By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

Two non-Jewish teens and their families had to move out of the School District of Philadelphia, which enrolls nearly 200,000 students in 331 schools, after they and two Jewish teens faced backlash for entering a “quiet room,” which the Academy at Palumbo turned out to reserve exclusively for Muslim students to pray, according to a federal lawsuit. The public school violated First Amendment rights in two ways, according to @LoriLMarcus, legal director of @deborah_project. The alleged “Muslim-only prayer room” discriminates against non-Muslim students, and the school used Jewish prayers that the boys recited in the room as “a basis for disciplinary action and justification for claiming harassment of Muslim girls,” she told JNS.

“It’s a stunning, insane story,” Marcus said.

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

Adelphi University, a private school in Garden City, N.Y., put the campus Students for Justice in Palestine chapter on “disciplinary probation for a year” after determining that it would be “reasonable to infer” that a Jew who viewed the group’s social media posts “may feel targeted or unsafe.” The @brandeiscenter posted a letter that Adelphi’s community concerns and resolution office sent to the center’s client, Israeli-American math and computer science professor Tuval Foguel, who filed a complaint against the SJP chapter. The university told Foguel that it determined that the student group “created a hostile environment towards the Jewish community.”

The university flagged social media posts of the chapter, including one that stated, “One year since Oct. 7. What have we learned about this historic day since it happened?” Another stated, “long live the intifada,” and another said that “Israel is a terror state, and all its supporters are Zionists terrorists.”

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

The board of the San Francisco Unified School District, which educates more than 50,000 students at 122 public schools, decided to purchase a new ethnic-studies curriculum without fulfilling its legal obligation to provide the public with prior notice, according to Marc Levine, a regional director of the @ADL. “We are concerned that the San Francisco Board of Education approved textbook purchases before adopting or publicly reviewing the related curriculum,” Levine, a former California state representative, told JNS. “This circumvents the transparent process required by law.”

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter after the group was “found in violation of multiple rules” after an April protest. The SJP chapter announced its suspension on social media on Sunday. In its statement, the group wrote that the decision was made in response to the chapter’s protest of a speaking appearance by Linda Thomas-Greenfield, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in April.

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

Stanford University suspended the student-run Kairos co-op for the upcoming academic year, after receiving reports that Jewish students were targeted, a spokeswoman for the private California school told JNS. Students taking part “in an extracurricular activity were asked to leave the house and told that, among other things, the presence of ‘Zionists’ in the group was making residents of the house uncomfortable,” Dee Mostofi, assistant vice president of external communications at Stanford, told JNS.

Rabbi Jessica Kirschner, executive director of Hillel at Stanford, told JNS that “students had permission from the residents to be in the building to work on a group project,” and “some residents realized some of the visiting students were Jewish and therefore assumed to be Zionists.”

The residents “decided their presence made residents ‘unsafe’ and told the group to leave, which they eventually did,” Kirschner told JNS.

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent more than $25 million to extremist groups with ties to Islamist terror groups between 2013 and 2023, according to a new report from the @meforum. @greggroman, executive director of the think tank, told JNS that the forum pored over publicly accessible government spending data.

“We matched these grants with extremist groups found in our research archives to identify the misuse of taxpayer dollars on a grand scale,” he said.

“Americans should know that their hard-earned money was allocated to build up security around a luxurious mosque compound in Maryland owned by Turkey’s Islamist government and that mosques in Michigan and Texas that serve as outposts for Iran’s regime were also recipients of DHS funds,” he told JNS.

My latest in @JNS_org: 🧵

After Yoav Segev was attacked on Harvard University’s campus in October 2023, shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks, the university further victimized him, according to a new lawsuit which the Jewish student filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. “Harvard did everything it could to defend, protect and reward the assailants; to impede the criminal investigation; and to prevent Mr. Segev from obtaining administrative relief from the university,” per the complaint, which National Review obtained.

“After Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitism exploded on Harvard’s campus,” Mark Pinkert, partner at Holtzman Vogel, who is representing Segev, told JNS. “Amidst the chaos and protests, Yoav Segev was violently assaulted by student-employees, simply because he is Jewish.”

Segev is “pursuing justice against Harvard not only for failing to protect him and other Jewish students but for defending and rewarding antisemitism,” the attorney told JNS. “This type of treatment would be unimaginable for other minorities at Harvard, except Jews.”

Thank you to the @AMarkFoundation for linking to some of my @JewishJournal articles on Wikipedia and for the award! The first piece they link to:

https://x.com/bandlersbanter/status/1795913613930037252

My latest in @JNS_org: 🧵

A Jewish Israeli researcher faced “discrimination and insidious, malicious conduct intended to permanently tarnish his reputation and career” at Stanford University, including “tampering with his lab results and manufacturing a bogus complaint against him, merely for being Israeli,” according to a federal lawsuit filed on Thursday. The suit, brought by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the firm Cohen Williams, accuses the private school in Stanford, Calif., of being “complicit in permitting an environment saturated with intimidation and harassment of Jewish and Israeli students to flourish on campus.”

