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Georgetown Law graduation speaker backs out after students protest his ‘controversial, Zionist and harmful opinions’
(JTA) — A pro-Israel Jewish economist and former university president will no longer speak at Georgetown University Law School’s graduation next week, after stepping down from the speaking engagement following student criticism.
Instead, graduating students and their families will hear from a Georgetown professor who has disparaged legal efforts to curb pro-Palestinian student protests and compared congressional hearings on college campus antisemitism to “McCarthyism.”
The school announced last week that Morton Schapiro, who led Northwestern University for a decade until 2022, would be the commencement speaker on May 17. Students soon launched a petition calling for his removal.
“Schapiro is not a lawyer, has no connection to Georgetown, and holds controversial, Zionist, and harmful opinions,” said the petition, which drew 282 signatures.
The petition called attention to a column that Schapiro published last year in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, where he now lives. In the column, titled “What I Have Learned Over the Past Two Years About Israel and the World and published on Oct. 15, Schapiro criticized progressives, higher education leaders and the mainstream media for vilifying Israel during the war in Gaza.
The petition also linked to a news story about Schapiro’s 2020 comments disparaging student protesters at Northwestern. At the time, he was clashing with students who called him “Piggy Morty,” an epithet that they said was meant to criticize his ties to police but that he said smacked of antisemitism.
Georgetown Law did not comment publicly on the petition until Wednesday, when Interim Dean Joshua Teitelbaum, who had been Schapiro’s student at Williams College, announced by email that Schapiro had withdrawn from the speaking role. Teitelbaum noted in the email, sent to the Georgetown Law community, that “in the past week, a number of law students raised concerns” about Schapiro’s selection.
“He was invited to address the graduating class to share his insights about the current moment in U.S. higher education and to inspire our graduates to pursue a life’s work in service of others,” Teitelbaum said in the email, which Georgetown Law School shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In an accompanying note, Schapiro said he did not want his presence “to distract from the day’s festivities.”
To the Jewish Journal, he said, “Given Georgetown Law’s desire to keep politics out of its commencement ceremony, I am a little surprised by their choice of a speaker to replace me.” JTA was unable to reach Schapiro on Wednesday.
The replacement speaker, David Cole, is a professor of law and public policy at Georgetown who is the former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. In that role, Cole issued a statement soon after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel condemning the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, two antisemitism watchdogs, for what he said were calls to “investigate, disband, or penalize pro-Palestinian student groups for exercising their free speech rights.”
Acknowledging surging antisemitism, Cole argued that curbing speech perceived by some to be offensive was not the right response.
“Restricting speech may seem like an attractive option for college administrators to quell campus tensions,” he wrote at the time. “But efforts to censor speech often prove counterproductive, and undermine the very mission of the university. We strongly caution universities against conflating the suppression of speech with the façade of safety.”
The speaker switchup comes amid a string of commencement dustups related to Israel and the war in Gaza. Also on Wednesday, Rutgers University rescinded its commencement speaker invitation to alumnus Rami Elghandour, a producer of “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” the Oscar-nominated docudrama about the Red Crescent response to the killing of Hind Rajab in Gaza in 2024, citing a tweet about Israel that it said did not comport with the school’s values. The president of the University of Michigan, meanwhile, also apologized after faculty senate chair Derek Peterson praised pro-Palestinian student protesters in his address Saturday.
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Netanyahu pushes back on Vance’s claims that US is Israel’s ‘only powerful ally’
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected Vice President JD Vance’s recent claims that the U.S. is Israel’s “only powerful ally” left in the world.
When asked on Fox News Sunday what his reaction was to Vance’s remarks, which came as Israeli ministers criticized the framework deal signed by the U.S. and Iran to end hostilities, Netanyahu replied, “I respect JD Vance. We have a very good relationship, but that doesn’t mean that I agree with everything that he says.”
“I have to point out this: Donald Trump is a great, the greatest friend we ever had in the White House, and I stand by that completely,” Netanyahu continued. “Secondly, we have some other friends, like a small country called India, you know, it has 1.4 billion people, and boy, do we have a tremendous support there.”
Netanyahu added that Israel also has the support of “many others,” but did not elaborate on which countries he was referring to.
“The relations are not quite as they appear, and we have, we have many, many friends, and I have to tell you, we also take care of our friends, especially the Christians in the Middle East,” Netanyahu said.
The prime minister also dismissed the claim that there was any rift between the United States and Israel regarding the deal with Iran, telling Fox that he and President Donald Trump were “set on the same goal.”
“President Trump is the leader of the United States. He does what’s good for America. I’m the leader of Israel, the one and only Jewish state. I do what’s good for Israel,” Netanyahu said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, we see eye to eye, but as any, in any family, in any close friendship, there are sometimes differences of opinion, and we discuss them openly.”
Netanyahu also said that he and Trump have “common objectives” regarding the U.S. deal with Iran.
“We want to see Iran give up its nuclear weapons program. We want to see the nuclear enriched material removed. We want to see the enrichment sites for nuclear material dismantled,” Netanyahu said, adding, “as long as I’m prime minister, Iran will not have nuclear weapons.”
