The University of Rochester in New York is investigating after hundreds of “wanted” posters targeting Jewish faculty and staff were posted on campus over the weekend.
University President Sarah Mangelsdorf said the posters were “disturbing, divisive and intimidating” and that they run “counter to our values as a university,” NBC News reported.
The university’s public safety director, Quchee Collins, said that the posters were found Sunday night across campus, including in classrooms.
The school’s Hillel chapter said the posters “disproportionally singled out Jewish faculty and staff and used language that spreads harmful, antisemitic ideas about Jewish people,” WROC reported.
One such poster accused a target of “racism, hate speech, [and] intimidation” and is “directly complicit in the displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank.”
Hillel said that no students were targeted in the posters.
University officials quickly stripped the posters and launched an investigation. No one has claimed responsibility for the posters, but the university’s chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace said it is not ” antisemitic to criticize the Israeli government and military that is committing war crimes” without noting that the posters did not target the Israeli government or military but staff and faculty at an American university.
The University of Rochester, like several other institutations of higher education, has strugged with student protests against Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza after the terrorist organization launched an attack more than year ago that killed more than 1,200 people. Hamas is believed to be holding around 100 people hostage, according to The Associated Press.
Israel launched a full out war against Hamas in response, while Hamas continues to fire missiles into Israel. Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah also fires missiles into Israel, and Israel has responded with attacks of its own targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The Israeli attacks in Gaza have killed at least 40,000 people and driven countless others from their homes while destroying large swaths of the territory.
Students across the country have launched protests against the Israeli war, sometimes, as with these “wanted” posters, veering away from targeting the Israeli government and military. They have demanded a ceasefire in Gaza and that universities divest of any investments in Israel, often by blocking school buildings and preventing normal daily activities.
Last spring, students at the University of Rochester built a tent encampment and shuttered administration offices for two days until campus security removed the encampment.
US Senator Chuck Schumer of New York — who is Jewish — condemned what he called “the loathsome actions of those who put up these wanted posters,” WROC said
“Any attempt — any attempt — to threaten or target someone simply because of their Jewish identity is antisemitism, plain and simple,” he wrote. “I condemn these cheap antisemitic bully tactics, and urge all of us to work together so we may root out antisemitism wherever it rears its ugly head.”
Gregory Heyworth, a English and computer science professor who was one of the targets of the posters, told the Democrat and Chronicle that increasing violence against Jews in the United States and Europe had prompted him to have serious conversations with his 11-year-old child about the situation.
“The subtext of a ‘wanted’ poster, after all, is the unwritten part ‘… dead or alive,'” Heyworth said. “It contains an implied message to eliminate, arrest, segregate, or kill. Even the colors of the posters ― red, white and black ― are not accidental: those are the colors of the Nazis, as well as of radical revolutionaries.”
Meredith Dragon, who heads the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester, told WHEC that her “first reaction was on of just disbelief.”
“Regardless of whether somebody is Jewish or not, the kinds of things that people are accused of, you know, are still anti-Semitic tropes, whether somebody is Jewish or not,” Dragon said. “So, you know, the tone and, and the misinformation, the disinformation and really the call to incite violence, irrespective of whether somebody is Jewish or not.”
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[Featured image: WHEC screenshot]
