On the firing of tenured faculty member Maura Finkelstein by Muhlenberg College

A statement from the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace

The Academic Advisory Council (AAC) of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) condemns the firing of tenured faculty member Maura Finkelstein by Muhlenberg College’s administration and trustees for speech in support of Palestinian freedom. The AAC demands the immediate reinstatement of Professor Finkelstein and the removal from office of President Harring, Provost Furge, and Board Chair Lance Bruck.

Muhlenberg’s specific reason provided for terminating Dr. Finkelstein’s tenure and employment was that she had reposted an Instagram message by Palestinian performance poet Remi Kanazi: “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.” That this speech was the specific or narrow cause of termination has been reported in The Intercept and has not been disputed by Muhlenberg; it is also corroborated by the report about the case from the outside “Appeals Officer appointed by Muhlenberg College.”

This speech (the re-posting) is fully within carefully delineated and long-established bounds of academic freedom protections. An Instagram post is what the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) terms extramural speech, and the AAUP is clear that extramural speech is a legitimate basis for disciplining a faculty member only in the rare case when it demonstrates “unfitness” to teach or to conduct research—that is, unfitness for a faculty member’s duties within “the walls” of the college or university.

The idea that this single re-posting might satisfy the criteria for such “unfitness” is risible. Muhlenberg College itself had reviewed Dr. Finkelstein’s teaching and research when evaluating her for tenure just three years ago. On what possible basis could a single Instagram reposting override and nullify the substantial and persuasive body of evidence Muhlenberg examined at that time?

As academics, the members of the Academic Advisory Council know, in short, that Muhlenberg’s firing of Dr. Finkelstein is an egregious trampling of academic freedom protections, including tenure. We know also that academic freedom is nothing less than a prerequisite for educational excellence, as the AAUP has long maintained. The firing of Dr. Finkelstein thus calls into question Muhlenberg’s very legitimacy as an institution of higher education.

We are also clear that while the Instagram re-posting is the explicit reason for the termination of Dr. Finkelstein, the context in which this termination occurred is fundamental and causative. This is a context in which Dr. Finkelstein’s principled anti- Zionism was misconstrued and misrepresented as a “threat to Jewish students,” which is to say as Jew-hatred or antisemitism. This is emphatically untrue. The reposting constitutes no threat to any group of students on the basis of their religion or ethnic identity.

An instigating factor of this reckless misconstrual and misrepresentation was a petition started and circulated anonymously that was used to pressure Muhlenberg administrators to target Dr. Finkelstein. Muhlenberg’s senior administrators (presumably) bear no responsibility for this petition, but as educators and academic administrators they were and remain obligated to unequivocally stand against two notions the petition assumed and proffered. The first is that a faculty member should subordinate their best professional judgment about what they teach—what they profess—to the goal of avoiding discomforting students: this view would allow some devoutly religious students to cancel the teaching of Darwinian evolutionary theory, to give an obvious example. Higher education is a place where received beliefs can and should be questioned, and this inescapably entails discomfort for students in the course of forming their own views. The second is that criticisms of Zionism and of Israel as a Zionist state are criticisms of Jews and/or Judaism. This is no way the case. The history of Judaism precedes the emergence of Zionism by nearly four millennia, and Zionism in its short history has always been a contested issue among Jews. Yet, rather than meet their fundamental responsibilities as educators and academic administrators to stand against these pernicious notions, Muhlenberg’s provost Laura Furge and the school’s Title IX Officer Jennifer Storm called Dr. Finkelstein into a series of meetings in the 2023-24 academic year where they subjected her to hostile, even threatening, questions that echoed them (as reported by The Intercept).

Here we as Jews and as intellectuals have an unequivocal ethical obligation to make clear that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism—that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are historically and definitionally distinct. Zionism is a political project of state-making, specifically the project of establishing a state for Jews (meaning a state that privileges Jews at the expense of non-Jews, which is to say, in short, a Jewish supremacist state). Anti-Zionism, in turn, opposes that political project; it is opposition to a supremacist state; and it is not opposition to either Jews or Judaism. This is analogous to the fact that opposition to white supremacism is not opposition to white people, but to supremacism and to any state built on white supremacism. The intellectually dishonest claim that opposition to Zionism is “antisemitic” is nothing more than a pretext for stifling criticisms of Zionism—smearing them with the scurrilous charge of antisemitism.

We further note that this weaponization of false charges of antisemitism relies on and fosters confusion about antisemitism. And confusion about what antisemitism is undermines the necessary struggle against actual antisemitism: we cannot effectively fight what we mis-recognize. Put simply: this weaponization of antisemitism can only make Jews less safe.

As a historical fact, actually existing Zionism has been the project of establishing a Jewish supremacist state not in the abstract or somewhere else in the universe, but here on earth and specifically in historic Palestine. Put otherwise: actually existing Zionism has been the project of establishing a Jewish supremacist state at the expense of Palestinian lives, their rights, freedoms, and self-determination—exactly as Edward Said argued in his 1979 essay, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.”

In this regard, the dishonest misconstrual of anti-Zionism as antisemitism implies that it is antisemitic, and thus hateful, to affirm that Palestinian lives matter, no less than all other human lives. This conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism is Orwellian double- speak that functions as a bulwark of the Israeli state’s denial of Palestinian freedom and, at this moment, of that state’s genocide in Gaza. Why would a college be in the business of shoring up this dangerous falsehood at the expense of academic freedom?

As members of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, we hold that the humane and ethical lesson to learn from the Holocaust is that “never again” is for all human beings. Muhlenberg’s egregious and vicious response to Dr. Finkelstein’s anti- Zionism is a fundamental betrayal of that most humane and precious lesson of the Holocaust.

We close in grief and rage for the victims of Israel’s ongoing genocide, and repeat our unequivocal condemnation of Muhlenberg’s termination of Dr. Finkelstein’s employment and tenure; we demand that she be reinstated and that those at Muhlenberg responsible for this termination be relieved of their administrative posts and board memberships.