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Should College Professors Who Signed BDS Pledges Be Teaching Classes About Israel?
North Carolina State University. Photo: Wiki Commons.
Community members have reached out to express concerns regarding the North Carolina State University course, “History of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict,” which is scheduled to be taught by Kristen Alff this spring. Classes begin Jan. 12.
Alff signed Palestine and Praxis: Open Letter and Call to Action —using her “NC State University” credentials — which characterized Israel as a “settler colonial state.”
The letter affirmed, “In the classroom and on campus, we commit to pressuring our academic institutions and organizations to respect the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions [BDS] of Israel by instating measures that remove complicity and partnership with military, academic, and legal institutions involved in entrenching Israel’s policies.”
Alff also signed a “Statement on Palestine from North Carolina Academics,” which said, “We acknowledge our complicity in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians” and “[We] reject the prevalent ‘two-sides’ narrative.”
NC State is a public university and part of the University of North Carolina (UNC) System. It is required by State law and the UNC equality policy to be institutionally neutral “on the political controversies of the day.”
What rationale could NC State possibly have for selecting an instructor who has signed a letter that publicly pledged to advocate for BDS against Israel, “in the classroom and on campus,” to teach a course focused on Israel?
I reached out to Dean Deanna Dannels, copying her executive assistant, inquiring, “Do you have any concerns about institutional neutrality and this course?” I received an automatic “out of office” reply. Additionally, I received an “out of office” message from Traci Brynne Voyles, who is Head of the History Department.
In late December, I asked Alff, “Do you use your classroom at a North Carolina public university to advocate for BDS?” She responded, “I absolutely do not advocate for BSD [sic] in my classroom nor at the university level.”
I asked why she signed the BDS pledge. Alff responded, “I anticipate my students’ thinking to change throughout the semester and their lives. I too am open and change my mind over time.”
I then asked if she was planning to request her name be removed as a signatory from the BDS pledge. Alff did not respond, and her name continues to be included as a signatory.
NC State philosophy student PJ Shaw told me, “The most harmful way for antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment to be spread is in the classroom. Because, if it is coming through a professor, it is perceived to be the most reputable path.”
Shaw suggested how the university should respond: “It shouldn’t be a ‘wait and see how she does’ situation. It should be a red flag immediately and the school should say, ‘OK, even if you think you can do a neutral job with this, we’re going to find someone else who hasn’t publicly signed a [BDS] pledge.’”
On Dec. 2, the university denied my public records request for Alff’s syllabus, stating, “NC State University considers syllabi to be the intellectual property of our faculty members and protected from disclosure under federal copyright law.”
On Dec. 19, the UNC System issued a new syllabi policy that will take effect in the 2026-27 academic year, following the completion of Alff’s course.
It mandates that instructors include a “list of all course materials (physical and/or electronic) that students are required to purchase” on their publicly available syllabus.
However, many instructors depend on free course materials that can be accessed at no cost through the university. This new policy will permit instructors to have one version of their syllabus for students and a second, redacted version, for the public. This is ridiculous and will continue to allow instructors to hide the content of their courses, biases, and radicalism from the public.
Let’s examine a syllabus from 2021 to further understand how little UNC’s new syllabi policy will help.
In 2021, I reported that UNC-Chapel Hill’s recurring course, “The Conflict over Israel/Palestine,” was being taught by Kylie Broderick, even though she publicly promoted the view that Israel should not exist. At the end of teaching the course, she publicly said, “The notion of objectivity is a tool of colonizers and one that we must completely reject.” Broderick also signed the BDS pledge and later became known for tweeting “F—k Israel.”
I was leaked a copy of Broderick’s syllabus which I reported on extensively at the time.
I do not see a single assigned reading or podcast on Broderick’s 2021 syllabus that indicates it is a required purchase. Under the new UNC syllabi policy, a significant number, if not all, of the materials assigned by Broderick could have been redacted from the publicly accessible version of her syllabus because they did not require a purchase.
I contacted UNC System President Peter Hans about the new syllabi policy he issued. He did not respond. The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal wrote to Hans, suggesting the new syllabi policy be changed to include “all required readings and materials, regardless of cost.”
The UNC System has lost the public trust by disregarding institutional neutrality and choosing radical anti-Israel instructors to teach courses about Israel.
It is essential now for the North Carolina General Assembly to intervene and pass a simple bill requiring that all course syllabi be made publicly available without omissions or redactions. The public has the right to be fully informed about what our public universities are teaching.