Shay Laps, a postdoctoral researcher, arrived at Stanford roughly six months after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, having been recommended by a Nobel laureate, according to the lawsuit. He aimed to “develop his research of synthetic and ‘smart’ insulin, which would revolutionize treatment for millions of people suffering from diabetes,” the Brandeis Center stated.

He faced extensive discrimination in the lab of Danny Chou, an associate pediatrics professor at Stanford, per the lawsuit, including tampering with his research, a fabricated sexual harassment complaint against him and being locked out of a lab.

My latest on @Wikipedia in @JNS_org: 🧵

The widely used online encyclopedia Wikipedia deems the Anti-Defamation League and NGO Monitor to be “generally unreliable” sources to cite when discussing Israel and the Palestinians, but it maintains that Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor “can be cited as an opinion source” on Israel and the Palestinians. EuroMed has accused Israeli soldiers of harvesting Palestinian organs and their founder and chairman celebrated the Oct. 7 attacks. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor is “an advocacy organization on a controversial topic, and should be used with attribution for factual claims,” Wikipedia states on its list of “reliable” and “perennial” sources. The group appears “to gather and responsibly report claims and information gathered directly from primary sources, and is widely used with attribution by reliable news sources,” Wikipedia states.

My first piece on @Wikipedia in @JNS_org: 🧵

‘Hypocrisy, double-standards’ in effort to axe Wikipedia page on Iranian policy to destroy Israel
“The whole thing is totally arbitrary,” an observer who documents anti-Israel hate bias on the platform told JNS. Iranian regime leaders have long said “death to Israel” publicly, and Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli foreign minister, told the United Nations Security Council this week that the Islamic Republic’s avowed goal is to “annihilate the State of Israel.” Iranian terror proxies, including Hamas, call for Israel’s destruction in their charters.

But that isn’t enough for some editors at Wikipedia, the sixth most visited site globally in May, who are attempting to delete an article titled “Destruction of Israel in Iranian policy.”

The article, which was created on June 4 and has garnered about 42,000 views in the past 30 days, states that Iran’s “foreign policy doctrine includes calling for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state” and that “the rejection of Israel’s legitimacy has remained consistent across both hardline and moderate Iranian leaderships.”

Excited to announce that I've been published in @RCInvestigates about @Wikipedia!

Taking Sides: Wikipedia Advances Anti-Israel Narratives 🧵 Wikipedia, the world’s go-to site for information that professes to take a neutral point of view, is coming under fire for alleged anti-Israel bias in the sources it favors and content it delivers to millions of readers.

The criticism is coming from several quarters, including a bipartisan group of 23 members of Congress who, in an April letter, expressed “deep concern regarding antisemitism” found in the online encyclopedia. The entries routinely highlight the work of anti-Zionist scholars and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), according to a review by RealClearInvestigations, while dismissing the views of Israel’s defenders. Amnesty International, which casts Israel as genocidal, is considered a reliable source for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the Anti-Defamation League, which rejects that view, is not.

Clip of me from @boazhepner’s recent Chosen Links episode on Wikipedia’s bias, where I was part of an 11-member panel discussing the matter. Here’s the link to the full episode:

This week's Campus Watch in @JewishJournal: 🧵

Jewish UCLA Student Assaulted on Campus
A Jewish student at UCLA was assaulted on campus April 30 during an unauthorized event promoted by the suspended Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter.

The university said in a May 1 statement that it told SJP “that moving forward with the unauthorized event would violate campus policy and the terms of the suspension” and that “when individuals set up a projection screen and audio equipment and began to project a film going against campus directives, within approximately six minutes, the UCLA Police Department (UCPD) seized the unauthorized sound and video equipment.” The university estimated that around 150 people gathered at the event, during which “a student and a police officer were physically assaulted … The student also had his personal belongings stolen from him.” The student, Eli Tsives, told Fox News host Trace Gallagher that he came to the event with his Israeli flag to show Jewish students to not be afraid of anti-Israel protesters. “One protester grabbed my flag and ran away. I went after them to retrieve my flag, and then around six, seven, eight of them circled around me and started throwing punches,” Tsives said. “One person tried to punch me in a headlock.”

The university’s statement added that university police “arrested three individuals and issued stay-away orders. We are sorry for what this student experienced, and we have already been in touch with him to offer support. This is unacceptable and UCLA will not tolerate it.” Georgetown Students Vote for Anti-Israel Divestment Measure
Georgetown University’s student body voted in favor of an anti-Israel divestment measure, with around 68% in favor and 32% against.

