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A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs.
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Tucked in the far corner of a large, brightly-lit exhibition hall on the ground floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, there is a delicate-looking piece of art with a strong political message.
At first glance, it appears to be three circular vases with flowers in them. The ceramic vases sit on shelves attached to the wall, and colorful collages hang above them. On closer inspection, visitors will notice that the flowers are made out of paper and that affixed to each vase is an image of the Palestinian flag printed on foam board.
A nearby label written by the curators of the exhibit, titled “Tikkun: For the Cosmos, the Community, and Ourselves,” explains that the piece was inspired by a conversation the artist, Tosha Stimage of Berkeley, had with a Palestinian man. He told Stimage about the plants that are native to Palestine — “a place which he can no longer access due to the ongoing conflict in the region,” the curators write.
The label also includes a note about the flag: “Some may find its presence at The CJM troubling or confusing, while others may find it appropriate and forthright. Stimage recognizes the potential for these divergent responses and hopes to use them as a means of generating dialogue.”
On a Sunday afternoon in October, Maury Ostroff read the label and walked away without inspecting the artwork.
Visitors to the “Tikkun” exhibit are encouraged to share their responses to the artwork via comment cards. (Andrew Esensten)
Asked how the presence of the flag made him feel, Ostroff, who is Jewish and lives in Muir Beach, in Marin County, replied, “Unhappy.”
Why?
“It’s not offensive to me in the same way that a swastika is. My skin is a little bit thicker than that. But I wish it weren’t here.”
He added, “What’s so Jewish about this? What’s so ‘tikkun olam’ about all of this?”
For the “Tikkun” exhibit, which opened Feb. 17 and runs through Jan. 8, the CJM invited both Jewish and non-Jewish Bay Area artists to contribute new works on the theme of repair, however they chose to interpret it. “No one is listening to us,” the piece by Stimage, who is not Jewish, is the first work of art featuring the Palestinian flag to be shown at CJM in recent memory; the museum could not say when or if the flag has been displayed on its walls before.
The piece prompted several internal conversations among CJM staff when it was first submitted and, since it has been on display, has generated a variety of responses from museumgoers who have left comments in a box at the entrance to the exhibit. Intentionally or not, Stimage has raised numerous questions with the artwork, including: Does a work of art that is sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle for statehood belong in a Jewish museum? And what is the role of a contemporary Jewish museum, anyway?
“To truly be a contemporary art museum, meaning embedded in the contemporary issues of our day, our job is to provide a platform for dialogue and to share a diversity of perspectives on our walls,” said Chad Coerver, CJM’s executive director since September 2021. “If any institution [like ours] took the path of withholding artwork that troubled our staff, our board or our community, it would be very difficult to mount exhibitions.”
CJM is a member of the Council of American Jewish Museums, a network of 76 museums across the country. CAJM does not have guidelines about the kind of art its member museums can and cannot display, according to Executive Director Melissa Yaverbaum.
J. reached out to several CAJM member museums in New York, Los Angeles and other places by email to ask if they had ever shown artwork with Palestinian iconography or works by Palestinian artists. The museums declined to answer or did not respond.
In recent years, two Jewish museums have been embroiled in controversy over issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago staged an exhibit in 2008 on Israeli and Palestinian concepts of homeland that included maps and portraits of Palestinians. Following outcry from members of the local Jewish community who felt the exhibit presented Israel in a negative light, the museum decided to close the exhibit after only a few weeks. And in 2019, the director of the Jewish Museum Berlin resigned after the museum tweeted a link to a pro-BDS article in a German newspaper. (The museum previously came under fire for welcoming anti-Zionist scholar Judith Butler and representatives of Iran.)
In a joint interview with J., two CJM staffers who worked on “Tikkun” — co-curator Qianjin Montoya, who is not Jewish, and a Jewish senior curator who served in an advisory role, Heidi Rabben — shared the story of how Stimage’s piece came to be in the exhibit. (Montoya’s co-curator for the exhibit, Arianne Gelardin, no longer works at the museum.)
