The ordeal comes as the public university grapples with high-profile anti-Semitic incidents—and a federal probe into complaints of anti-Semitism at the school.

By Jessica Costescu, The Washington Free Beacon

On Oct. 13, just six days after Hamas terrorists infiltrated the Jewish state and slaughtered more than 1,000 Israelis, Stockton University professor Raz Segal penned an op-ed accusing Israel of genocide.

Months later, the University of Minnesota tapped Segal to lead its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, prompting resignations from members of the center’s advisory board.

On Friday, Minnesota’s interim College of Liberal Arts dean, Ann Waltner, extended an offer to Segal to serve as the center’s chair, according to an internal email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The decision prompted immediate pushback from members of the center’s advisory board, with two members—French professor Bruno Chaouat and music professor Karen Painter—announcing their resignation from the board within hours.

“My understanding is that the core mission of the Center is to educate locally and internationally on the specific history of the Holocaust and of genocides in order to raise awareness and prevent further dehumanization and violence,” Chaouat wrote in a resignation email to colleagues explaining his resignation, which was shared with the Free Beacon.

“Professor Segal, by justifying Hamas’s atrocities five days after they occurred (via a perverse allegation that Israel was committing a genocide), cannot fulfill the mission of the Center,” Chaouat continued.

“He has failed to recognize the genocidal intent of Hamas. He does not understand that a movement like Hamas is inherently fascist and represents precisely what CHGS stands against.”

Painter echoed that rhetoric, writing in a Friday resignation email obtained by the Free Beacon that Segal “has positioned himself on an extreme end of the political ideological spectrum with his publications on Israel and Gaza.”

The ordeal comes as the public university grapples with high-profile anti-Semitic incidents—and a federal probe into complaints of anti-Semitism at the school.

Last week, for example, the Minnesota Hillel building saw its windows smashed in an act of vandalism. In January, the Biden administration launched an investigation into the school after faculty departments within the College of Liberal Arts posted anti-Israel statements to their websites.

Now, the university is scrambling to distance itself from Segal as faculty members revolt. In a Monday statement, a university spokeswoman said the school “paused” Segal’s appointment “to determine next steps.”

Segal, who did not respond to a request for comment, has rallied against Israel in the wake of Oct. 7.

In his Oct. 13 op-ed, published in Jewish Currents, he referred to Israel’s “assault on Gaza” as “a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.”

“I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians,” Segal wrote.

“I have written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel, the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry, the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid. Now, following Hamas’s attack on Saturday and the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, the worst of the worst is happening.”

In a May interview with NJ Spotlight News, meanwhile, Segal dismissed complaints from Jewish students regarding campus safety amid unauthorized anti-Israel protests.

Such complaints are “baseless,” Segal wrote, adding that student protesters “aren’t escalating anything” and are subject to “a vicious police attack against them.”

In a January Los Angeles Times article, he argued that the creation of the Jewish state “reproduced the racism and white supremacy that had targeted Jews for exclusion.”

Painter, who began teaching at the University of Minnesota in 2007, told the Free Beacon that Segal’s appointment was entirely the decision of Waltner, who has served as the College of Liberal Arts’ interim dean since July 2023.

The search committee excluded representation from Jewish stakeholders, Painter said.

In particular, the university’s Center for Jewish Studies director was excluded from the search committee, according to Painter.

In her resignation email to provost Rachel Croson and interim president Jeff Ettinger, Painter argued the Holocaust center’s director should not be “someone who blames Israel for the rape and murder of 1200 civilians, and kidnapping of hundred more.”

“Educating the current generation of students about the Holocaust is critically important,” Painter wrote in the email. “Instead, an interim dean of CLA, despite substantial opposition from faculty and others, has offered the Holocaust center directorship to someone who will accomplish nothing of the kind.”

The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas was also excluded from the search committee, despite its close working relationship with the Holocaust center.

The two have worked together to shape Holocaust education standards and benchmarks for state schools.

In an email to the University of Minnesota’s board of regents, Richard Painter, a law professor at the school and the husband of Karen Painter, also lambasted the decision to appoint Segal, whose “views on the Middle East conflict are extreme, and deeply offensive to many people who believe Israel has a right to defend itself.”

“It’s one thing to hire yet more instructional staff with such extreme views; there are numerous extreme left instructors in CLA already. Nothing new,” he wrote.

“It is quite another thing to hire an extremist to run the Holocaust Center. The last thing we need is a Holocaust Center director who blames Israel rather than Hamas for genocidal intent in the Middle East.”

Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration before launching multiple congressional campaigns as a Democrat, also lamented what he called a pattern of anti-Semitism at the College of Liberal Arts.

On Oct. 13., for example, a group of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies faculty members released a statement that reaffirmed “support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement” and called on “students, colleagues, and friends around the country to call for lifting the siege, ending the occupation, and dismantling Israel’s apartheid system.”

