Northwestern University warned its Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) chapter that its constitution, which bars Zionist Jews from joining, violates the school’s new anti-discrimination policy, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
The constitution for the anti-Israel student group states that “members are expected to be anti-Zionist and identify with Judaism” and requires a faculty adviser to be a “Jewish anti-Zionist or support anti-Zionist philosophies.” According to its mission statement, JVP aims to build an “anti-Zionist Jewish community on campus.”
The group seems committed to that goal, playing a significant role in anti-Israel campus activity with an adviser, Sarah Schulman, who has repeatedly blamed the Jewish state for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. But JVP’s constitution doesn’t square with Northwestern’s updated non-discrimination policies, which incorporated the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism. That definition states that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” is a form of anti-Semitism.
A Northwestern spokeswoman told the Free Beacon that the university is making Northwestern’s JVP branch, a recognized student group that formed after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, change its rules.
“As a registered student organization, Jewish Voice for Peace is required to comply with Northwestern’s anti-discrimination policies. The appropriate steps are in progress to revise the organization’s constitution and membership policies,” she said.
The move comes as Northwestern faces pressure to rein in campus anti-Semitism. Earlier this month, the Trump administration froze $790 million in federal funding to Northwestern amid a civil rights investigation into alleged anti-Semitism and racial discrimination on campus. The House Committee on Education and Workforce, meanwhile, is demanding a meeting on anti-Semitism with Northwestern’s president, the Free Beacon reported.
Like Harvard, which saw $2.2 billion frozen on April 14, Northwestern retained a high-profile, MAGA-linked lobbying firm to navigate the scrutiny.
Wendy Khabie, the mother of a Northwestern student and national co-chair of the Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern (CAAN), told the Free Beacon the JVP chapter should be stripped of its rights if it doesn’t update its policies.
“We expect that any and every registered student group affiliated with the University would be held responsible for meeting all of the requirements established by the code of conduct and student handbook. That includes any updates or revisions recently made, with specific regard to the University’s adoption of IHRA,” Khabie said. “It would be concerning if the University afforded rights and privileges to groups that are not in full compliance with established guidelines.”
JVP, meanwhile, has been a major player in disruptive, anti-Israel protests, and Schulman, a tenured English professor, has proven that she fits the group’s faculty adviser requirements.
The day after Hamas’s assault, Schulman attended an anti-Israel protest in Times Square. There, she told the New York Times, “Decades of brutality towards Palestinians, in which people have been murdered, incarcerated and displaced unjustly have made conditions untenable, and I believe that they exploded.”
Roughly a week later, she penned a New York Magazine article arguing that Hamas’s attack was the result of Israel’s “consistent, unending brutality.”
“[F]or 75 years, Palestinians have been murdered, incarcerated, and displaced with escalating violence by Israeli soldiers, and more recently by settlers. On October 7, these unending, untenable conditions exploded when Hamas broke through Israel’s imposed barriers. They reentered the land they consider home,” Schulman wrote. “They attacked formerly Palestinian villages and cities, now under the control of Israel. After decades of being on the receiving end of highly organized violence, they switched roles and became the murderers and kidnappers of more than 1,300 Israeli children and adults.”
Schulman has a long history of anti-Israel activism, serving on the advisory board of JVP’s national arm since 2010. In 2016, while a professor at the College of Staten Island, Schulman was accused by the Zionist Organization of America of “echo[ing] the lies of talking points of Hamas” by claiming that Israelis are indiscriminately killing Palestinians. At the time, she also served as a faculty adviser for the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter.
Northwestern’s JVP chapter appears to follow in Schulman’s footsteps. On the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s attack, the group joined a walkout in solidarity with Northwestern SJP “to commemorate a year of the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”
“There are no universities left in Gaza, and today we are leaving classes at our university to stand in solidarity against occupation and apartheid,” the group wrote on Instagram. Earlier this month, SJP held an anarchist training session for its Northwestern members at which it cited propaganda from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group urging students to “build an Intifada” and “destroy amerika.”
In April 2024, JVP helped organize a five-day encampment and successfully negotiated with the university to allow the anti-Israel activists to keep up one tent through June 1, 2024.
Most recently, on Feb. 27, JVP and SJP boycotted Northwestern’s new mandatory anti-discrimination training. The two groups described parts of the “fascist” training as “zionist propaganda” that “incite[s] violence” against Muslim, Arabs, and Palestinians on campus.
In reality, the training relies on unverified data from the Council on American-Islamic Relations that inflate Islamophobic attacks, giving the false impression that those attacks vastly outpace anti-Semitic hate crimes, the Free Beacon reported.
Northwestern touted that training as part of a March 31 progress report detailing steps it has taken to combat anti-Semitism. It also noted that “there has been a significant decrease in reports of discrimination or harassment based on antisemitism or shared Jewish ancestry at Northwestern compared with the same period last academic year.”
Yet on April 14, during Passover, anti-Semitic vandals at Northwestern used red paint to write “Death to Israel” and draw Hamas triangles on Kresge Centennial Hall, a campus building that houses the school’s Holocaust center, the Free Beacon reported.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