Since 2009, CJM has invited local artists from different backgrounds to create new work as part of the museum’s annual Dorothy Saxe Invitational. The idea for “Tikkun” was hatched before the pandemic put the planning process on hold. Once the CJM and Saxe — a local philanthropist and art collector — agreed on the theme, the co-curators invited artists “already engaged in healing through their relationship to community or in their practice of daily life,” Gelardin told J. last February.
The 30 artists who accepted the museum’s invitation were given only four months to conceive of and submit new works. That was likely the shortest timeline in the history of the invitational, which has been held 11 previous times, according to the museum. Each artist received a packet of materials compiled by CJM staff, with input from the Shalom Hartman Institute, a non-degree granting Jewish education center, to guide their thinking on “tikkun.”
Stimage was invited to participate because she is “very active” in the Bay Area and because “her work reflects ideas of community and connection,” Montoya said.
The curators said Stimage’s inclusion of the Palestinian flag in her submitted piece came as a surprise and prompted challenging conversations. However, they noted that they found the content of some of the other artists’ work surprising, too, and that it’s not unusual for contemporary artists to push the envelope in their work.
“I wouldn’t say we expected to receive a piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we weren’t steering anyone away from that, either,” Rabben told J., adding that the submission guidelines did not place any topic off limits. “That’s a commitment from the museum to authentically represent the creative spirit of the artists that we’re working with,” she said.
Still, the curators said they engaged in a dialogue with Stimage in order to better understand each aspect of her piece and her overall intentions. Through those conversations, the curators learned that Stimage wanted to explore a moment of “rupture,” and that through her piece she hoped to communicate “that before healing or repair might happen, you have to first acknowledge that rupture,” Rabben said.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco is showing “Tikkun,” an exhibit of works by Jewish and non-Jewish artists on the theme of repair. (Andrew Esensten)
Coerver, who was involved in some of the conversations, stressed that “careful consideration” was given to including the piece in the exhibit. “We felt an artwork addressing the plight of the Palestinians was appropriate in an exhibition on healing and repair,” he said. (No work submitted as part of the Dorothy Saxe Invitational has ever been outright rejected, the museum said.)
Stimage did not respond to interview requests from J. According to a CV on her website, she was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2016. She is a past fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and was an artist-in-residence at Facebook in 2018. She also owns a floral gift shop in Oakland called Saint Flora.
Her work often touches on Black identity; she created a piece honoring Sandra Bland, an African-American woman whose 2015 arrest and death in a Texas jail cell sparked protests, and contributed to a 2019 San Francisco Art Institute exhibit on the Black Panther Party.
“I have a responsibility to create things that will, to the best of my present knowledge, do more good than harm, heal, inspire and uplift other humans,” she told the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper in 2015.
Stimage’s precise views on Israel are unknown. CJM referred J. to her artist statement for “No one is listening to us,” which reads: “Olive, sage, and sumac are flowering plants native to the Mediterranean (including regions of Gaza and the West Bank) that have a direct relationship to contested ancestral land and affect the livelihood of so many Palestinian farmers and families caught in the conflict. They are positioned in the space of The Contemporary Jewish Museum as a metaphor for the ongoing conflict over land rights and the desperate need for restoration and healing of an age-old wound.”
The curators told J. that during their conversations with Stimage about her piece, they asked her why including images of the Palestinian flag was important to her but did not request that she remove them.
“We determined that none of [the piece’s] components in and of themselves signified something problematic or concerning,” Rabben said. “Of course, we had the awareness that the symbol [of the flag] will be read in a variety of ways by a variety of people.”
(Rabben pointed out that the exhibit includes other works with national symbols rendered in provocative ways, such as a black-and-white photograph of an American flag that was torn apart and partially reassembled by Mexican-American artist Jose Arias.)
The Palestinian flag — which contains the Pan-Arab colors of black, white, green and red — was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964. Since then, it has been the primary symbol of Palestinian nationalism.
