The Lawfare Project has initiated legal action on behalf of a student at Carnegie Mellon University whose professor said of a project she did on Orthodox Jews that she should have focused on “what Jewish people do to make themselves so hated.”
The student received other antisemitic discrimination going back to her freshman year, when she was denied an excuse to attend a memorial for the murder in October 2018 of 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Congregation in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, not far from the university.
The nonprofit think tank and litigation fund wrote in a statement that “the student’s complaints to the DEI and Title XI offices yielded nothing and her appeal to professors for help brought retaliation in the form of exclusion and an undeserved near-failing grade.” The group further notes that the university has received more than half a billion dollars in funding from Qatar, a longtime supporter of Hamas and its parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.
“In addition to seeking justice for the aggrieved student, this lawsuit endeavors to expose the toxic undercurrent of antisemitism that for years has corroded academia and has laid the foundation for the unbridled Jew-hatred that has become rampant on college campuses” since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, stated Ziporah Reich, director of litigation at the Lawfare Project.
Brooke Goldstein, founder and executive director of the Lawfare Project, said: “The pervasively toxic environment found on college campuses across the country, which, in many instances, has been funded by Qatar, has resulted in the illegal discrimination against Jewish students.”
She added that the group was “proud to be representing a brave student willing to stand up for Jewish civil rights, and we will make every effort to ensure that justice is achieved.”