Two months later, in December, the college considered an anti-Israel professor in the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies department, Sima Shakhsari, for a top diversity, equity, and inclusion position, Jewish Insider reported.

Shakhsari denied Hamas terrorists raped Israeli women on Oct. 7 and was seen on campus attending an anti-Israel rally, chanting, “Globalize the Intifada.”

The post He accused Israel of genocide days after Oct. 7. The University of Minnesota tapped him to lead its genocide studies center appeared first on World Israel News.

Are the other contributors to the new book comfortable seeing their names alongside somebody who accuses David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir of mass sexual assault?

By Moshe Phillips, JNS

A radical historian who claims Israel practices mass rape of Palestinian Arabs is one of the contributors to a book that has just been published by Brandeis University Press. And this happened just as anti-Israel extremists are denying that Hamas terrorists committed rapes during the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.

The book, Antisemitism and the Politics of History was co-edited by historians Scott Ury and Guy Miron. It consists of essays by 18 authors, almost all of whom are respected scholars.

Almost, but not all. Two of the contributors are openly hostile to Israel—and one of them earlier this month publicly accused “every Israeli government” of having a policy of carrying out mass “sexual assault” against Palestinian Arabs.

The two extremists are Raz Segal of Stockton University in New Jersey and Amos Goldberg of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Their co-authored essay in the book is titled “ ‘Antisemitism’ as a Question in Holocaust Studies.”

Segal and Goldberg have never been shy about expressing their opinions about Israel. Here’s what Segal said during a webinar sponsored by the anti-Zionist magazine Jewish Currents on Nov. 13, 2023:

“I do think absolutely that this Israeli government has a plan, and in a way, it’s a plan that all Israeli governments have always had, of creating a larger Jewish state, a ‘Greater Israel’ with as few Palestinians as possible, right? In any kind of possible way, there is, you know, short-term intense violence, like the 1948 Nakba, right? The expulsions of 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of villages in the 1948 war; and longer-term processes of violence, various, you know—mass incarceration, humiliation, sexual assault, all kinds of, you know, very well documented, Israeli mass violence; and what we’re seeing now is part and parcel of this, it is—I don’t think it has anything to do with revenge, it has something to do with a structural plan of how Israel should be as a Jewish state, right?”

So if “every Israeli government” has had a secret policy of undertaking mass “sexual assault” (and other offenses) against the Palestinian Arabs, that would make David Ben-Gurion a mass rapist. As well as Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yair Lapid, to name just a few others.

Of course, Segal has made plenty of extremist statements previously. For example, writing in the journal Contending Modernities in 2022, Segal accused Israel of “apartheid” and declared that Professor Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, is guilty of promoting “a segregationist political ideology authorizing state violence” (by Israel).

In other words, the editors of the new book from Brandeis University Press certainly knew what they were getting when they included him.

The same is true for Segal’s co-author, Amos Goldberg of Hebrew University. In Madar magazine in 2018, Goldberg denounced Yad Vashem as “very narcissistic and problematic” and “perhaps even chauvinistic” for focusing on the persecution of Jews. In 2019, he urged the German parliament to reject anti-BDS legislation. In “+972” magazine in 2020, Goldberg co-authored an article asserting that the State of Israel is “based on segregation and discrimination.”

It may be just a coincidence that two of the eight members of the Brandeis University Press editorial board, who would have had to have approved the inclusion of Segal and Goldberg in the new book, have themselves publicly accused Israel of apartheid and worse.

One of them, Omer Bartov, was on the same Jewish Currents webinar with Segal and joined him in accusing Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. Another editorial board member is Derek Penslar of Harvard University, who has publicly accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid” and “Jewish supremacism.” So maybe it’s no surprise that the Brandeis University Press editorial board would be happy with having Segal and Goldberg in the book that they are about to publish.

Since critics of Israel often claim that anybody who disagrees with them is trying to suppress their free speech, let me be absolutely clear: I am not saying that Segal or Goldberg should be prevented from contributing to books or denied the right to publish, speak, or teach anywhere.

But that does not mean that anybody else is required to associate with them. Therefore, I ask: Are the other contributors to the new book comfortable seeing their names alongside somebody who accuses David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir of mass sexual assault?

Moreover, Brandeis University had no obligation to grant Segal and Goldberg the honor and legitimacy that derive from the imprimatur of the Brandeis name. So I ask: What does the Brandeis University administration think about the deep embarrassment to its reputation and legacy caused by Segal’s vile accusations against Israel’s prime ministers?

And, finally, what would Louis D. Brandeis—the most famous leader in American Zionist history—have thought about his name being connected to such anti-Israel slander?

The post Brandeis publishes author who claims Israel practices mass rape appeared first on World Israel News.