Haverford ‘doubled down’ on Jew-hatred since May lawsuit, per complaint before US District Court “It’s in vogue to believe that the Jews are evil and the Jewish state is evil,” the lawyer Lori Lowenthal Marcus told JNS. “They’re feeling like they’re on the side of justice.”
On May 13, the Deborah Project, a public-interest law firm, filed a lawsuit under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act accusing Haverford College in Pennsylvania of creating a hostile environment for Jews. Five days later, at the highly-ranked private liberal arts school’s graduation ceremony, Haverford gave awards to multiple people accused in the complaint of Jew-hatred.
The Deborah Project filed an amended, 278-page complaint on Sept. 9 before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, in which the firm accuses Haverford of “doubling down on every policy at issue in this case,” as well as making a “mockery” of and leveling a “calculated insult” at the Jews who told the administration repeatedly that they are unsafe at the school.
Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of the Deborah Project, told JNS that the college not only decided to go forward with the awards five days after the complaint was filed, but it knew for months that Jews were feeling unsafe and neglected on campus. Students had complained since October, for example, about social posts by a professor Tarik Aougab.
“There were many, many, many complaints about his callousness and repeated all kinds of things that he did throughout the year that were insulting to Jews, so it’s not like it happened when we filed our complaint,” Lowenthal Marcus told JNS. “The people who are being insulted here are the Jews who complained all year bitterly.”
“Absolutely, they knew of everything. Repeatedly. Well-documented. Absolutely no surprises,” she said of the Haverford administration. “That’s why it’s deliberate indifference.”
The amended complaint that the firm filed relates to alleged Jew-hatred on campus that occurred since the initial complaint, and things about which the firm didn’t know when it filed the first complaint, according to Lowenthal Marcus.
“They’re completely emboldened,” she said, of the school administration. “That’s the issue. There’s no concern what it’s doing to the Jewish population at the school.”
“What’s different at Haverford—there’s more of an informed support for allowing what we’re complaining about at the school. It’s very much about free speech, except at the same time, microaggressions are policed carefully. It’s really truly a double standard,” she said. “The Jews are the compliant model students, customers, fill-in-the-blank. They complain quietly and write letters to the editor, while the other side screams and yells and breaks things. The louder you are, the more compliant the administration or institution is.”
The Haverford administration also has “the sense of the smug superiority of being social-justice warriors, and right now it’s in vogue to believe that the Jews are evil and the Jewish state is evil,” Lowenthal Marcus added. “They’re feeling like they’re on the side of justice.”
Chris Mills, associate vice president for college communications at Haverford, told JNS that the school doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
JNS sought further comment from Mills about whether the college was aware of the complaint and to what degree Jewish faculty, staff and students are safe on campus.
‘Carefully choreographed ballet’
Haverford made it “crystal clear” to pro-Israel students and families at its graduation that their safety and comfort didn’t matter when the school gave awards to the student Harrison Lennertz (“greatest contribution to on-campus performing arts”) and Aougab (upholding “the qualities intrinsic to a Haverford education”), who were named in the initial complaint, per the Sept. 9 complaint.
The awards were “intended as a direct insult to the plaintiffs in this case and the Jewish community at Haverford” and made “a mockery of the Jews’ concern,” it states. The complaint notes that students decided whom to award, but states that Haverford’s president or other administrators could have overruled the decision “if any believed its grant would be improper for any reason.”
The amended complaint also alleges that Haverford’s chief equity officer Nikki Young told Philadelphia Jewish communal representatives on April 16 at the college that “at Haverford in the past, black and gay students had to hide their commitments to their people, so Jews must now disavow ‘genocide.’”
“Young means that Jews must disavow Israel’s defense against Hamas’s publicly stated intention to murder all Jewish Israelis who refuse to live ‘under the wing of Islam,’” per the amended complaint.
The complaint also states that Haverford hasn’t disciplined associate religion professor, Guantian Ha, who said of people in “my little world” who are silent about “genocide” that, “I know their names and I know their faces. Never forgive. No reconciliation.”