Peter Reitzes writes about antisemitism in North Carolina and beyond.
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Marx Brothers fans rejoice: There’s a recording of Harpo speaking
Harpo Marx’s wife, Susan Fleming, once remarked that, when you got him talking, you couldn’t shut him up.
The proof was there for those who chanced to see him in the 1930s and ‘40s, screening clips of the films he made with his brothers. If a crowd was good, he’d deliver what was known as “Red’s Speech,” a reference to the red wig he wore on stage.
The speech grew more verbose with each recitation, with input by Harpo’s friend, the critic Alexander Woollcott, a fount of $5 dollar words. It got so long, in fact, that Harpo would take it out in the form of a long script that spilled off the stage down the aisle.
“There’s always been this fallacy that Harpo never spoke on stage,” said Marx historian Robert S. Bader, author of Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage and Zeppo: The Reluctant Marx Brother. When he did, he would often make a joke about the mute persona he adopted in 1914, opening his remarks with “as I was about to say in 1915.”
In 1964, Harpo was hitting the speaking circuit. He spoke at events for the United Jewish Appeal, having grown more connected to his Jewishness after a 1963 trip to Israel. On these occasions, Bader said, Harpo “might have looked like a local councilman, just wearing a business suit,” and would sneak in a line from his bar mitzvah speech: “For 13 long years, I have toiled and labored for your happiness.”
Advised to retire from performing after a number of heart attacks, Harpo reasoned that, so long as it was for charity and he didn’t get paid, it couldn’t count as work.
That rationale led to Harpo’s appearance at benefits for a number of symphony orchestras. On March 20, 1964, he gave his final performance at a concert for the Riverside Symphony Orchestra in California, playing a suite of songs about the moon, an original composition and conducting a particularly manic take on Haydn’s “Toy Symphony.”
This time, Harpo not only spoke, giving a lively recitation of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, he did something unprecedented by allowing himself to be recorded with the understanding the public might someday hear it.
On June 5, 2026 a record of the evening will be released as Harpo Speaks! The Riverside Symphony Concert. It was announced on April 1, but it was no April Fools joke. It’s an outstanding artifact, and it was discovered quite by accident.
John Tefteller, the foremost collector of rare, Marx-related records, was looking for a copy of a 1963 concert with Harpo and comedian-musician Allan Sherman, recorded by Sherman’s son Robert. Looking in the tape box for Pasadena, Sherman instead found the Riverside tape. Oddly enough, Robert Sherman had no memory of recording — or even attending — the Riverside concert.
Bill Marx, Harpo’s son and the arranger of much of his music, says the man on the recording, telling the tale of “Peeduh,” the “boid” and the “huntahs,” is the one he grew up with.
“It was very, very low key,” said Bill Marx, now a celebrated pianist and Juilliard-trained composer, recalling his father’s voice. “I think I would have to say that he was about five or six notes lower than Groucho’s. It was easy to hear him speak. I suppose you could call him soft-spoken. He rarely if ever raised his voice in our house with my two brothers and sisters.”
Instead, he would do something like wake his daughter in the middle of the night to play jacks.
Peter and the Wolf, written for young audiences, was a natural fit for Harpo, and it was his idea to do it. The version of the libretto, co-written by Harpo and Groucho, also features a topical joke for that election year of 1964: “Imagine the triumphant procession. Peeduh at the head, after him the huntahs leading the wolf, then Goldwatuh, Rockefelluh and Nixon.”
That Harpo was a patron of the symphony is no great surprise. He practiced the harp three hours a day and Bill Marx remembers his father’s love of French impressionist composers like Debussy and Ravel and Fauré. When Bill played records in his bedroom, without fail his father would knock on the door, ask what he was listening to, and commit to learning it — which he did.
“He just had a great learning thirst, and I had the privilege of watching this man appear in everybody’s life by doing things that he was compelled to do,” Bill Marx said.
As the narrator of Peter and the Wolf, Harpo is wonderfully expressive, evoking the storytelling of an old-time New York-born Zayde (dressed in his traditional costume at the concert, he donned a new accessory: reading glasses). He sounds quite a lot like Chico, his closest brother in age.
Restoring the tape took major work from audio restorer Joel Tefteller (John’s son) and audio engineer Nick Bergh. At one point, in his closing speech, Harpo walked away from the mic, making the original tape almost inaudible.
“He wasn’t used to looking for a microphone,” said Bader. “He didn’t have a lot of time in front of microphones. I don’t think anybody ever had to say ‘Harpo get closer to the microphone’ ever.”
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The post UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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