Recently, CAMERA published two important reports detailing anti-Israel and often antisemitic bias emanating from Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies (CMES) and the university’s Choices Program, which provides curricula for secondary schools.
As one of those reports explained, nearly one in three faculty members of the CMES are supporters of the BDS Movement against Israel. According to the AMCHA Initiative organization that produced this data, “the presence and number of faculty who expressed support for an academic boycott of Israel prior to the onset of the [2021] Israel-Hamas war were strongly and reliably associated with every measure of faculty and student-perpetrated antisemitic activity…” Brown University has one of the highest numbers of faculty BDS supporters, comparable to Harvard University which has three times as many total faculty.
But the bias, extremism, and antisemitism among faculty in the CMES goes far beyond just support for the BDS Movement. Provided below is a non-exhaustive list of anti-Israel and antisemitic public rhetoric from many of the Center’s faculty members. The rhetoric shown helps demonstrate the level of bias and hostility toward the Jewish state.
Faiz Ahmed, Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History
- April 2019: Signed a statement in support of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement referendum against Israel.
- May 2021: Signed a statement that accused Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “war crimes,” and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. In addition, spread the false libel about Israel denying vaccines to Palestinians.
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Nadje Al-Ali, Director, Center for Middle East Studies
- 2015: Stated she is actively involved in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel; accused Israel of “decades” of “atrocities”; accused Israel of genocide; and compared Zionism – the Jewish movement for self-determination in the Jewish homeland – to “colonialism” and “imperialism” as “configurations of power” responsible for harms to Palestinian women.
- October 2016: Signed an open letter accusing Jewish activists of “misusing and abusing” the charge of antisemitism against Malia Bouattia, then president of the National Union of Students in the United Kingdom, who had made numerous antisemitic and extremist statements including: claiming the government’s anti-terror program was fueled by “Zionist and neo-con lobbies”; expressing concern about the “large Jewish Society” at the University of Birmingham, which she declared was “a Zionist outpost in higher education”; condemned “Zionist-led media outlets”; and compared Zionism to “white supremacy.”
- April 2019: Signed a statement in support of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement referendum against Israel.
- May 2021: Depicted Palestinian terrorism during the Israel-Hamas war of May 2021 (Operation Guardians of the Wall) as “resistance” and compared it to “global justice struggles against settler-colonialism and racism.”
- October 2022: Claimed that antisemitism is being “instrumentalized” and argued that the conversation about antisemitism wrongly “excludes Palestinians.” (“Like many, I’m very concerned about anti-Semitism, the rise of anti-Semitism on campuses in the US, internationally. But I’m also concerned about the way that the discussion around anti-Semitism has often been instrumentalized…. Often or most of the time, the conversation about anti-Semitism excludes Palestinians.”)
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Ariella Azoulay, Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media
- Undated: Accused Israel of “apartheid,” of “racial supremacy of Jewish-Zionist nationals,” committed to using “scholarship” to “center decolonization,” and promoted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel.
- July 2014: During the 2014 Israel-Hamas war, instigated by the kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teenagers by Hamas terrorists, signed on to a letter to the European Council, Commission, and Parliament endorsing the conditions that Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist organization, placed for resolving the conflict.
- April 2019: Signed a statement in support of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement referendum against Israel.
- October 2020: At a lecture given to Cornell students, Azoulay blacked out “all photographs showing Jews or Israelis” because “I can’t bear to look at them.” (See Azoulay’s posting of these images here)
- May 2021: Signed a statement that accused Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “war crimes,” and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. In addition, spread the false libel about Israel denying vaccines to Palestinians.
- February 2023: During a lecture by another professor, Azoulay applauded the speaker for claiming that efforts to combat antisemitism are a part of a colonial conspiracy. She then claimed that Mizrahi Jews (from North Africa and the Middle East) were colonized as part of a conspiracy to “bring them into the European sphere” and “convert” them into Zionism.
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Omer Bartov, Distinguished Professor of European History
- August 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of “apartheid” and “Jewish supremacism.”
Tony Bogues, Director, Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice
- May 2021: Claimed that Jews are “settler-colonizers” engaged in a “business of theft” in their own indigenous homeland and compared Jews in Israel to “settler-colonialism” in South Africa and the United States.
Beshara Doumani, Professor of Palestinian Studies
- Undated: Accused Israel of “apartheid,” of “racial supremacy of Jewish-Zionist nationals,” committed to using “scholarship” to “center decolonization,” and promoted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel.
