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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill declined comment on an Intercept article that reported that Israeli consular officials met last month with a dean about a graduate student who is teaching a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Citing two anonymous Chapel Hill professors with knowledge of the meetings, the article says that the Israeli officials accused the Ph.D. student of anti-Semitism based on her Twitter posts in support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel, and of being unfit to teach the course in question.
Anat Sultan-Dadon, consul general of Israel to the Southeast U.S., reportedly confirmed that she’d met with university officials but declined to share specifics of the meeting. U.S. Representative Kathy Manning, a Democrat from North Carolina, allegedly met with the dean of arts and sciences regarding the graduate instructor, as well, but Manning’s office did not confirm or deny this. The graduate instructor, Kylie Broderick, told The Intercept that outside challenges to academic freedom are not new, but “these people have never seen me teach, never seen my past evaluations which have said that I treat students fairly, and thus have no right to dictate what I say inside the classroom.” Criticism of Israel’s policies and actions regarding Palestinians is not in itself anti-Semitic, she said.
Sultan-Dadon in a statement said that Broderick’s comments are “not only heavily biased, but fall clearly under what is defined as antisemitic by the IHRA working definition of antisemitism,” or the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition. Broderick is teaching the course as planned this semester.
