On May 17, Cecilia Culver, a George Washington University double major in economics and statistics and the recipient of GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences (CCAS) Distinguished Scholar Award, came to the stage of GW’s Lisner Auditorium to deliver a commencement address. Culver, whose CV is in no way political (her college activities included Epsilon Sigma Alpha and the Association for Women in Mathematics; her recent summer internships were at Ernst & Young and the Federal Reserve Board) used her speech to address what she said was her university’s complicity in Israel’s attacks on Palestinians.
“I am ashamed to know my tuition is being used to fund…genocide,” she said. “Despite repeated calls to disclose all endowments and investments by the university and divest from the apartheid state of Israel, the administration has refused. Instead, they have repressed anyone with the courage to point out the blood on their hands.”
Twelve days later, on May 29, Megha Vemuri, the class president at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, delivered her own address on the topic. Vemuri, a major in computer science, neuroscience and linguistics whose CV is similarly professional (she worked as a research intern with the UCT Neuroscience Institute in South Africa) and who leans only slightly more political, made a similar case to Culver’s.
“The Israeli occupation forces are the only foreign military that MIT has research ties with,” she said. “This means that Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people is not only aided and abetted by our country, but our school. We are watching Israel try to wipe Palestine off the face of the earth, and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it.”
These far from radical speakers were making far from radical statements. Students protesting the use of their tuition dollars to fund what are widely perceived to be atrocities abroad dates back sixty years in this country, to the Vietnam War, when the protests were more extreme and less reasoned. In the 1969 commencement ceremonies at Harvard, with sitting congressmen looking on, a speaker compared the president of the university, who had sent in police to extract anti-war students occupying administrative buildings a month before, to Adolf Hitler. Some of those students had been members of Maoist and Leninist political groups, at a time when the United States was prosecuting campaigns against communism across the world which had provoked such widespread resistance that they had led to protests and riots in American cities. Statements like those made at Harvard’s commencement were tinder to flame, and yet the response was, in the tradition of this country, to let the speakers speak without punishment.
What happened at Harvard and across America in 1969 is a very long way from Cecilia Culver’s or Megha Vemuri’s brief, argumentative forays into politics in 2025. But the responses by universities to these instances of reasoned public dissent in 2025 were considerably more draconian than they were to the wilder displays in 1969. Culver was banned from campus and GW released a statement calling her conduct “inappropriate and dishonest.” Vemuri was banned from her graduation and MIT sent her a letter, which it released to The Boston Globe, accusing her of “deliberately and repeatedly mis[lead]ing commencement organizers” and “disrupting an important institute ceremony.”
MIT was also silent on behalf of Vemuri, until recently a star student, in the face of harassment directed at her from influential quarters. Ouriel Ohayon, the Israeli CEO of a Bitcoin company, wrote about Vemuri, “Make that b*tch famous. May she never find any career path and be humiliated for what she just did and did before that. Ps: Megha if you really want to sound cool, work on your ‘rrrrrhaazzzza’ accent.”
What punishments like these most resemble are the punishments in Israel, reported by outlets like +972 and The Nation, of the actress Maisa Abd Elhadi and 126 other women who exercised their right to speech in the aftermath of October 7. Like Culver and Vemuri, these women were not leading protests or encouraging “agitation” or inciting violence; they were exercising their right to speech. And yet they were singled out in ways that inflated awareness of their statements rather than diminished it—singled out for what could only have been the purpose of discouraging future dissent.
In Israel, these actions began in the days and weeks after October 7, 2023. In America, a “respectable,” white-gloved version of this treatment played out during the same period. It also predicted much of what was to come in this country: not the highly publicized crackdowns on college encampments that occurred in the spring of 2024, but more targeted and so more lethal strikes before and after punishing not group action (for example, the commandeering of a public space like a lawn or library) but individual speech. The early-stage version of this treatment occurred most prominently at Harvard at the hands of Bill Ackman, the Zionist American financier who made his special project attacking a student statement about October 7 that did not condemn Hamas and that called Israel the root cause of the attacks.