- March 2016: Claimed all of Israel is under “colonial rule” and expressed his position that any academic theory that does not start from the position that Israel is a “settler-colonial project” is not worth discussing. (“I want to talk about an intimate dance. An intimate dance between Palestinians living under direct colonial rule, whether they’re inside ‘48’ or in the ‘67’ areas.”) (“The idea is not to have CNN style, ‘this is your story, this is my story, let’s recognize the humanity of each other and then find some sort of a solution that we both can live with.’ Because this is really a critical conversation, in two senses. One is that the departure point is not the punches and counterpunches of public discourse and nationalist narratives, but rather an issue of intellectual political consequence using academic standards of knowledge as the baseline. So what we do share in common many of us here is that Israel cannot be understood properly unless the features of it as a settler colonial project are understood. If most academics looking at that history think that this is an attractive, and maybe even dominant framework, for understanding the conflict, then we start from there and then we go on to debate what does that mean and what can we think about in terms of the future that debate?”)
- April 2019: Signed a statement in support of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement referendum against Israel.
- May 2021: Signed a statement that accused Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “war crimes,” and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. In addition, spread the false libel about Israel denying vaccines to Palestinians.
- May 2021: Praised the terrorist violence waged by Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza and the West Bank during the May 2021 Israel-Hamas war, instigated by the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas terrorists, as part of an “amazingly wide range of forms of resistance.”
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Miled Faiza, Senior Lecturer in Language Studies (Arabic)
- May 2021: Signed a statement that accused Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “war crimes,” and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. In addition, spread the false libel about Israel denying vaccines to Palestinians.
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Linda Fruzzetti, Professor of Anthropology
- May 2021: Signed a statement that accused Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “war crimes,” and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. In addition, spread the false libel about Israel denying vaccines to Palestinians.
Katharina Galor, Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies
- January 2019: Signed on to a statement claiming there is an Israeli government effort to “stifle debate” by “cynically” labeling people as antisemitic, and that the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism is “highly-politicized” and “dangerously instrumentalized” to “afford the Israeli State immunity against criticism,” notwithstanding the definition explicitly excludes legitimate criticism of Israel.
- June 2019: Signed on to a statement claiming that efforts to combat antisemitism are part of a “Growing tendency to label supporters of Palestinian human rights as anti-Semitic” and part of a “right-wing” Israeli government conspiracy.
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Yannis Hamilakis, Professor of Archaeology
- April 2019: Signed a statement in support of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement referendum against Israel.
- May 2021: Signed a statement that accused Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “war crimes,” and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. In addition, spread the false libel about Israel denying vaccines to Palestinians.
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Jae Han, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Susan Harvey, Director, Program in Early Cultures
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Alla Hassan, Lecturer in Language Studies (Arabic)
- April 2019: Signed a statement in support of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement referendum against Israel.
- May 2021: Signed a statement that accused Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “war crimes,” and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. In addition, spread the false libel about Israel denying vaccines to Palestinians.
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Adrienne J. Keene, Assistant Professor of American Studies
- April 2019: Signed a statement in support of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement referendum against Israel.
- May 2021: Signed a statement that accused Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “war crimes,” and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. In addition, spread the false libel about Israel denying vaccines to Palestinians.
- May 2021: Depicted Jews as non-indigenous “settler-colonizers” and as part of a “violent settler regime,” despite acknowledging she knows very little about the subject. She also suggested that there is a conspiracy by the Jewish state to employ police brutality in the United States. (“The escalation of policing in the US is by design, and these police forces in the United States are being trained in Israel or by trainers using weapons, techniques and tactics honed in attacks on Palestinians. The US military supplies both nations with the weapons and tactical gear needed to suppress uprisings and before Standing Rock was Ferguson. After the murder of Michael Brown at the hands of police, the US militarized police have used and are using lessons from Israel at home and will continue.”)
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Nancy Khalek, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
- April 2019: Signed a statement in support of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement referendum against Israel.
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Stephen Kinzer, Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs
- June 2008: Blamed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, committed by a Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan, on Israel.
- June 2010: Argued that Israel, a liberal democracy, should be treated like Iran, a rogue theocracy and state sponsor of terrorism. (Kinzer wrote an entire book on this subject.)
- June 2018: Trafficked in “Jewish lobby” tropes about U.S. politics. (“@BernieSanders denounces Israeli policy in #Gaza. Other possible 2020 candidates are also courting outraged Democrats, but “when it comes to #Israel, those competitors are constrained by their fears of the American Jewish establishment.”)
Brian Meeks, Chair, Africana Studies
- May 2021: Signed a statement that accused Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “war crimes,” and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. In addition, spread the false libel about Israel denying vaccines to Palestinians.
- May 2021: Engaged in Holocaust inversion, comparing the Gaza Strip to the Warsaw Ghetto. (“When I was 13 years old, I came across Mila 18 by Leon Uris. It was a heart-rending tale of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. It introduced me to the Holocaust and taught me my first, albeit literary, lesson on what it means to resist. To fight back against overwhelming odds, even when the outcome is uncertain, unknown beforehand. It gave me an early lesson in this characteristic of humanity. Indeed, at the heart of what it means to be human, and that is to resist injustice. Today I see Mila 18 in Gaza.”)