“Although he is an associate professor of religion at Haverford College and presumes to speak on the subject including about the content of Judaism, Ha is completely ignorant about Jewish texts, Jewish history, Jewish culture, Jewish belief and Jewish thought,” per the complaint. On Aug. 22, Ha wrote—in a still-live post—that “Zionism is fundamentally a modern racist ideology that has next to nothing to do with Judaism as an ancient religion.”
“Haverford has seen no reason to say anything about any of these posts, which intentionally insult and demean each of the plaintiffs and all members of Jews at Haverford,” per the complaint, “even though Haverford has clothed Ha with the authority to speak as an expert about religion, including the religion of the plaintiffs and members of Jews at Haverford.”
The complaint also notes the “carefully choreographed ballet” at graduation, during which Haverford president Wendy Raymond “politely paused” during the ceremony each time a student unfurled an anti-Israel banner. Some 30% of graduates handed Palestinian flags to Raymond, who gave them to John McKnight, vice president and dean of the college, before giving the students their diplomas, the complaint states.
“If a student had ascended the podium with a Confederate flag, or with the symbol of any political movement with which she disagreed, Raymond would not have cheerfully and politely accepted it,” per the complaint. “But the fact that, in the eyes of the committed Jews who were attending the ceremony, the Palestinian flag represented a threat to them was of absolutely no moment or interest to Raymond.”
In its motion to dismiss the original complaint, Haverford suggested that the “plaintiffs themselves don’t get to define their Jewish identity,” per the Sept. 9 complaint.
“Haverford decides what it means to be Jewish, and according to Haverford, Zionism and Israel aren’t part of it,” it adds. “Israel and Zionism are, according to Haverford, merely ‘political’ issues and so those committed to it are not entitled to protection or even respect from the college.”
“Haverford therefore sees itself as entitled to be officially hostile to any Jew to whom Israel and Zionism are central to their identity,” it adds. “Jews—but only Jews—don’t have the right to define their identity for themselves.”
‘I was treated as a Jew from Israel’
“I am absolutely not sure that we are safe. I am absolutely sure that the administration doesn’t have our best interests in mind,” Barak Mendelsohn, a political science professor at Haverford who is Israeli, told JNS.
An expert in Israeli security, Mendelsohn—who is mentioned nine times in the amended complaint—is in his 18th year teaching at Haverford. The college investigated him last year for telling a student that she “should be more respectful of people who disagree with her and that she should learn more about Israel and Zionism before attacking people who are committed to either,” per the amended complaint.
“I did not have concerns about antisemitism before. I experienced boycotts because I came from Israel and served in the IDF,” he said. “I sort of accepted that this is the price of doing business here.”
“What has happened since, in the last year, is completely different in scale,” he said. “The antisemitism that we are seeing is not just a product of misguided or antisemitic students. It’s also the result of a framework that sees the DEI project from an ideological perspective.” (The acronym refers to diversity, equity and inclusion.)
“It divides us to oppressed and oppressors, and the Jews for them under the oppressors. Jews are white. Jews are oppressors. Therefore Jews cannot be treated as a minority that requires respect,” he told JNS. “Everything that can be said against them is suddenly protected by freedom of speech.”
Mendelsohn told JNS that he has been the most vocal, but that he has discussed Jew-hatred on campus with other concerned faculty members. Some 18 to 20 Jewish staff and professors at Haverford and nearby Bryn Mawr College established a group called Club Chai to address concerns, he said. He has also been blind copied on “so many” emails to the school administration from students, parents and alumni, he told JNS.
“The school knew everything,” he said. “It is just refusing to accept that they did anything wrong, and then doubling down. They have excuses all the time.”
The Haverford administration did not contact Mendelsohn after Oct. 7 to draw upon his expertise as not only a scholar on Israeli security but also on terrorism. “My institution did not treat me as a resource,” he said, “but just treated me as the Jew from Israel, when I thought that I am the scholar and educator. I was treated as a Jew from Israel.”