This statement had been signed by thirty-three student organizations and released on the morning of October 8, a Sunday. No one with even a passing familiarity with college life would assume that most of the board members of these organizations (anywhere from two hundred to four hundred students in all) would have read it. But Ackman called “for the names of the students to be released in an effort not to hire them.” He also said publicly that he would deny them jobs, and urged his influential associates, friends, and investors to do the same. He did this even as a billboard truck plastered with these students’ names and faces began circling Harvard’s campus.
Any university not in hock to its donors and the political entities backing them would have stepped in front of this kind of white-shoe bullying, then handled the matter itself using one of the myriad policies specifically written to balance the speech and safety of students. But this is Harvard, where the head of its body of corporate governors who was regularly taking Ackman’s irate calls, Penny Pritzker, is a Zionist and the sister of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, also a Zionist. Both are members of the billionaire Pritzker family, known for decades for its financial support of Israel. And this vignette of crime and punishment and the players involved points to the real issue in the cases of Cecilia Culver and Megha Vemuri. Namely, to a far greater degree than even Vietnam—when Harvard alone produced both the two national security advisers and the secretary of Defense running the war— questioning America’s military involvement with Israel goes straight to the black box of universities’ power via its ties to the military corporate state whose most reliable client is the Zionist state.
GW, at the heart of Washington DC, has one of the more direct connections to the military-corporate complex and the Zionist state it supports via Professor Joseph Pelzman. Pelzman is the originator, off the implicit urging of Jared Kushner, of the “Raze-and-Rebuild” plan for Gaza that I have reported on for the Libertarian Institute. Students complained about Pelzman’s model in The GW Hatchet, the student newspaper, and a professor called his approach orientalist and demeaning. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and other campus groups also urged that Pelzman be let go on the grounds that his work was not in service of the pursuit of knowledge but was instead linked to Washington’s military corporate complex. In response, according to the Hatchet, GW:
“…barred Students for Justice in Palestine from hosting on-campus events “until further notice,” saying the group violated a policy by preventing Division for Student Affairs personnel from attending programming, which students claimed wasn’t a policy in a prior version of student organization rules. Officials said they were ‘separately reviewing’ incidents at recent SJP events to determine if any violated the Code of Student Conduct or other University policies.”
This temporary suspension was later lengthened to a year, which is not surprising given the nature of the scaffolding upholding GW. The largest philanthropic gift in the school’s history was given, in 2014, by a committed Zionist, Michael Milken. Another of GW’s top five donors, the late Saul Brandman, was a Zionist whose family is known for his donations to Hebrew University. At least six of the nineteen members of GW’s board of trustees have ties via philanthropic work or their companies to Israel; and the co-chair of GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs serves on the Board of Birthright Israel.
GW’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development offers, off a donation from the late Home Depot Founder and committed Zionist Bernard Marcus, “a master’s degree program in Israel education, the first of its kind to be offered at a major university in the United States.” Three of America’s five main weapons’ suppliers, for whom Israel is the most reliable client, also have a presence on campus. The CEO of Northrup Grumman graduated from GW; Lockheed Martin has multiple academic connections with the school including alumni; and General Dynamic appears on campus in multiple guises.
These are the guarantors that GW would alienate if it allowed its students to generate sustained upset over Israel’s actions in Gaza. So, too, with MIT, which, like Harvard, was the recipient of donations from Zionist Jeffrey Epstein, in this case to MIT’s Media Lab. Even more significant was the donation to MIT from Zionist Stephen A. Schwarzman for the Schwarzman College of Computing: now the incubator for computer science graduates of the most prestigious technology university in the country. The College of Computing has as its first and currently serving dean computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher, whose mentor was a prominent Israeli computer scientist and whose close professional colleagues have included prominent Zionists like the late Henry Kissinger and Google founder Eric Schmidt. This is not an ecosystem the people who administer it will disturb by, for example, allowing Megha Vemuri’s commencement address to go unanswered.
