Earlier this month, Interim President Arthur Levine issued a response via email, to the demonstration held on April 4 by the Brandeis Jewish Bund, “While we encourage debate over difficult topics at Brandeis, we can never permit threatening, harassing, hateful or antisemitic speech on our campus.” President Levine accused the Bund of bringing “… masked protesters on Friday [that] were not members of the Brandeis community.” In response, Levine reinforced Brandeis’ policy on trespassing, threatened disciplinary action against the organizers and declared that “face coverings may not be used to avoid responsibility for one’s actions, they may only be worn for medical and religious purposes.”
“It’s completely unfounded,” said Bund officials. “They have provided absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the majority of people came from off campus. Of course there’s nothing wrong as we have said in the past with people in their own communities in Waltham showing up to support in solidarity with Palestine. But everyone that I know that was there was a Brandeis student.”
Brandeis was the first university in the United States to arrest students protesting for Palestine after Oct. 7, 2023, after the school de-chartered the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter on Nov. 11, 2023. Despite claiming a history of championing social justice and freedom of speech, students and visitors were arrested for their participation. Later, former President Ron Liebowitz resigned after pressure from the community, and many raised questions about incoming President Levine’s approach to freedom of speech.
The November 2023 demonstration organized by now de-chartered Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which were previously covered by The Hoot, were the subject of significant political action and advocacy on campus from groups like SJP and Revolutionary Students Organization (RSO) with protests, demonstrations and petitions to drop the charges for the seven students who were arrested, continuing through the entire school year. The Bund claims that had this could have been avoided had communication from the university been more clear, “at [the November 11 protest], the dispersal orders were unintelligible, and at the first dispersal order, we were going to immediately disperse.”
For the April 4 protest, The Bund had been communicating and corresponding with senior administration officials, and was cut off from communications after the administration accused the Bund of “bussing” outside people to the protests.
According to the Bund, three groups of students were brought to the Protest; one from off campus that gathered near the Shapiro Campus Center (SCC), and the two others gathered at two off-campus locations for safety purposes. “But just to be very clear, it was because Brandeis has proved they are unable to keep Brandeis students safe, and that is our main priority.”
The Jewish Bund, whose previous vigils, speaker events and demonstrations have been the subject of previous Hoot coverage, alleges they have been facing coordinated “doxxing” efforts by students and others who oppose their political views on campus. The Hoot verified that the Bund had indeed been in communication with senior administration regarding multiple cases where Bund members have had their personal information spread across various social media platforms. In an interview, one Bund member told The Hoot that “… we had to be masked because of the doxxing effort on campus that is emboldened by our university, that the university refuses to care about.”
On the day of the protest, an organization which claims to expose anti-semitism took to X with a post and accompanying video footage from on campus captioned “Brandeis University – protestors screaming ‘Intifada, Intifada, Long Live the Intifada’ at the entrance of the school as Jewish students look on stunned.” The video footage, posted less than half an hour after the protest occurred, seems to have been taken by an unidentified onlooker. The organization, which has been at the forefront of personal information exposure efforts aimed at targeting professionals, students and public officials that have been deemed antisemitic, has focused on trying to influence the personal and professional lives of its targets.
“Unfortunately we know that Brandeis has a stronger commitment to ensuring property rights and laws than like concerning the safety of the students,” they criticize.
Since the Nov. 11, 2023 vigil and subsequent arrests, the Bund, other organizations and students continually accuse the university of police brutality, following the widely publicized video footage of Brandeis police officers tackling students on the Great Lawn.
“So it feels like they created a narrative, that they can use the excuse to arrest people in masks … because anyone from campus can come and they can arrest as many Brandeis students as they want for using their free speech, for protesting on the basis that there are outside agitators, which again they have not substantiated.”
Part of the narrative displayed in the recent response email by the university’s President discusses accusations of antisemitism against the student activist group. The Bund not only denied allegations of antisemitism, but criticized how Brandeis has handled freedom of speech: “The coordination of Brandeis students who live off campus was safely co-ordinated because again we’ve seen like crazy amounts of police brutality from Brandeis in the past, so we safely co-ordinated the arrival of Brandeis students who live off campus.”