For decades, the PLO was considered an enemy organization by Israel, and anything associated with it “had no place in Israeli public life,” said Eran Kaplan, an Israeli-born professor of Israel studies at San Francisco State University. Israel never went so far as to ban the flag. However, during the First Intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993, Israeli soldiers sometimes followed orders to confiscate the flag from protesters in the West Bank and Gaza.
With the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993, Israel and the PLO recognized each other as negotiating partners. Yet the Palestinian flag remains a contentious symbol in Israel today. Kaplan noted that it recently served as a flashpoint during the funeral procession of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian American broadcaster who was killed in the West Bank in May. (The IDF conducted a review and admitted that the Israeli soldier who shot her had most likely misidentified her as an armed militant.) After warning Abu Akleh’s family not to display the flag, Israeli police attacked mourners in East Jerusalem, ripping flags out of their hands and off of the vehicle carrying her casket.
Today, the flag holds different meanings for Israelis and American Jews from different generations and political persuasions.
“There are large segments in Israeli society who view any form of Palestinian national identity as a threat to the existence of Israel,” Kaplan said. “There are others who view the PLO as legitimate partners in any form of negotiations [over the creation of a Palestinian state], but there’s an absolute split over those questions.”
Given the sensitive nature of Stimage’s work and others in the exhibit, the curators decided to solicit feedback from visitors via comment cards available at the entrance to the hall. Rabben said the museum has received a number of comments specifically about “No one is listening to us,” most of which were positive. “The majority of those comments were ‘Thank you for offering space for this topic at the museum,’” she said.
Last month, a security guard sitting in the “Tikkun” exhibition hall told a reporter that he had not witnessed any expressions of outrage or protest through the first nine months of the exhibit. “When we opened we were afraid of negative reactions, but they’re not stressed about it,” he said of visitors. “We have shown worse things here.” The guard, who has worked at the museum since it opened in 2008, mentioned a 2010 exhibit, “Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf,” which included a copy of Hitler’s autobiography. “Some people were cussing us out” for displaying the book, he recalled.
Meanwhile, on the same floor as “Tikkun,” there is another, smaller exhibit containing potentially offensive art. A sign outside of the room warns visitors that inside is a Hitler marionette created by the parents of puppeteer Frank Oz. “Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today,” the sign says.
Coerver, CJM’s executive director, said he was proud that the museum’s three current exhibits — “Tikkun,” “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History” and “Gillian Laub: Family Matters,” which includes photographs that Laub took of her Trump-supporting relatives — are raising “challenging questions” and providing opportunities for both visitors and museum staff to “expand our horizons.”
“We’ve been wading into some issues that I think are a little thicker than maybe we’ve been confronting in the past,” he said, “and I hope that continues.”
A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
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European Countries Join France in Demanding Anti-Israel UN Special Rapporteur Albanese’s Resignation
Francesa Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, speaks at a conference, “A Cartography of Genocide” Israel’s Conduct in Gaza,” at the Roma Tre University, in Rome, Italy, Oct. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Remo Casilli
Top diplomats from Austria, Germany, Italy, and the Czech Republic have joined France in calling for the resignation of the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, who has an extensive history of using her role to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize the terrorist group Hamas’s attacks against the Jewish state.
Earlier this week, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot accused Albanese of being “a political activist who stirs up hate” after she delivered yet another inflammatory tirade against Israel, this time at an Al Jazeera forum in Doha, prompting renewed calls for her resignation.
He described Albanese’s “outrageous and reprehensible remarks” as targeting “not the Israeli government, whose policies may be criticized, but Israel as a people and as a nation, which is absolutely unacceptable.”
The top French diplomat announced that France will demand Albanese’s resignation “with firmness” at this month’s United Nations Human Rights Council session.
Despite her history of antisemitic statements, the United Nations has consistently refused to fire Albanese, citing her status as one of its “independent experts.”
Now, officials in Austria, Germany, Italy, and the Czech Republic have aligned with France in demanding Albanese’s removal, warning that she continues to spread hatred under the cover of her official role.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said Albanese’s “conduct, statements, and initiatives are not appropriate for the position she holds within an organization dedicated to peace and security.”