Nor are MIT and GW and Harvard the only universities or colleges dependent on this ecosystem and taking this stand. Before his stint at MIT, Huttenlocher served as the inaugural Dean of Cornell Tech, Cornell University’s research center on Roosevelt Island in New York. In 2016, under Huttenlocher’s leadership, Cornell Tech inaugurated the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, a joint partnership between Israel’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Cornell University which “marks the first time an international university has granted an accredited degree on U.S. soil.” Not surprisingly, Cornell handled protests over Israel’s actions in Gaza with subtle dispatch. According to Aaron Fernando in The Nation, it empowered the Office of Conduct and Community Standards to issue three-year bans from campus via “persona non grata” statuses to students who participated in a Pro-Palestinian action. Judging by a video, this action involved students “pushing through a line of campus police and banging kitchenware and using musical instruments.”
Similar connections exist not far from Cornell, at New York’s other Ivy League University, Columbia. There, as Alan McLeod at MintPress News has uncovered, the dean of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) is a former soldier in the IDF. According to The New York Times, Columbia’s major donors (some of whom have paused donations these past two years) include Zionists Robert Kraft and Angelica Berrie. The same Times article reported on similar withholding actions by Zionists Marc Rowan of Apollo Global Management at the University of Pennsylvania and by Barry Sternlicht at Brown University. Brown’s former Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Tom Tisch, exercises enormous influence and is a member of one of the most influential Zionist families in America. All three of these universities have aggressively responded to protests—arguably at the expense of the Constitution and in Columbia’s case to such an extent that it has become, in some descriptions, a direct outgrowth of government.
But this question of undue influence is not just a question of connections to Zionists. Just as GW has ties to defense contractors, Cornell University contracts with the Defense Department to such an extent that the Donald Trump administration’s April freeze of $5.1 billion funding in what it called “wasteful” defense projects affected over one hundred research projects. MIT got $107 million in 2024, and Harvard, in recent years, $180 million. Cornell’s and MIT’s Huttenlocher sits on the board of Amazon, which in 2022 was awarded a Pentagon contract worth $10 billion, and the Pritzkers are connected to contractor-funded think tanks which, as I have reported elsewhere, make it their business to push Washington into Middle East interventions. Columbia’s ultimate security in Morningside Heights depends ultimately on the NYPD, which receives $200 million annually from Washington DC. Columbia’s SIPA and Harvard’s Belfer and Kennedy Schools feature a revolving door of faculty from the State and Defense Departments, the National Security Council, and the White House, all of whom support the state of Israel if only as the condition for holding their government jobs.
What is going on here, in other words, is nothing so crude as a Zionist infiltration of American institutions of higher learning. It is the infiltration of these institutions by the military-corporate system which Zionists have put themselves at the heart of: a system which exists with Israel in a state of mutual dependence. This, then, is why universities have responded with such alacrity to the Trump administration’s demands on behalf of Zionist students. The demands give them the cover to do what they want to do anyway to satisfy their donors and partners and patrons.
There is certainly no intellectual consistency to these moves. They empower administrative boards to mete out punishments in the name of anti-discrimination to protect Zionists at the same time as these same protections are being ostentatiously withdrawn for other groups, often by weaponizing laws meant to ensure these protections in the first place. A recent investigation by Mari Cohen in Jewish Currents found seventeen people, some of them students, who have been targeted by hate speech laws, even though, in many of the cases:
“…video footage or other evidence suggests that the defendant may not have committed any underlying crime…In others, there is more substantial evidence that a crime was committed, like vandalism, but by designating it a ‘hate crime,’ prosecutors have construed political actions against Zionism or the state of Israel as anti-Jewish. As one judge acknowledged…’the statute here, the way it was drafted, wasn’t designed to make the sort of fine distinction that people involved in this issue make…between Zionists and Jews and Israeli citizens.’ As if to underscore his point, at least three of those charged with antisemitic hate crimes in the cases identified by Jewish Currents are themselves Jewish…”
Students are not the only objects of this campaign; professors are too, among them professors who are Jewish. In June, The New York Times ran a profile of Maura Finkelstein, a tenured Jewish American professor fired from Muhlenberg College after “students, alumni, and strangers” passed on to the Joe Biden Education Department a petition “demanding that she be fired.” Their grounds were that Finkelstein was guilty of “‘dangerous pro-Hamas rhetoric’ and ‘blatant classroom bias against Jewish students.’” The evidence for these charges included:
“…screenshots of Finkelstein’s posts: a photo of her, on Oct. 12, in a kaffiyeh, a kaffiyeh-patterned face mask and a tank top that read ‘Anti-Zionist Vibes Only,’ below which she had written ‘Free Gaza, free Palestine, stop the ongoing genocide by the Israeli and American war machines.’ In another, on Oct. 26, she wrote, ‘ISRAEL DOES NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEFEND ITS OCCUPATION.'”
