At least 300 students have been prohibited from registering for classes at Northwestern University because they refused to watch a controversial antisemitism training video that they said was biased in favor of Israel, contained factual inaccuracies and could inflame campus tension over Gaza.
Students objecting to the video say it equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. At one point the narrator compares critics of Israel to former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, and uses a controversial definition of antisemitism.
The video also states that Israel was founded “on British land” and refers to the occupied West Bank as “Judea and Samaria”, the biblical name controversially used for the region by the Israeli government.
The training module’s opponents at Northwestern, many of them Jewish, say the material does little to protect Jews. Instead, it “reinforces, rather than reduces, the proliferation of discriminatory bias in our communities”, students wrote in an open letter.
The Northwestern training was produced by the Jewish United Fund (JUF) , a pro-Israel advocacy group that Micol Bez, a student organizer, said has opposed a ceasefire. In a statement, the JUF defended the video.
”There is a critical difference between criticizing policies of the state of Israel versus questioning Israel’s right to exist – and demonizing Jewish students for their connections to Israel,” a spokesperson said.