Jewish Professor Fired For Anti-ZIonists Posts with Maura Finkelstein.

Maura Finkelstein with Nora Barrows-Friedman

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Maura Finkelstein interviewed on the Electronic Intifada

1.

Take a deep breath, give yourself 40 minutes and listen to the comments of a beautiful soul, one Maura Finkelstein.

Listen to Maura Finkelstein because what she is experiencing is the tip of a repressive iceberg … and yet they have not destroyed her spirit, her poise, her humanity. Tough cookie as my Uncle Willie used to say.

Across the US, students and faculty are continuing to resist repressive measures by university administrations intended to stifle or even criminalize speech in support of Palestinian rights, as the genocide in Gaza continues. Along with elite US institutions calling riot cops on their own students who have been holding sit-in protests, or attempting to prevent students from holding protests altogether, some universities have tried to categorize the political ideology of Zionism as a protected identity class in order to define anti-Zionist speech as racist hate speech.

“As long as I’ve been a teacher, I’ve been teaching about Palestine – it’s always been either central or integrated into the work that I do,” Maura Finkelstein told The Electronic Intifada Podcast. Finkelstein, a scholar of anthropology and a writer, taught at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania for nine years. She had been teaching a course on the anthropology of Palestine, a class that she says had been approved by the college. But even though she was tenured, she was fired in May 2024 over her social media posts in support of Palestinian rights and against the political ideology of Zionism – a move that has been seen as a warning to other anti-genocide professors. The firing followed months of targeted harassment by Israel lobby groups and individuals who pressured the university to fire Finkelstein, accusing her of “Jew hatred” over her anti-Zionist principles. Finkelstein is Jewish.

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2.

Much of what happened to Ms Finkelstein, also happened to me long ago – attempts to get me fired, delegations of “prominent” leaders of the Jewish Community – a cabal of skunks actually – going to the places where I worked to have me fired – a half a dozen times, “auditors” from the ADL and Hillel to spy on my lectures (especially at the University of Denver), telephone calls from local rabbis (the more liberal ones) to institutions where I had been invited to speak pressuring to cancel speaking events. Some of this long lost history I shared at a forum done by Denver/Boulder Jewish Voice for Peace at a recent forum “Personal Histories of Front Range Jews Against the Occupation”

I survived all that and went on to teach in higher ed in Colorado for close to half a century, in part because at key moments different university officials had the backbone to stand up for me. One was  a “liberal Republican” college president who threw the Zionist delegation out of his office when they visited to ask that I be fired. G. Owen Smith then called me in  “Prince, how is it you are always getting into trouble?” – and then giving me a hug, and sending me back to the classroom. Another was a dean at the University of Denver, who in college at Princeton University, had a roommate named Edward Said. He too defended me from other vindictive attacks against me (although I didn’t even teach about the Middle East per se. I taught Global Political Economy).

And yet, while not illegal what “they” did, it was all “informal” – there was no legal framework for their intimidation. Today a legal structure has been set up to purge “people like me” – that includes weaponizing Hillel into little spies, using anti-racist legislation to defend Israel’s racist practices, the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC’s legal gymnastics of turning reality on its head to blame the victim (or its sympathizers)