Northwestern University students and faculty have taken issue with president Michael Schill’s decision to create a committee to address antisemitism on campus.
In a Monday message to the broader Northwestern community titled, “Announcing New Committee on Preventing Antisemitism and Hate” Schill affirmed that the university “will not stand for antisemitism or discriminatory acts directed at any individual based upon their race, religion, national origin or other protected categories.”
“They are against University policy and, in many instances, against the law,” he continued. “We will investigate any and all allegations of behavior targeting members of our community in violation of our policies. If an individual violates these policies, we will begin disciplinary proceedings against the perpetrator and, if the matter warrants, refer it to law enforcement.”
Schill also called “on all members of our community to use our collective voices to emphatically reject statements or banners that significant parts of our community interpret as promoting murder and genocide. This includes flying flags associated with Hamas and banners with the slogan ‘From the River to the Sea.'”
Soon after, 65 student organizations signed a letter to the editor printed in the Daily Northwestern campus newspaper with the headline “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” They described concern over rising antisemitism as “mass hysteria and collective psychosis” and accused Schill of engaging in “the deliberate silencing and censorship of pro-Palestinian activism,” which they claimed “is nothing but repressive and authoritarian.”
“The destiny of all marginalized people — both in occupied Palestine and around the world — is intertwined,” they wrote. “We believe in the liberation of all peoples from Chicago to Sudan to the Congo to Western Sahara to Palestine. We stand in solidarity with Students for Justice in Palestine as we understand that all liberation movements are intrinsically linked.”
Organizations that signed the statement include the Northwestern University Community for Human Rights, Northwestern College Feminists, Students Organizing for Labor Rights, Womxn in Law, and Northwestern University Marching Band Clarinets Leadership.
A group of 163 Northwestern faculty and staff members issued their own letter, saying they “are seriously dismayed and concerned by the email [Schill] sent on Nov. 13, ‘Announcing new committee on antisemitism and hate.'”
“Your letter . . . inflicts the exact harm it claims to prevent through its glaring imbalance. It deprioritizes and diminishes many students’ experiences, ideas and concerns regarding what leading scholars and human rights organizations are describing as genocidal violence in Gaza,” the faculty and staff wrote. “The letter makes unjustified assumptions about which students, staff and faculty are the targets of hate. And, it implies that criticism of the government of Israel is antisemitic.”
Straying from criticism of the government of Israel, the faculty and staff members turned to the slogan Schill asked community members not to use, given its connotations of ethnic cleansing.
“The phrase ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free,’ as our colleagues at Harvard write, ‘has a long and complicated history. Its interpretation deserves, and is receiving, sustained and ongoing inquiry and debate.'”
One faculty member who signed the letter, Wendy Pearlman, is a professor of Middle East Studies and interim director of Northwestern’s Middle East and North Africa Studies Program. Her first tweet after Hamas’s attack on Israel was a call for a “#FreePalestine.” She has not condemned the atrocities of October 7, but has shared the falsehood that Israel bombed the al-Ahli Hospital.
Another is Steven Thrasher, assistant professor and chair of social justice in reporting at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. His first tweet thread after October 7 included justification of Hamas’s terrorism: “White supremacy and settler colonialism can NOT kill, main and steal for decades (or even centuries) via genocidal violence and then expect patience and peace — ESPECIALLY when peaceful protest is met with economic, spiritual and literal death.”
Thrasher has a history of unsavory comments about Israel, comparing the Jewish state to Nazi Germany and transatlantic slave traders and accusing Israel of commiting genocide. He has also shared his confusion over the “obsession with Iran and ISIS (who hurt non one [sic]) but scant mention of white supremacy & police killing endless Americans?”
Thrasher spoke at New York University’s 2019 Graduate School of Art and Sciences convocation ceremony, where he promoted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and called Israel “an apartheid state.” He had omitted the language about Israel from the draft he submitted for review, according to dean Philip Brian Harper.
Seventeen faculty members signed the letter anonymously.