Austrian Foreign Minister Beate Meinl-Reisinger accused Albanese of “spreading incitement” in a way that “undermines the impartiality and highest standards that the role of a UN representative requires.”
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul called her “untenable in her position,” noting that she “has made numerous inappropriate remarks in the past.”
Albanese sparked fresh outrage after seemingly calling Israel a “common enemy of humanity,” drawing sharp condemnation from diplomats and human rights advocates worldwide.
Speaking at the Al Jazeera forum in Qatar last weekend, she accused Israel of “planning and carrying out a genocide” during the country’s defensive war against Hamas.
“It’s also true that never before has the global community seen the challenges that we all face, we who do not control large amounts of financial, algorithms, and weapons,” Albanese said, appearing to invoke a long-standing antisemitic conspiracy that Jews control wealth and technology.
She also accused Western nations of being complicit in the so-called “genocide” by supplying arms and financing Israel, while claiming that Western media helps defend the Jewish state by “amplifying the pro-apartheid, genocidal narrative.”
Facing mounting backlash and renewed calls for her resignation, Albanese defended herself, insisting that her comments targeted a “system” that allowed a “genocide” to unfold in Gaza.
In an interview with France 24, Albanese rejected the allegations against her as “completely false accusations” and “manipulation.”
“I have never, ever, ever said ‘Israel is the common enemy of humanity,’” she said.
On Thursday, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, acknowledged disagreement with Albanese’s statements, emphasizing that her language does not reflect the tone or approach of the United Nations.
“If member states are not happy with what one or more of the special rapporteurs are saying, it is their responsibility to get involved in the work of the Human Rights Council … and push for the direction they wish to push for,” Dujarric said in a statement.
On the contrary, UN human rights spokesperson Marta Hurtado defended Albanese, stressing concerns over personal attacks and misinformation targeting UN officials.
“We are very worried. We are concerned that UN officials, independent experts and judicial officials, are increasingly subjected to personal attacks, threats and misinformation that distracts from the serious human rights issues,” Hurtado said in a statement.
Since taking on the role of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories in 2022, Albanese has been at the center of controversy due to what critics, including US and European lawmakers, have described as antisemitic and anti-Israel public remarks.
Last year, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) faced intense pressure to block Albanese’s reappointment for another three-year term, with several countries and NGOs urging UN members to oppose the move due to her controversial remarks and alleged pro-Hamas stance.
Despite significant pressure and opposition, her mandate was confirmed to extend until 2028.
In her long history of antisemitic remarks, Albanese has referred to a “Jewish lobby” controlling the US and Europe, compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and stated that Hamas’s violence against Israelis — including rape, murder, and kidnapping — needs to be “put in context.”
Last year, the United Nations launched a probe into Albanese for allegedly accepting a trip to Australia funded by pro-Hamas organizations.
In the past, she has also celebrated the anti-Israel protesters rampaging across US college campuses, saying they represent a “revolution” and give her “hope.”
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France Marks 20th Anniversary of Ilan Halimi’s Death as Macron Condemns Rising Antisemitism
France’s President Emmanuel Macron speaks during a ceremony commemorating the 20th anniversary of the murder of Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old French Jew who was tortured and murdered in 2006, at The Elysee Presidential Palace in Paris, France, Feb. 13, 2026. Photo: BERTRAND GUAY/Pool via REUTERS
France on Friday marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Ilan Halimi — the young Jewish man who was brutally tortured to death in 2006 — as Jewish leaders and government officials sounded the alarm over a relentless wave of antisemitism that continues to shadow the nation.
Local communities across France planted olive trees in Halimi’s memory as part of a nationwide initiative responding to the recent surge in antisemitic incidents.
“Twenty years after Ilan Halimi’s death, the situation has only worsened,” Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the main representative body of French Jews, said during a commemorative ceremony at the Élysée Palace in Paris.
“Antisemitic prejudice is spreading, even among the youngest generations,” he continued. “Schools, once safe havens, can no longer shield children from this hatred.”