The Georgetown Student Association election commission announced the results on April 29; the referendum only needed a simple majority to pass and 25% of the student body to vote, according to The Georgetown Voice student newspaper. Twenty-nine percent of the student body voted on the referendum.

Interim President Robert Groves sent out an email shortly after the results were announced stating that the university would not be implementing the referendum “based on our institutional values and history and existing university resources and processes that address our investments.” He added that there are “a wide range of opinions on the conflict in the Middle East within our community. We have numerous events to present different perspectives on the conflict. Guided by the University’s Policy on Speech and Expression, we will continue to protect the right of members of our community to freely express their views.”

This week's Campus Watch in @JewishJournal: 🧵

Harvard Sues Trump Administration Over Freezing Federal Funding
Harvard University President Alan Garber announced on April 21 that the university is suing the Trump administration over freezing billions of dollars to the university.

The administration initially froze more than $2 billion from the university; the government had at first demanded that the university ban masks and rescinds its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion program and subsequently issued more demands that, among other things, the university revoke recognition of anti-Israel student groups and auditing its academic programs to ensure that they’re adhering to viewpoint diversity. The Trump administration is reportedly planning on freezing an additional billion dollars after the university publicized the administration’s letter despite the administration’s request it be confidential, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Garber contended that the government’s actions put critical research at risk, including research into cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Further, he argued that “the law requires that the federal government engage with us about the ways we are fighting and will continue to fight antisemitism. Instead, the government’s April 11 demands seek to control whom we hire and what we teach. Today, we stand for the values that have made American higher education a beacon for the world.” Georgetown Student Gov’t Postpones BDS Vote Initially Scheduled During Passover
Georgetown University’s student government postponed a vote on a nonbinding campuswide referendum that was initially scheduled during Passover calling for the university to divest from companies linked to Israel and sever all academic ties with Israeli universities.

The vote was moved from April 14-16 to April 26-28; it requires a majority vote to pass and at least 25% voter turnout by the undergraduate student body. The Georgetown University Student Association (GUSA) said in a statement posted to social media that it “made this decision after hearing concerns about the placement of the election during a religious holiday.” According to The Hoya, a student newspaper at the university, 16 of the 28 student senators voted anonymously to bring the referendum to the student body for a vote, which the paper described as being “a departure from standard GUSA procedure.” @J_Insider @HaleyCohen19 noted that other student government business continued during the Passover holiday. University Director of Jewish Life Rabbi Ilana Zietman told the outlet that this “inadvertently [singled] out Jewish student groups for favoritism or bias as some are claiming, which is not the case. Jewish students would have been happier with postponing all student government matters until after the holiday.” She did say that postponing the vote “was the right move in terms of religious inclusion and a fair process.”

By me in @JewishJournal: 🧵

Complaint: Bay Area School District Failed to Handle Antisemitic Incidents
Complaint alleges that “Jewish and Israeli students are continuously being denied equal access to their educational program.” The complaint was filed to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) on April 3 alleging that the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) failed to properly address reported antisemitic incidents on their campuses. It was filed by the @StandWithUs Saidoff Legal division and the Bay Area Jewish Coalition, represented by David Rosenberg-Wohl of the Hershenson Rosenberg-Wohl, P.C. law firm.

This week's Campus Watch in @JewishJournal: 🧵

UCLA Indefinitely Bans SJP
UCLA has issued a preliminary ban for the campus Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter and a preliminary four-year suspension for the Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine (GSJP) chapter on March 28.

Back in February, Chancellor Julio Frenk announced that the two student groups were suspended after “individuals affiliated with the student groups harassed Mr. Sures and members of his family outside his home” and that “individuals vandalized the Sures home by applying red-colored handprints to the outer walls of the home and hung banners on the property’s hedges.” The Los Angeles Times reported that the student groups can appeal the decision, which has not yet been finalized. Additionally, the Times noted that the sanctions “do not prevent them from protesting on campus. As a public institution, limited parts of UCLA’s grounds are open to anybody to demonstrate at most times of day. But the moves prevent the organizations from registering for campus event space, applying for student activities funds and otherwise representing themselves as UCLA organizations.”

The university said in a statement, “UCLA is committed to fostering an environment where all students can live and learn freely and peacefully … We will continue to uphold our policies to ensure UCLA remains a safe and respectful learning environment for all members of our Bruin community.” Katrina Armstrong Resigns as Columbia President
Katrina Armstrong resigned from her position as president of Columbia University on March 28.