“I am a full professor, which allows me to speak up,” he told JNS, but noted he still worries about repercussions to what he says publicly. He added that he is seen as far-left in Israel, and that he is “supposed” to be the kind of faculty member that students would seek out about their concerns, not to be the target of antisemitism.
‘Sucking the air’
Mendelsohn told JNS that it’s important for the public to understand the antisemitism that Jews face at smaller schools, which don’t make the headlines regularly, as major educational institutions have when they face Jew-hatred.
“UPenn is sucking the air from all the other places in Pennsylvania,” he said of the University of Pennsylvania, whose embattled president Liz Magill resigned in December after testifying before a House committee that it would depend on the context whether calling for genocide against all Jews would violate the school’s policies.
“It makes sense that the media pays attention mostly to the Ivy League or big schools,” he said. “But they are missing the very unique dynamics of antisemitism in small liberal arts colleges. Sometimes, it might be less direct but not less painful or devastating and impactful, because the nature of social pressure in small schools is much more effective and much more devastating to the Jewish students than what they face in the big schools.”
In bigger schools, it’s easier to avoid or otherwise reduce exposure to antisemitism, he said. “In small liberal arts colleges, you just can’t do that.”
In early August, Mendelsohn posted an email from an incoming student who decided not to study at Haverford due to Jew-hatred on campus. “I doubt the college cares. Not sure they won’t be happier with fewer Jews,” Mendelsohn wrote on social media, in a thread that received hundreds of thousands of views.
“This is a very tough decision for me, as I truly thought Haverford would be the place for me to thrive academically and socially. I thought that everything would pass over the summer and I’d be able to fight the last parts of antisemitism on campus when I got to Haverford,” the unnamed student wrote. “But it doesn’t seem that way.”
The student reported after “great conversations” with fellow students, “when they hear that I went to Jewish day school and am Jew, I get asked almost immediately if I support Israel and if I’m Zionist, I either get blocked or ridiculed by other Haverford students who I barely even know.”
“It sounds crazy but I feel safer in Israel in a war zone that is about to be attacked by Iran and its proxies then I do in America, and I fear that this feeling will be what I feel like everyday at Haverford—scared to be a Jew in what was supposed to be my second home,” the student added.
Mendelsohn told JNS it was particularly difficult to receive that note from a student who was slated to study with him.
The result of the school’s decisions, according to Mendelsohn, will be that donors will opt to avoid association with the college, and due to the “stupid game,” antisemitic students “are going to be the reason why there will be a generation of first-generation students that will not get scholarships to come to Haverford.”
Mendelsohn shared a copy of a letter, which Haverford shared with him, with 613 signatures denouncing him. Number 316 was “Joseph Mengele, Haverford ’20.”
“My college, as they are trying to investigate me, sent me an antisemitic document,” he said. “I suffered both the investigation and antisemitism that the college transmitted to me.”
Speaking up
Haverford has 30 days to respond to the amended complaint, according to Lowenthal Marcus, who expects the school to file a motion to dismiss.
Lowenthal Marcus added that the suit is a Title VI case but not one filed before the U.S. Department of Education.
“The courts have judges. They are bound by law. The Department of Education is a part of the executive branch. It’s an administrative agency. They’re goal is to find a resolution. They are the fact finder and the judge, and so, the plaintiff doesn’t have an active advocate pushing hard on righting a wrong that has been done to the plaintiff,” she told JNS. “It’s like depositing in a box, and it goes into this big black hole.”
She told JNS that she doesn’t blame victims and doesn’t advocate violence or abuse to correct wrongs done to Jews. She hopes that Jews will be more vocal and comfortable being named publicly in demanding action against antisemitism.
“That would help,” she said. “This is a tool that we have, and it’s hard to wield it when so many Jews are so frightened to speak out about it.”
Comments are closed.
