Controversy Over Academic Freedom and Israel

Young Israelis are sent to American colleges.

Their job is to, quote, confront attitudes toward Israel.

The Jewish Agency for Israel sends them. Those are its own words.

On campus, these Israel fellows work with Hillel,

a Jewish

campus organization.

Both groups say the fellows have served in the Israeli army.

Their work, in the agency's words, includes promoting Israel

advocacy.

At one college, Muhlenberg in Pennsylvania,

a professor taught a

course on Palestine.

In January 2024, she reposted a Palestinian-American

poet's statement against Zionism.

It was an Instagram story, gone after a day.

Investigators the college hired later reported what followed.

A college dean saw the post. She sent it to the college's office for

discrimination complaints and told the director of the campus

Hillel.

The director said he shared it with one Hillel staff member, who was also

a Jewish Agency fellow, and encouraged him to have students file a

report.

The investigators wrote that part of that staff member's role was to, quote,

keep tabs on what's happening on social media, and that he regularly

checked her social media to see if there was an intimidating

or anti-Israel

post.

They did not say which of his two jobs

that role belonged to.

A week after her post, the college suspended her

and barred her from

campus. In May, it dismissed her. She appealed.

In January 2025, a faculty committee found the college had

not proved cause.

She resigned in 2025 under a settlement with the college.

A national association of professors found her academic freedom

violated, said monitoring of her posts by

administrators and Hillel

staff made the college's action easier, and censured the college

in June 2025.

A teacher there told the association they cut a week on Israel and

Palestine from a syllabus, worried it would get them fired.

Faculty told of a student who wrote a thesis on Palestine and feared

backlash, even doxing.

To keep the student safe, they held the presentation in private.

A faculty member there asked, quote, As a riposte, it was presenting a

Palestinian perspective. Is the requirement that

that perspective has to

be treated as illegitimate and cannot be voiced?