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Elias Muhanna, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
- April 2019: Signed a statement in support of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement referendum against Israel.
- May 2021: Signed a statement that accused Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “war crimes,” and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. In addition, spread the false libel about Israel denying vaccines to Palestinians.
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Adi Ophir, Visiting Professor of Humanities and Middle East Studies
- Undated: Accused Israel of “apartheid,” of “racial supremacy of Jewish-Zionist nationals,” committed to using “scholarship” to “center decolonization,” and promoted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel.
- Undated: Described Israel as “the garbage heap of Europe, a “site of experiments…in ethnic cleansing,” a “regime that produces and distributes evil systematically,” all caused by Israel’s identity as a Jewish state.
- July 2014: During the 2014 Israel-Hamas war, instigated by the kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teenagers by Hamas terrorists, signed on to a letter to the European Council, Commission, and Parliament endorsing the conditions that Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist organization, placed for resolving the conflict.
- July 2014: Signed on to a statement accusing Israel of “placing yet more barriers of blood in the way of a negotiated agreement” by “slaughtering…large numbers of wholly innocent people” during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, launched after Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers and fired rockets on Israeli civilian centers.
- April 2019: Signed a statement in support of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement referendum against Israel.
- May 2021: Engaged in antisemitic blood libel, Holocaust inversion, and accused Israel of being a “Jewish supremacist” state; glorifed the terrorist organization Hamas; “prayed” for the end of “Jewish supremacy” in Israel; and declared that the American Jewish community is “complicit” in the “colonization” of “Palestine.”. (“There are Jews, including Israeli Jews – how many only God knows – who pray with all their heart for the end of Jewish supremacy in Palestine. I’m speaking as one of them. The last few weeks in Palestine were especially devastating for these Jews. Despair, depression, anxiety, not because of the Hamas rockets – regardless of how frightening they are. Anxiety, because they have found themselves living in the midst of a Jewish mob thirsty for Palestinian blood. A Kristallnacht mob…”) (“Hamas is fighting for the residents of Jerusalem and those who pray in al-Aqsa.”) (“Only God knows how many Jews pray for the end of Jewish supremacy. But in in Palestine, there are certainly too few of them. For them, there is no possible win in sight. The colonization of Palestine, the process of destruction and extraction, go on relentlessly all over the land and the irreversible changes and irredeemable losses are fast and widespread. All this happens with the full support of the former, recent, and current American administration, and with the complicity of much of the American Jewish community. It is the latter that is most painful for a Jew who prays for the end of Jewish supremacy. It is for this reason that the Jewish part of my heart is broken, looking for a new book of lamentation to cry over not the fall of Jerusalem, but its rise to relentless, draconian powers and to wail the total perversion of its soul. We Jews who pray for the end of Jewish supremacy need these lamentations, not only to express our grief, but also to complete the process of parting from Zionism.”)
- May 2021: Signed a statement that accused Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “war crimes,” and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. In addition, spread the false libel about Israel denying vaccines to Palestinians.
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Loubna Qutami, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Palestinian Studies
- Undated: Accused Israel of “apartheid,” of “racial supremacy of Jewish-Zionist nationals,” committed to using “scholarship” to “center decolonization,” and promoted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel.
- Undated: Founder of the extremist group Palestinian Youth Movement, which has become notorious for celebrating terrorists and their murderous attacks.
- June 2021: Participated in a conference organized by a convicted leader of the U.S.-designated terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Amy Remensnyder, Professor of Teaching Excellence
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.
Nina Tannenwald, Senior Lecturer in Political Science
- August 2016: Falsely called an anti-BDS law “a loyalty oath” to Israel, playing into antisemitic, conspiratorial tropes, even though the law did not even name Israel nor does it require anything akin to a “loyalty oath.” The law merely provided that the government will not contract with any business that is engaging in a discriminatory boycott of a country.
- April 2019: Signed a statement in support of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement referendum against Israel.
- March 2021: Advocated against the widely accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism by falsely claiming it is about “silencing criticism of Israel,” when, in fact, the definition explicitly excludes legitimate criticism of Israel.
- May 2021: Signed a statement that accused Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “war crimes,” and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. In addition, spread the false libel about Israel denying vaccines to Palestinians.
Alex Winder, Visiting Assistant Professor in Middle East Studies
- Undated: Accused Israel of “apartheid,” of “racial supremacy of Jewish-Zionist nationals,” committed to using “scholarship” to “center decolonization,” and promoted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel.
- May 2021: Signed a statement that accused Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “war crimes,” and expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel. In addition, spread the false libel about Israel denying vaccines to Palestinians.
- December 2023: Signed a statement accusing Israel of a “potentially genocidal campaign,” referring to the war started by a massive terror attack committed by Palestinian terrorist organizations that saw the murder, rape, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping of over 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians.