Since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out, American Jews have been bitterly divided. The debate has been particularly intense on college campuses, where students and faculty who participate in Palestinian solidarity actions have found themselves targeted for punishment by their own schools, and in some cases, by the Trump administration.
In the case of faculty members, a recent case at Muhlenberg College caught the attention of Sarah Viren, New York Times Magazine correspondent and Arizona State University professor, who wrote a piece for the magazine called "A Professor Was Fired for Her Politics. Is That the Future of Academia?" It tells the story of Maura Finkelstein.
Finkelstein, who is both Jewish and an outspoken supporter of Palestine, taught a class on Palestine at Muhlenberg, which has a very significant population of Jewish students. Finkelstein also, critically, had tenure. And for a while, the school’s leadership seemed to consider Finkelstein’s activism to be an important part of campus discourse.
But then, in October 2023, Hamas attacked Israel. The president of Muhlenberg condemned the attacks — and as Viren wrote in her New York Times piece, that’s when everything changed for Finkelstein.
Viren joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: After Oct. 7, the head of Muhlenberg sent out an all-campus email denouncing the attacks by Hamas. And Finkelstein then replied all to that email, so sent a response that went to every student. Tell us what happened after that?
SARAH VIREN: Yeah. So she said, you know, in some ways this situation is more complicated than it's been made out to be. And she called Gaza an open air prison and said a number of things in this sort of reply all to the campus.
And that ended up being the sort of incident that kind of put her on the map in a larger way. From the people I talked to, it seemed to be not as much a student-driven charge to get her fired as it was alumni and outsiders.
There was a huge Change.org petition started by some alumni, but signed by lots of outsiders calling on her to be fired. And so that original reply all email was one of the first ways that she sort of came to the attention of people outside of the college.
And I think really it was part of what led to then that the really, really concerted campaign to get her fired after that.
DINGMAN: Yes. Well, that is the part of this that's really interesting to me is she sent this email. Then she invited her students to have a frank discussion about it in the next instances of her class.
You spoke to some of her students who said that those discussions were had and that they were by and large, it sounds like respectful and thoughtful and not necessarily inflamed in any particular direction.
And yet, because of the publicity she had generated by virtue of sending this email, what she ends up actually getting fired for, if I'm not mistaken, is not the email or the things she said in the email, but an Instagram post, right?
VIREN: Yeah. I mean, there are various administrators at colleges that have to sort of when they field complaints about somebody like Maura, in this case, they have to sort of decide, OK, when is something that she said when does it make people feel unsafe versus uncomfortable? And I think that a lot of things that she said made people feel uncomfortable, either outsiders or students. But what the college said throughout the fall, she had various social media posts.
She said, you know, she talked about the Gazan war in class. And there were lots of complaints. But the college always said, well, as far as we can tell, you know, doing our investigations, etc.. The students are maybe uncomfortable by this, but they're not unsafe and discomfort is actually a part of learning.
And so then this all happened in the fall after Oct. 7 and the very, very start of the spring semester. Maura had come back home and was sort of watching the news from Gaza. And she's, you know, from talking with her, what she told me is that she's just felt very distressed over the rising death toll.
So she was at home alone, and she reposted a Palestinian poet's post to her Instagram Stories. It spoke specifically about Zionists, so those that support Zionism, and it specifically said, we should exclude Zionists as we would any other racists. And so she reposted that without comment to her Instagram stories. And it was there for 24 hours. And in that time the college saw it. And that was the reason she was investigated, the sole reason she was investigated, and also the sole reason she was fired.
DINGMAN: Right. The origins of tenure, part of the thought process behind it was to make sure that things professors do in their private lives don't have bearing on their academic careers.
VIREN: Yeah. And it's really interesting. I mean, not interesting for Maura because this was her life. But it's you know, when we're thinking about these issues, is that what the college argued in the end, was that because she said Zionists, which are people, and because she had students who are, who identify as Zionists, that they could potentially read that repost as talking about them, and it's really messy because then, you know, it probably don't have time to get into sort of civil rights discrimination law.
But, you know, an ongoing part of the debate right now is also whether Zionist belief is part of a protected class. And this gets down to this question, the stories also exploring about Jewish identity.
DINGMAN: One of the reasons it's interesting to me to hear about these elements of Maura's personality, where it seems like she was really interested in figuring out exactly where the line was in terms of what she could speak about and post about.
I suppose as a member of the faculty, that would suggest to me if I were, you know, sketching out a character profile in my mind, that she was going to be somebody who was going to fight for her continued ability to make those statements and publicize those ideas as a member of the faculty.
But what happens at the end of your story is really remarkable to me, which is that even after she finds out that having been fired, there's going to be a review of her firing and she ends up resigning. Why did she do that?
VIREN: Yeah. Well, so I think it's complicated. So what happened is that this faculty governance, this thing that's kind of essential to academic freedom. It had been sort of sidestepped by the administration, which is the real fear that schools will not adhere to this idea of faculty governance. And so they hadn't at Muhlenberg.
But then they in the end, there was this kind of review by the faculty, which is what we hope for in cases like this. And so that faculty group, this committee, they came back and they said, you know, this school messed up. It needs to be reconsidered. And the college president, in an ideal world, would sort of follow the guidance of faculty.
But from the, the ultimate determination letter that the president had was going to release, it seems like she planned to reject the recommendations of her faculty committee, which means that Maura probably would have been fired or in some ways was forced to resign.
DINGMAN: But it does seem like she feels like she will be able to speak with greater freedom outside of the academia than she was within it.
VIREN: Yeah. I mean, to me, it felt kind of like a tragedy, I think, when where I say near the end of the article that, you know, that decision of her to resign, I think probably being forced to resign came after we saw all these attacks on higher education and various universities, including ASU, where I work.
And also we were starting to see what they would talk about as the brain drain, like they talk in the story about how, you know, during the the rise of Nazism in Europe that we had so many amazing thinkers that came to the U.S., because of these attacks on both freedom and academic freedom there and people's lives.
But we're seeing what some people are calling a reverse brain drain, where people are leaving the U.S. for colleges and universities in Canada or Europe. But people are also and I've seen this from other professors. I know people are just leaving the academia.
And so Maura in some ways, as an example of that, this is somebody yeah, she was forced out. I think that seems to be the case. But it's also that she's saying that those protections that have been there now for 100 years, that they're, they're no longer protecting faculty like they used to. And that feels to me like the scariest part of all of this.