On Saturday, Trump told Axios that Netanyahu had requested a meeting at the White House and said that the pair gets along “very good” and that the Israeli leader “knows who the boss is.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Former Israeli hostages Sasha Trufanov and Sapir Cohen wed in emotional ceremony
(JTA) — Two former Israeli hostages have wed, in the first marriage of hostages taken when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Sasha Trufanov and Sapir Cohen were visiting Trufanov’s family on Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7 when they were attacked and abducted to Gaza. Trufanov’s father was murdered. Cohen was freed during a temporary ceasefire after 55 days, while Trufanov was held for nearly 500 days.
They married on Sunday in Israel, in a ceremony attended by multiple former hostages as well as Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who posted a picture of himself under the chuppah, or wedding canopy, with Trufanov and Cohen.
“We prayed for your return, we were moved to tears when you came back home, and this evening we were privileged to rejoice together with you and to bless you under the chuppah on your joyous day,” Herzog wrote.
While other freed hostages have celebrated births and engagements, the wedding is the first for a former hostage. It comes just days after Israel marked the 1,000th day since Oct. 7, and as the government’s handling of the hostage crisis continues to roil Israeli politics ahead of a looming election. Last week, Nitzan Alon, an Israeli army major general who was part of a small hostage negotiation team, said at a conference that more hostages could have been returned alive had the Israeli government made different decisions, strengthening a widespread belief within Israel.
Alon, too, was present at Trufanov and Cohen’s wedding.
After Trufanov stepped on a glass, the traditional signal for the execution of the marriage, Eyal Golan’s “Am Yisrael Chai,” an anthem of Jewish and Israeli solidarity during the Gaza war, began playing.
Rom Braslavski, another hostage who was briefly held with Trufanov in Gaza, posted pictures of himself with his friend at the wedding, as well as a video of him and the newly married couple being hoisted to dance.
“Today, we are together, not in Rafah, not stuffed in a trunk, but free and you are in a beautiful groom’s suit marrying Sapir. How much you talked about her, my brother,” he wrote on Instagram. “There is nothing happier for me than accompanying you on this day, and I hope both of you will bring into the world happy little children and that they won’t know evil. May they not know war, with God’s help.”
Another wedding featuring a former hostage is scheduled for next month. Eliya Cohen, who was held for 505 days, marked his engagement to Ziv Abud in a party that took place last week. He wore a jacket that read “Bring them Home” when other grooms wore it during the hostage crisis. With all hostages out of Gaza since January, Cohen altered it to read “Dad, thank you,” a mantra that he said sustained him during his captivity.
Cohen did not know that Abud had survived the attack on the Nova music festival until after his release. While he was held hostage, she drew attention to his plight by setting a romantic table with an unfilled place on the boardwalk in Tel Aviv.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Former Israeli hostages Sasha Trufanov and Sapir Cohen wed in emotional ceremony appeared first on The Forward.
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Hundreds of Patriot Front members march in Washington on July 4, alarming Jewish groups
(JTA) — Hundreds of people affiliated with the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, in a July 4 show of force by the group founded by a veteran of a landmark 2017 far-right rally that featured an antisemitic chant.
The marchers in Washington wore masks and some carried Confederate flags, according to reports and video from the scene. At times, they chanted “Reclaim America!” — a rallying cry channeling the group’s nativist agenda.
While Patriot Front’s public activities mostly center on its anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ agenda, the Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly cited the group, founded in 2017, as the largest purveyor of antisemitic materials in the United States.
One of the group’s signature slogans, which members displayed on a banner in Washington in 2023, is “No Zionists in Government.”
The previous year, the group’s internal communications, obtained and leaked by an independent media collective, showed that some members used Nazi slogans and that one member was accepted on the basis of an application in which he declared that the “biggest threat to America is Jewish domination over the world.” Group leaders criticized how the chat logs had been obtained but did not challenge the veracity of their contents.
In a statement on Sunday, the ADL called Patriot Front “the most visible white supremacist group operating in the U.S. today” and noted that its previous public rallies had been much smaller.
“The size of the march is concerning,” the ADL said about the Saturday rally.
Patriot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau, was a leading participant in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which attendees chanted “Jews will not replace us” while carrying burning torches. The chant refers to an antisemitic conspiracy theory positing that Jews are engineering mass immigration in order to displace white people. Rousseau later testified that he heard the chant but thought attendees might have been saying “you will not replace us.”
The 2017 rally fueled criticism of President Donald Trump, who did not immediately comment on it and then placed blame on “both sides” while condemning the display of “hatred, bigotry and violence.” It also animated the presidential run of Joe Biden and spurred a successful lawsuit against the rally’s organizers by an advocacy group called Integrity First for America, whose leader, Amy Spitalnick, is now CEO of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs.
“Patriot Front is an offshoot of one of the white supremacist groups we (successfully) sued for orchestrating the Charlottesville violence,” Spitalnick said in a JCPA statement on Sunday. “They are emboldened because their extremism has been wholly normalized by the administration and others.”
Trump has not commented publicly on this weekend’s Patriot Front march, which took place during festivities to celebrate the United States’ 250th birthday. A top administration official did not directly answer when CNN’s Dana Bash asked him whether he would urge Trump to denounce the group.
“What they stand for is nothing that I could possibly agree with,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum told Bash, who is Jewish and has made antisemitism a focus of her recent coverage. “But one of the foundational principles of the United States, which makes democracy messy, is free speech.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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