Professors at Barnard College received identical texts from the federal government Monday with a link to a survey asking if they were Jewish.
The text messages, first reported by The Intercept, were sent to the majority of Barnard professors and are part of a review of the school conducted by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, over alleged discrimination against Jewish faculty.
The Microsoft Office form asked current and former employees of Barnard whether they identified as Jewish, Israeli, had Jewish/Israeli ancestry or “practice Judaism.”
It also asked them to indicate whether they had experienced harassment by allowing them to tick a sequence of 10 boxes that included phrases like “unwelcome comments, jokes or discussions” and “antisemitic or anti-Israeli protests, gatherings or demonstrations that made you feel threatened, harassed or were otherwise disruptive to your working environment,” according to The New York Times.
Professors said they were jarred by the federal government asking if they are Jewish, and objected to Barnard giving the government their contact information without notifying them first.
“The federal government reaching out to our personal cellphones to identify who is Jewish is incredibly sinister,” Debbie Becher, a Jewish associate professor of sociology at Barnard, told The Intercept. “They are clearly targeting what most of the United States, I hope and I think, defines as freedom of speech, but only in the case of anti-Israeli speech.”
History professor Nara Milanich, who has researched the experiences of Jews in fascist Italy, told the Times, “We’ve seen this movie before, and it ends with yellow stars.”
Serena Longley, Barnard’s general counsel, told faculty in an email Wednesday that Barnard had shared their contact information with the commission. She wrote that faculty would be given advance notice of any future requirements to share staff information unless a court order prohibited the school from doing so. She added that Barnard had been “robustly defending the college,” according to the Times.
Barnard is a women’s college affiliated with Columbia University in New York, and both have faced escalating scrutiny over pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses, which reached a peak last spring and have continued since.
The Trump administration has frozen $400 million in federal grants to Columbia over its handling of the protests, and has targeted students for deportation. In response, the school has made a litany of changes demanded by the White House, and in February, Barnard expelled two students who disrupted an Israeli history course by banging on drums, shouting “Free Palestine” and distributing fliers with a boot stomping on a Star of David.
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