“So it’s important to remember that by Brandeis doing this, they just want to turn Jews into a monolith, into what they want the Jewish image to be. Not the complicated reality of Jewry which is a complex tapestry, like every other group of people, particularly a group of people who are historically oppressed. So when it comes to us being anti-semitic, it’s ridiculous. We are a Jewish group on campus, we have the most social media engagement of any group on campus and we have been engaging with more Jewish students on campus … Just because we don’t want [a genocide in our] names, that’s what makes us antisemitic.”
The debate surrounding the line between academic freedom and antisemitism has recently been a huge point of contention in mainstream politics. The Bund’s April 4 protest to included calls for an end to the Trump Administration’s persecution of student activists, with the promotional flyer for the demonstration reading “No Trump, No ICE, No Genocide.” Following the arrest of Columbia University’s Mohammed Khalil, who was heavily involved in the pro-Palestinian organizing efforts on Columbia’s campus, questions surrounding the administration’s use of antisemitism to further their deportation efforts have arisen. The executive branch has been on a campaign to “address anti-semitism” among universities, after pulling billions in funding from top universities. The demands have been criticized for encroaching on academic freedoms, and the Trump administration was recently sued by Harvard University.
“It’s a completely deranged claim that members of the Brandeis Jewish Bund are anti semitic. Of course the claim was most likely targeted at the mystical, mythical protestors that came from off-campus in a coordinated effort as was alleged by Levine. But given that the claim is completely unfounded, we’re not antisemites, we are Jews ourselves and fighting to maintain the Jewish tradition of adherence to social justice, the Jewish tradition of protest itself. The Bund is a historical entity—even if we don’t claim any particular Bunds line—it was the primary force among Jews under Nazi occupation that resisted, that fought in what you could describe as [an] intifada if you’re an Arabic speaker. To call that antisemitic is itself antisemitic.”
The Bund is not only advocating to end the violence in Gaza, but also beginning to challenge what is defined as antisemitism. “It’s a very clear attempt at censorship. By labelling it as antisemitic, it’s a clear way of just limiting people wanting to engage in critical thinking and critical thought … So Brandeis is supposed to be the free speech school, but by them censoring what it is we can and can’t say—to table, talking about how what’s happening in Gaza is an ethnic issue and why certain child deaths are more valid or impactful than other… There is a very clear double standard at play here.”
“Also if Brandeis can condemn Jews for protesting genocide as being antisemitic, condemn our free speech by the legal structures of hate speech that exist, we must remember that legal structures have never been supportive of the liberation struggle. Apartheid was legal, slavery was legal. We shouldn’t be using the white supremacist western states’ philosophies of speech and law as their basis.”
The student-run group, which has been tabling, holding reading groups and advocating for various humanitarian causes across the globe, thinks that Brandeis runs counter to their political causes. The Bund said “Brandeis, by calling us anti-semitic, by censoring our speech, gets to distract from the fact that Brandeis Board of Trustees, alum networks [and] admin, get their money from killing little kids in Palestine. That’s where this endowment[’s] funds are invested in. There’s big donor money implicated in Israeli war crimes. We are releasing some of our findings on the Board of Trustees tomorrow or the next day. Members of AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], members of Birthright, all continue to fuel settler colonialism in the name of the Jewish people. And we say no. And that makes us anti-semites?” Brandeis has not yet disclosed their investments, and The Hoot is unable to verify the Bund’s claims about the endowment. However, it is notable that the Bund claimed to have a scheduled meeting with Brandeis Admin to discuss the university’s investments.
“At the town hall, Levine said that Brandeis cannot take a side politically … that we have to stay impartial as a university. This is a clear act of partiality. They have very clearly taken the side repeatedly, of people who are doxxers, of police officers who have beat their students. So when Brandeis said they are impartial, they are straight up lying. None of their actions have made any of the students here on this campus feel safe. Many of the people who spoke at our protests, mentioned that this was the first time they felt that this was also their campus. That’s really what our goal is—to make sure everyone feels safe and heard. Again we are not only advocating for the liberation of Palestine. It’s also the Congo, Sudan and these are all interconnected struggles that Brandeis is directly linked [to], continuing the oppression. So our goal is not only to raise awareness, but to disgruntle that through things like our investigations and looking at where exactly Brandeis’ morals lie.”
President Arthur Levine did not respond to The Hoot’s request for an interview.
