faculty Assembly has rejected a proposal to establish passing ethnic studies in high school as a requirement for admission to its 10 taxpayer-funded schools for undergraduates.

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the campaign for the measure — defeated overwhelmingly 29-12 with 12 abstaining — was spearheaded by Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Hong believes that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” Moreover, she holds that anti-Zionism is “part and parcel” of the ethnic studies discipline.

Ethnic studies activists like Hong throughout the University of California system coveted the admissions requirement because it would have facilitated their aligning ethnic studies curricula at the K-12 level with “liberated ethnic studies,” an extreme revolutionary project that was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. Had the proposal been successful, school officials of both public and private schools would have been forced to comply with their standard of what constitutes ethnic studies to qualify their students for admission to UC.

Being indoctrinated into anti-Zionism and “hating Jews” would essentially have become a prerequisite for becoming a UC student had the Faculty Assembly approved the measure, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner on Friday. AMCHA Initiative first raised the alarm about the proposal in 2023, calling it “a deeply frightening prospect.”

“Ethnic studies never intended to be like any other discipline or subject. It was always intended to be a political project for fomenting revolution according to the dictates of however the activists behind the subject defined it,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “And anti-Zionism has been at the core of the field, and this became especially clear after Oct. 7. Most of the anti-Zionist mania on campuses that day — the support for the encampments, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters — it was a project of Ethnic Studies. At UC Santa Cruz, 60 percent of Faculty for Justice in Palestine members were pulled from the ethnic studies department.”

Founded in the 1960s to provide an alternative curriculum for beneficiaries of racial preferences whose retention rates lagged behind traditional college students, ethnic studies is based on anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-Western ideologies found in the writings of, among others, Franz Fanon, Huey Newton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Karl Marx. Its principal ideological target in the 20th century was the remains of European imperialism in Africa and the Middle East, but overtime it identified new “systems of oppression,” most notably the emergent superpower that was the US after World War II and the nation that became its closest ally in the Middle East: Israel.

UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department is a case study in how the ideology leads inexorably to anti-Zionist antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative argued in a 2024 study.

Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CRES issued a statement rationalizing the terrorist group’s atrocities as political resistance. Additionally, the department days later participated in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’s atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” Later, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.

Imposing such noxious views on all California students would have been catastrophic, Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner.

“The goal of admissions requirements is to make sure that students are adequately prepared for college,” she noted. “Their goal was to use their power to force students to take the kind of Critical Ethnic Studies that is taught at the university, with the goal of revolutionizing society. The idea should have been dead on arrival, being rejected on the grounds that there is no evidence that it is a worthwhile subject that should be required for admission to the University of California.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Dec. 12, 2024. Photo: The Western Wall Heritage Foundation

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar praised Paraguay’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, and to broaden the country’s previous designation to include all factions of Hamas and Hezbollah.

The top Israeli diplomat congratulated the South American country and described President Santiago Peña’s decision as a “landmark move” in addressing security challenges and fostering international peace.

“Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens regional stability and global peace,” Sa’ar wrote in a post on X. “More countries should follow suit and join the fight against Iranian aggression and terrorism.”

On Thursday, Peña issued an executive order designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization “for its systematic violations of peace, human rights, and the security of the international community.”

The executive order also expanded Paraguay’s 2019 proscription of the armed wings of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, to encompass the entirety of both organizations, including their political wings.

“With this decision, Paraguay reaffirms its unwavering commitment to peace, international security, and the unconditional respect for human rights, solidifying its position within the international community as a country firmly opposed to all forms of terrorism and strengthening its relations with allied nations in this fight,” Peña wrote in a post on X, emphasizing the country’s strategic relationship with the United States and Israel.

Iran is the chief international backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Islamist terror groups with weapons, funding, and training. According to media reports based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, Iran had been informed about Hamas’s plan to launch the Oct. 7 attack months in advance.

Last year, Peña reopened Paraguay’s embassy in Jerusalem, making it the sixth nation — after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea — to establish its embassy in the Israeli capital. During the same visit, he condemned the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, calling the perpetrators “criminals” in a speech at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

The Trump administration also praised Paraguay’s decision to officially label the IRGC as a terrorist organization, describing it as a major blow to Iran’s terror network in the Western Hemisphere.

“Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world and has financed and directed numerous terrorist attacks and activities globally, through its IRGC-Qods Force and proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.

The US official said Paraguay’s action will help disrupt Iran’s ability to finance terrorism and operate in Latin America — particularly in the Tri-Border Area, where Paraguay borders Argentina and Brazil, a region long regarded as a financial hub for Hezbollah-linked operatives.

“The important steps Paraguay has taken will help cut off the ability of the Iranian regime and its proxies to plot terrorist attacks and raise money for its malignant and destabilizing activity,” the statement read.

“The United States will continue to work with partners such as Paraguay to confront global security threats,” Bruce added. “We call on all countries to hold the Iranian regime accountable and prevent its operatives, recruiters, financiers, and proxies from operating in their territories.”

During his first administration, Trump designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), citing the Iranian regime’s use of the IRGC to “engage in terrorist activities since its inception 40 years ago.”

At the time, Trump said this designation “recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”

“The IRGC is the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign,” he continued.

The post Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’

Yale University students at the corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S., April 22, 2024. Photo: Melanie Stengel via Reuters Connect.

As darkness fell over Yale University on Wednesday evening, Jewish students faced intimidation that echoed history’s darkest chapters. The following day, as the sun rose on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world solemnly reflected on the devastating consequences of unchecked hatred.

Yet, disturbingly, at Yale, the shadows of that same hatred linger once again.

For several nights now, radical anti-Israel activists, primarily organized by “Yalies for Palestine,” an anti-Israel hate group, have targeted Jewish students at Yale — in many cases, based solely on their outwardly Jewish appearance. 

On Wednesday, protestors blocked walkways, physically intimidated Jewish students, and hurled bottles and sprayed liquids at them — all while campus police stood by and did nothing.

One Jewish student described her chilling encounter with the protesters the night before, on Tuesday: “When I tried to get through, they blocked me, ignored my requests to pass, and handed out masks to those obstructing me. Yale security told me they couldn’t help.”

The immediate trigger for this harassment is the invitation extended by Shabtai, a Yale Jewish society, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli government minister. Whether one supports or opposes Ben-Gvir’s politics is beside the point. Notably, Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, was also protested and disrupted during a separate campus event in February, underscoring a broader trend of hostility toward Israeli speakers regardless of their political affiliation.

These events signal more than isolated protests; they constitute a redux of hatred that historically escalates when met with institutional silence or indifference. 

Yale’s administration, under President Maurie McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis, has failed to adequately respond. Though Yale revoked official recognition from Yalies for Palestine, its tepid actions have not halted the dangerous slide toward overt hostility. The silence — from both the university and the Slifka Center, Yale’s center for Jewish life — is deafening.

This isn’t the first troubling instance at Yale. A year ago, similar demonstrators disrupted campus life with vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric, silencing dialogue and fostering an atmosphere hostile to Jewish students. 

Earlier this year, CAMERA on Campus documented Yale’s Slifka Center pressuring students to erase evidence of anti-Jewish harassment during a pro-Israel event, effectively whitewashing antisemitism and emboldening extremists.

As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has powerfully documented, the rhetoric of anti-Zionism today often revives the antisemitic patterns of the past, particularly those propagated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. These tactics, she explains, echo Nazi-era propaganda that portrayed Jews as subhuman, sinister, and uniquely malevolent — a narrative used to justify marginalization and, ultimately, genocide.

These dynamics — scapegoating, dehumanizing, and ostracizing Jews under the guise of “anti-Zionism” — are not relics of history. They are alive and active across elite American campuses. And now, unmistakably, they have taken root at Yale.

McInnis must break the silence and condemn the open harassment and assault of Jewish students. She must also hold the perpetrators of the heinous actions and those responsible for the safety of students accountable for their inaction. 

This week has revealed a grave failure of moral and institutional duty on many fronts. When law enforcement stands by as Jewish students face intimidation and assault, it sends a chilling message: their safety matters less.

We must demand a full investigation and real accountability. Condemnations of antisemitism are not enough. Policies must be changed to ensure Jewish students and organizations can freely exercise their right to free expression without being subject to harassment and assault. Anything less would betray Yale’s stated values — and the promise of “never again.”

Douglas Sandoval is the Managing Director for CAMERA on Campus.

The post Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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