There is of course nothing anti-Semitic about opposing a nation-state, a genocide, or a war machine. In fact, Finkelstein taking these stands as an anti-Zionist Jew might be construed as affirming, not repudiating Jewish identity. So might the disproportionate presence of anti-Zionist Jews at antiwar encampments across college campuses in the spring of 2024. But, like the responses to campus protests, the Muhlenberg play was not about reasoning; it was about power. As with other cases, the main influence here appears to have been donors, at least according to faculty members interviewed by the Times, who said that “Muhlenberg had declining enrollment and a shrinking faculty body…that…made them more aware of…donor influence.”
And Finkelstein was not the only one singled out in this way. In late May, the progressive Jewish news website Mondoweiss featured a report by Anna Feder—an anti-Zionist Jew who had worked for seventreen years at Emerson College, most recently as Head of Film Exhibition and Festival Programs—about her firing in 2024. This firing occurred after a member of the Board of Trustees texted her to express concern over one item in her programming: the film “Israelism,” created by two anti-Zionist Jews, Sam Eilertsen and Erin Axelman, investigating the deepening rift between young American Jews and Israel. In May and July, a professor of Medicine at University of California San Francisco who had taught there for twenty-three years and a tenured professor at Georgetown were also let go, for similar “offenses.”
And there are signs that this targeting of professors and staff over speech deemed critical of Israel is becoming more technologized, and systematic. A case in point is the international criminal law conference in Canberra in early July during which, according to the recounting and photographs of a witness, one participant:
“…spent most of the time putting names of presenters into an ‘Anti-Israel Academics’ folder (?) on ChatGPT. I have no idea what the person was planning to do if ChatGPT told him that any of the speakers were ‘anti-Israel’ but this also points to the dangers of self-reinforcing AI tools when used as a means to label and harass people.”
This is not an abstract concern. Meta, Google, and other technology conglomerates with significant numbers of Israeli employees and ties to Israel have singled out the posts of pro-Palestinian users, employees, entertainers and consumers: limiting their audience reach or outright banning them. The application of this practice to academic life can only lead, over time, to the stifling of intellectual expression, as professors censor themselves for fear of becoming a name in a government database.
Silencing and surveillance in American life, including on campuses, are not new. But no recent push compares to what is being done today. This is a push by politicians of both parties and enacted by university administrators with unprecedented aggression, one meant to silence public debate about the ultimate issue universities exist to discuss: the use and misuse of power. And aggressive silencing is not just the function but undeniably the intent of what is occurring. In the framing of one Zionist activist, who is part of a pressure campaign against Columbia, “What matters most is a deal with the government that ensures federal funding while coercing Columbia into systemic change to combat antisemitism.”
Agree or disagree with government funding universities in the first place, government using funding to coerce universities is not an American project, and it is not a Jewish one. For Americans like me of Jewish heritage who identify as anti-Zionist, it represents the culmination of the aggressive eighty-year co-option of a religious and cultural heritage devoted to seeking knowledge, Judaism, by a project of power, Zionism. Given the carte blanche this silencing has allowed Israel the past eighteen months, its influential backers will likely continue to exercise their influence for as long as it takes for the American empire to back its Israeli client (and benefactor) in remaking the Middle East.
The collateral damage of this “coercing” has already been Cecilia Culver and Megha Vemuri and Maura Finkelstein and Anna Feder and others besides. Judging by the hopes or aims suggested by prominent Israelis when it comes to remaking the Middle East, “for as long as it takes” may be a very long time indeed, which means there will be more collateral damage to come. The carte blanche allowed Israel by the buildup of this collateral damage in America may accrue to the benefit of our military corporate complex. But it is the antitheses of the virtues of individuality and democracy that are foundational to both Jews and Americans.