French President Emmanuel Macron also attended the ceremony, condemning what he called an “antisemitic hydra” that has spread into “every corner” of French society over the past two decades.
During the tribute, Macron called for elected officials convicted of “antisemitic, racist, or discriminatory acts and statements” to face mandatory disqualification from public office, insisting that politicians must act as “guardians of the Republic.”
“Far too often, those who commit antisemitic crimes face sentences that are shockingly light,” Macron said. “We must ensure transparency and accountability by closely monitoring every ruling and sanction.”
“The government and Parliament will take decisive action to strengthen laws against antisemitic and racist acts,” he continued, vowing a tougher, more consistent approach to combating hatred.
Halimi was abducted, held captive, and tortured in January 2006 by a gang of about 20 people in a low-income housing estate in the Paris suburb of Bagneux.
Three weeks later, he was found in Essonne, south of Paris, naked, gagged, and handcuffed, with clear signs of torture and burns. The 23-year-old died on the way to the hospital.
In 2011, an olive tree was planted in Halimi’s memory. In August, the memorial was found felled — probably with a chainsaw — in Epinay-sur-Seine.
Halimi’s memory has faced attacks before, with two other trees planted in his honor vandalized in 2019 in Essonne.
On the 20th anniversary of his death, IFOP — France’s leading pollster — released a report showing that antisemitic stereotypes about Jews, their wealth, and perceived communal solidarity remain widespread, revealing how deeply such prejudices persist in French society.
“The case of Ilan Halimi shows the deadly consequences of antisemitic prejudice,” Yossef Murciano, president of the French Union of Jewish Students (UEJF), which commissioned the study, said in a statement.
“Twenty years later, remembering him means rejecting the idea that a Jew could be attacked or killed simply for being Jewish,” he continued.
Regards sur les préjugés antisémites 20 ans après la mort d’Ilan Halimi : étude @IfopOpinion pour @uejf
20 ans après l’assassinat d’Ilan Halimi, l’Union des Étudiants Juifs de France (@uejf) publie une étude intitulée « Regards sur les préjugés antisémites 20 ans après la mort… pic.twitter.com/eHIP7B84Ti
— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) February 13, 2026
According to the newly released report, one in four French people still believe Jews are wealthier than others, while 69 percent perceive them as a closely united community.
The poll also found that 44 percent of the overall population are unaware of Halimi’s case, with 73 percent of 18–24-year-olds having never heard of it.
Even though 25 percent of young adults believe that Jews “make too much of” antisemitism, 76 percent of French citizens say a tragedy like Halimi’s could happen again today.
“The change is undeniable: antisemitism is not fading, but evolving. It shows less as overt biological hatred and more as suspicion, expressed through narratives of power, influence, and money. It is becoming diffuse, normalized, sometimes even politically justified — and now, more than ever, it often takes the shape of anti-Zionism,” Murciano said.
According to the latest statistics, 47 percent of young adults believe the existence of the State of Israel is unjustified.
The report also found that half of respondents view Zionism as a racist ideology, while 35 percent see it as an international organization aiming to influence the world for the benefit of Jews — reflecting long-standing conspiratorial stereotypes.
The data followed the French Interior Ministry’s releasing its annual report on anti-religious acts on Thursday. The report revealed a troubling rise in antisemitic incidents documented in a joint dataset compiled with the Jewish Community Protection Service.
Antisemitism in France remained at alarmingly high levels last year, with 1,320 incidents recorded nationwide, as Jews and Israelis faced several targeted attacks amid a relentlessly hostile climate despite heightened security measures, according to the published data.
Although the total number of antisemitic outrages in 2025 fell by 16 percent compared to 2024’s second highest ever total of 1,570 cases, the newly released report warned that antisemitism remained “historically high,” with more than 3.5 attacks occurring every day.
Over the past 25 years, antisemitic acts “have never been as numerous as in the past three years,” the report said, noting a dramatic spike following the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Even though Jews make up less than 1 percent of France’s population, they accounted for 53 percent of all religiously motivated crimes last year.
