On October 26, 2023, less than three weeks after terrorists murdered 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped another 250, Maura Finkelstein tweeted: “ISRAEL DOES NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEFEND ITS OCCUPATION.”
The tenured anthropology professor at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, added: “BUT PALESTINIANS HAVE THE RIGHT TO FIGHT FOR FREEDOM AND SELF-DETERMINATION.”
Those tweets led to a Change.org petition, circulated by alumni, that declared “Muhlenberg College Must Remove Professor Finkelstein for Dangerous Pro-Hamas Rhetoric.” It accused Finkelstein of “blatant classroom bias against Jewish students” and “cyberbullying students with her partner,” Zein Murib, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York. The petition reeled in more than 8,000 signatures.
But in the end, it was what Finkelstein shared on her Instagram Stories account—not what she actually said or wrote—that led to her termination: a seven-line tweet from January by Palestinian American performance poet Remi Kanazi that bashed Zionists. “Why should those genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist,” Kanazi wrote. “Don’t normalize Zionism. Don’t normalize Zionists taking up space.”
After an anonymous student screenshotted Finkelstein’s temporary post, alumni renewed their effort to remove Finkelstein. In January, Muhlenberg suspended her, and in May she was fired.
It was the first time since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, as The Intercept reported last week, that a tenured professor had been fired for “pro-Palestine speech.” (Finkelstein has appealed her firing and is still being paid by the college, although she’s not teaching.)
The Kanazi tweet was misleading and histrionic: The death and destruction in Gaza, however horrible they may be, do not amount to “genocide.” Since 1967, when Israel took the strip from Egypt—which previously occupied it—the population has jumped from 117,000 to 801,000 today. And the multiracial, multiethnic Israelis—with a democratically elected Knesset and independent judiciary and media—are hardly “fascists.”
But that is beside the point. It was a social media post, an opinion, and Finkelstein had every right to broadcast it to her 4,000 or so followers.
Muhlenberg firing her was “about controlling speech and shutting down dissent, and it sets a very dangerous precedent,” Finkelstein told me when we spoke earlier this week.
She added: “If we cannot critique a foreign power, if we cannot say no to genocide, then what is left?”
She made a point of distinguishing between politics and religion—Zionism and Judaism.
“Zionism is a political ideology,” Finkelstein, who turns 45 Thursday and is Jewish, explained. “Judaism is a religious and ethnic identity. Those are not the same. It’s almost the Jewish New Year. Judaism has been around for 5,700 years; Zionism, for 120.”
While it’s true that Zionism grew out of the pogroms in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century, there have been Jews in the land now controlled by the state of Israel since at least 1000 BC. What’s more, 82 percent of American Jews say Israel is “essential” or “important” to them, according to a 2021 survey. In December 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order combating antisemitism that views Zionism as central to Jewish identity. The point is: demonizing Israel, or “the Zionist entity”—as progressives call it—is not just anti-Zionist but antisemitic.
Ultimately, though, Americans have a constitutional right to scream the most hateful blather from the proverbial rooftops, and no one can—and more importantly, should—stop them. Also, nothing Finkelstein says is all that original. Her views on Israel are now progressive dogma, the likes of which Ta-Nehesi Coates has taken to spewing on breakfast TV.
Graham Piro, a fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, called Finkelstein’s termination “hugely concerning” and, echoing Finkelstein, “unprecedented.”
Alas, it’s not as unprecedented as we’d like to think.
Rather, it is in keeping with the illiberal trend that has swept campuses over the past few years. Just a week before Finkelstein was let go, the University of Pennsylvania suspended conservative legal scholar Amy Wax for “unprofessional conduct.” Among other things, Wax was guilty of arguing that America should return to a 1950s-style “bourgeois culture.”
There is something sadly ironic about all this: So-called progressives created this idiocy, with their nonsensical safe spaces and trigger warnings and microaggressions, and now other students and interest groups with a decidedly nonprogressive bent have imbibed the inanity, and it turns out no one is off-limits. Today’s campus cares more about hoovering up donations than fostering free expression, which is to say the censor is not ideological so much as corporate. All ideas and points of view that ruffle anyone—which is all of them—are potentially verboten.
It’s true that private institutions like Muhlenberg have a right to curb free expression, but they shouldn’t when they’re institutions of higher learning. We arrive at good ideas by way of less good ideas, by sorting through all the arguments and vantage points and gradually working toward some semblance of the truth. The once-great academy undermines what little status it has left by abandoning the values that once made it great.
“A college education is not necessarily designed to make you feel safe,” Anita Levy, a senior program officer at the American Association of University Professors, told me. “It’s designed to shape you as a critical thinker, and sometimes controversial views do get expressed in the classroom, and this is as it should be.”
Finkelstein indicated that she and her attorneys are considering a lawsuit against Muhlenberg. “My lawyers and I have not taken that off the table,” she said. “We’ll see what happens next.” (Oddly, a half hour after getting off the phone with me, Finkelstein, who was giving a talk in New Jersey, called me back to say that she no longer wanted to take part in my story and that she was retracting her on-the-record comments. When I asked why, she responded, “I should have taken a beat,” without offering any further explanation.)
She is not optimistic about the future of the campus or America. “We either continue on this road and find that all the so-called perceived rights and freedoms we have continue to be eroded until we are fully living under fascism,” she said, “or there is some kind of widespread critical mass of folks who refuse to go along with the status quo. I hope that it’s the latter.”
Peter Savodnik is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @petersavodnik, and read his piece, “The Kids vs. the Empire.”
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