When the director of the local Jewish federation first saw the hundreds of red, white and black posters plastered around the University of Rochester’s campus last weekend, an eerie comparison came to her mind.
They “looked a little bit like the ‘Kidnapped’ posters,” recalled Meredith Dragon of the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester, referring to the flyers for Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza that became prominent in the weeks after Oct. 7, 2023. “I wonder if they were designed that way in particular.”
But the Rochester posters were something else entirely. Instead of promoting visibility for Israeli victims, these posters — marked with large “WANTED” lettering — targeted members of the university community who, the unnamed protesters alleged, had some form of ties to Israel. They stood accused of crimes ranging from “genocide” to “racism” and “intimidation.”
Out of more than a dozen individuals on the posters, according to Dragon, at least half were Jewish. Those included Iddo Netanyahu, brother of the Israeli prime minister, who is a physician at a branch of the university hospital system more than 70 miles away from the upstate New York campus. (The posters accuse him of “committing war crimes” during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when he served in the Israeli military, according to the Times of Israel.)
They also included the director of the university Hillel, Joy Getnick — in a rare instance of a Hillel director being targeted by pro-Palestinian protesters by name. Getnick stood accused of “racism,” “hate speech” and “intimidation,” owing to what the poster’s makers claimed were some remarks she had made toward protesters.
University officials condemned the posters as “vandalism” that had the goal “to intimidate members of our university community.” A separate statement Tuesday from school president Sarah Mangelsdorf, who is not Jewish but was also named by the posters, added, “We view this as antisemitism, which will not be tolerated at our University.”
Rochester’s Hillel also called the posters antisemitic. So did Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Jewish U.S. Senate majority leader from New York, who wrote on the social network X that he had urged a university investigation and added, “Those responsible must be held fully accountable. These actions must be condemned loudly.”
Campus pro-Palestinian protests have been commonplace since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war more than a year ago, and some have also gone as far as to target Jewish institutions like Hillel specifically. But local Jewish leaders said the Rochester posters were ominous in part because, rather than targeting the university or Jewish institutions more broadly, they employed the names and faces of specific people.
That, some said, represented an escalation in protest tactics and a new threat against Jews on campus.
“I think what is most significant about this is the targeting of people,” Getnick said. “It is one thing to target ideas. It is another thing to target specific humans, particularly disproportionately Jewish faculty and staff, which is targeting people because they are Jewish.”
Getnick added that, because the posters had targeted her personally as the Hillel director, the action “creates an environment in which it is harder for Jewish student life to thrive.” The only other recorded instance of pro-Palestinian protesters targeting a campus Hillel director by name took place at Baruch College, in New York City, in September. Activists say they target Hillel because it facilitates campus Israel programs and because its parent organization, Hillel International, has strict protocols against partnering with anti-Zionist groups.
The skyline of Rochester, N.Y. (Getty Images)
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the Rochester posters. The campus chapter of the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace said it was not behind them, but added, in an Instagram post, that it did not believe the posters were antisemitic.
“These posters highlighted Jewish and non-Jewish administrators and professors and explicitly condemned their support for the Israeli military and government,” the group wrote. “It is not, however, antisemitic to criticize the Israeli government and military that is committing war crimes.”
The posters include a range of accusations, many of which center around a partnership between the city of Rochester and Modi’in, Israel (which some of the posters erroneously claim is a West Bank settlement). Funded by the Jewish Agency for Israel and facilitated by the Rochester federation, the program involves exchanges of students and educators from the two cities, including in the public school system.
Getnick’s participation on a committee dealing with the partnership was one of the knocks against her on the “WANTED” poster, which claimed that by participating in the program, the Hillel leader was “directly complicit in the displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank, upholding the settler colonial government in occupied Palestine.”
In July, Mangelsdorf wrote an essay defending her decision to remove an encampment at the school while expressing relief that only one student was arrested over the protests.
“This year, our students were not only protesting governmental actions and inactions but also against each other,” Rochester’s president reflected at the time. She concluded, “Protests are a part of campus life and of democracy. They can be an important catalyst for change, but they should not paralyze our campuses, interfering with the basic goals of the university to engage in teaching, learning and scholarly and creative work.”
Under President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming second term, campuses are expected to be under additional pressure to crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters. Asked about how university administrators have handled the posters, Getnick said by email, “I hope that the University will use this opportunity to reflect on what is needed to instill meaningful education about Jewish Peoplehood and antisemitism, so that UR is a place where Jewish life can fully thrive.”
Dragon told JTA that the university and its public safety department “are taking this very seriously” and will “utilize the legal system” to hold perpetrators accountable.
For Dragon, who was the victim of a different, vulgar targeted harassment campaign this spring by local Green Party pro-Palestinian activists, the posters were also a potential harbinger of protests to come.
“I think that Rochester is being used as a testing ground to see if this is the next iteration of what’s going to happen on college campuses,” she said, adding that she was urging the university “to act decisively and swiftly when they find out who did this.”
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