Between 2022 and 2025, antisemitic attacks across France quadrupled, leaving the Jewish community more exposed than ever.
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Princeton University Anti-Zionist Group Cancels Norman Finkelstein Lecture, School Says He’s ‘Welcome’ to Come Back
Norman Finkelstein participating in pro-Hamas demonstration in New York City in April 2024. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Princeton University’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter has canceled this year’s annual lecture by Norman Finkelstein, a stridently anti-Israel activist and political scientist who for years has been one of the West’s most outspoken critics of the Jewish state.
“We regret having to inform you on such short notice, but due to unforeseen circumstances involving new university policy, this event has been canceled. There are no confirmed plans at this stage for a rescheduled date,” SJP said in a statement. “Please help share this to all who were planning to attend.”
Finkelstein, who has been criticized for reprising antisemitic conspiracies of Jewish influence and power, has remained a regular on Princeton University’s speaking circuit thanks to SJP. As previously reported by The Algemeiner, SJP chapters across the US have been involved in assaulting Jewish students, stalking Jewish and Israeli faculty, and destroying university property during illegal occupations of school grounds.
Princeton University, which at one time had notoriously imposed disciplinary sanctions on conservatives and Zionists that are generally reserved for alleged sexual predators, has not stopped Finkelstein, who was born to Jewish Holocaust survivors, from coming to campus.
Writing in 2000 that the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime, has become an “industry” for Jews and Israelis to exploit, Finkelstein charged that a “handful of American Jews have effectively hijacked the Nazi Holocaust to blackmail Europe” and “divert attention from what is being done to the Palestinians,” whom he describes as unwilling subjects of an “apartheid” country. Meanwhile, he derided advocates of Holocaust commemoration as a “repellant gang of plutocrats, hoodlums, and hucksters.”
Finkelstein, according to The Princeton Tory, is also on record calling a Princeton student who served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) a “concentration camp guard” during a campus event, an allusion to false accusations that Israel is committing a genocide against a Palestinian people whose population, according to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics has “doubled about ten times since” Israel’s founding in 1948.
In other Princeton events, Finkelstein has said it is acceptable to “shoot them dead,” referring to Israelis,” and said that Israeli Jews are “drinking the blood of those children.”
Writing to The Algemeiner on Friday, Princeton University noted that the institution did not disinvite Finkelstein and that SJP is “welcome” to have him back.
“Princeton University did not disinvite Norman Finkelstein,” a university spokesperson said. “The event could not take place as scheduled because the student organizers did not register it with the required advance notice. We require advance notice for logistical planning, a requirement that is unrelated to the content of this or any event.”
Princeton University has long been a hub of antisemitism on campus, often propagated by anti-Zionist activists who present their call for the destruction of Israel as being consistent with progressive values.
In 2023, week before Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel, Princeton appeared to defend a professor’s assigning his students a book which accuses the Israel Defense Forces of “maiming” Palestinians and harvesting their organs. The book, Rutgers University professor Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim, is widely denounced as “pseudo-scholarship” for trafficking in antisemitic blood libels rooted in medieval conspiracies charging that Jews murdered Christian children and drank their blood during the holiday of Passover.
Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber addressed the issue at a faculty meeting at the time, defending the work’s inclusion in Princeton’s curriculum as a routine of academic freedom.
“It has unfortunately become common for university faculty members here and elsewhere to become the target of viral social media storms focused on controversial materials that they assign or teach,” Eisgruber said during a faculty meeting. “That has sometimes extended to demands that the university should ban or condemn a book, cancel a course, or discipline a professor.”
He continued, “We, of course, will not do that. Academic freedom protects your right to decide what to teach and how to teach it. That right, like the right to free speech on campus, is very broad indeed, and we will protect it.”
One year later, students marked the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre by vandalizing the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO), splattering red paint on the entrance door and graffitiing the perimeter of the building with the slogan “$4genocide.”
Since March 2025, Princeton remains under federal investigation for allegedly ignoring campus antisemitism.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.