The university announced that Armstrong will be leading the Irving Medical Center at the university; Claire Shipman, the co-chair of the university’s Board of Trustees, will be taking over as the interim president. Armstrong’s resignation comes after reports from The Free Press and Washington Free Beacon came out stating that Armstrong told faculty members privately that the agreement with the Trump administration’s demands to address campus antisemitism wouldn’t change much on campus; per the reports, Armstrong told faculty that there would be no ban on masking or change in admissions procedures despite both being demands from the administration. Provost Angela Olinto also reportedly told faculty that the school’s Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department would not be under an “academic receivership” for five years despite that also being a demand from the administration. The agreement was part of an effort to begin talks for the administration to restore $400 million in funding to Columbia.

“Dr. Armstrong accepted the role of interim president at a time of great uncertainty for the University and worked tirelessly to promote the interests of our community,” Board of Trustees Chair David Greenwald said in a statement. “Katrina has always given her heart and soul to Columbia. We appreciate her service and look forward to her continued contributions to the University.”

My latest in @JewishJournal: 🧵

An event featuring two former Israel Defense Force (IDF) lone soldiers was cut short due to security concerns posed by anti-Israel protesters at CSU San Marcos (CSUSM) in North San Diego County on March 25. The event was hosted by the university’s Students Supporting Israel (SSI) chapter and was part of SSI’s “Triggered, the Tour: From Combat to Campus” featuring IDF soldiers speaking at 25 campuses across the United States and Canada. The two soldiers who spoke at CSUSM had both served in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, according to a post on the SSI chapter’s Instagram page. Hillel San Diego Executive Director Karen Parry wrote in a March 27 letter to community members that “Hillel staff supported student organizers and worked with the University to confirm that safety measures were in place.  We had received information prior to the event that several external non-student organizations as well as on-campus student organizations were leading a protest to seek canceling the event.”

My latest in @JewishJournal: 🧵

Michael Kaminsky, a third-year student at DePaul University, a private Catholic school in Chicago, spoke to me on March 1 about when he and another Jewish student were assaulted in November while tabling for Israel. Kaminsky, a @StandWithUs Emerson Fellow, was an attending the 2025 StandWithUs International Conference at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport and spoke to me there. “On Nov. 6, 2024, myself and another student, who’s also an IDF [Israel Defense Force] reservist, were tabling for Israel,” he said. “We do this every single week on Wednesdays right around 1-3 pm on our campus trying to engage people in conversation about Israel, about misconceptions that people might have about the Jewish people or about Israel. And two people wearing ski masks physically attacked us. One person came from the front and was talking to us simply to distract us, while another person came from behind and started the assault. They battered us, and then eventually got up [and] ran away. We were left with pretty harsh injuries.”

Kaminsky, a tall, thin but solidly built 22-year old whose left arm was in a black sling at the time of the interview, said he suffered a wrist injury from the assault. He was recovering from an operation the previous week that required stitches. The other assaulted student, who has been publicly identified as Max Long, suffered a “pretty bad concussion and some other head injuries,” according to Kaminsky. “To this day, no one’s been arrested.”

My latest on @Wikipedia in @JewishJournal: 🧵

Wikipedia editors decided to blacklist The Heritage Foundation’s website after a report came out that the conservative think tank is working on a plan to unmask various editors that the think tank believes are promulgating antisemitic content on Wikipedia. The Forward reported in January that it had obtained documents purportedly outlining Heritage’s plan to “identify and target” the editors, which included the use of “facial recognition software and a database of hacked usernames and passwords in order to identify contributors to the online encyclopedia… The Heritage Foundation sent the pitch deck outlining the Wikipedia initiative to Jewish foundations and other prospective supporters of Project Esther, its roadmap for fighting antisemitism and anti-Zionism. ” A spokesperson for Heritage told The Forward that they couldn’t comment on the matter. Mike Howell, executive director of the think tank’s investigative arm, was in The New Yorker on March 4 that Heritage’s “investigation” of Wikipedia will be provided to “the appropriate policymakers to help inform a strategic response.”

My cover story in this week's @JewishJournal: 🧵

An obscure Discord chat room, “Tech For Palestine,” infiltrated Wikipedia, the world’s largest information database, to spread anti-Israel propaganda. To fully understand the depth to which the TFP coordination occurred, The Journal will be publishing a 244-page dossier of screenshots from the channel taken by a source who infiltrated it, as the channel was open to the public until the beginning of September 2024. On Dec. 9, Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (ArbCom), the site’s version of a Supreme Court, sanctioned three editors over their purported involvement in a Wikipedia channel on the “Tech for Palestine” (TFP) Discord server.

The relevant policy at hand is canvassing, meaning that any kind of offsite coordination of editing Wikipedia articles is prohibited, which is what was reportedly occurring in the Discord channel. Telling people what to edit falls under canvassing. The existence of the TFP channel has previously been reported by @J_Insider @GSDeutch, the @WikipediaFlood blog and a @PirateWires piece by @AshleyRindsberg that went viral.