Stanford, CA – An instructor at Stanford University has been suspended for what the president and provost called “identity-based targeting” of students in connection with the Israel-Gaza war.
Rabbi Dov Greenberg, director of the Chabad Stanford Jewish Center, said he was told by three students who were in the room that the instructor asked Jewish and Israeli students to identify themselves during a session for a required undergraduate course called “Civil, Liberal and Global Education.”
The teacher told the Jewish students to take their belongings, stand in a corner, and said, “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians,” Greenberg said, citing the student accounts. The instructor then asked, “How many people died in the Holocaust?” When a student answered, “Six million,” the lecturer said, “Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer.”
Stanford President Richard Saller and Provost Jenny Martinez sent a letter to the university community on Wednesday that mentioned the removal of the instructor from teaching duties but did not provide the details of the incident.
The instructor “addressed the Middle East conflict in a manner that called out individual students in class based on their backgrounds and identities,” the statement said.
That statement followed an earlier letter from Stanford officials that faculty from Stanford and Hebrew University had criticized as being too neutral on the situation in Israel.
The second statement from the president and provost specifically condemned the Hamas attacks as a “moral matter.”
The statement from Saller and Martinez said the incident with the instructor was under investigation. The university’s media relations office declined to confirm or provide more details, citing it as a “personnel” matter. The instructor was a teaching assistant, not a faculty member.
The instructor did not immediately respond to an email inquiry from the Forward sent Thursday.
Greenberg, the Chabad rabbi, said the students he’d spoken to were afraid to speak up in class out of fear that they would be penalized grade-wise. “What are they going to do, get in a fight with their teacher at Stanford?” he asked. But he said all three were traumatized by the experience. The teacher “didn’t say anything that happened to the Israelis,” Greenberg said. “He ignored that. He said, ‘Hamas is a legitimate representation of the Palestinian people. They are not a terrorist group. They are freedom fighters. Their actions are legitimate.’”
