‘We Don’t Need to be Genteel’

Last October a handful of George Washington University students projected slogans, including “Glory to Our Martyrs,” onto a university library named after Jewish patrons. The students said the phrase was meant to honor Palestinians killed by Israel, according to the student newspaper. But many Jewish observers read it as celebrating Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

To Elizabeth Rand, the George Washington “laser light show,” as she calls it, was more proof that antisemitism is ascendant at America’s colleges. Two days later, she started a private Facebook group for people who wanted to do something about it. Over the past six months, members of Mothers Against College Antisemitism, or MACA, have filled administrators’ inboxes and voicemails with their concerns. They’ve advocated for documentary showings to be canceled, for divestment resolutions to be rejected, and for colleges to remove antiwar encampments that have popped up across the country.

The group, which now has nearly 60,000 members, celebrates “wins” for the broader movement each week, like a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter getting placed on probation or a university investigating the removal of Israeli flags as a possible hate crime.

MACA sees its mission as protecting Jewish students from bigotry that their own colleges will not or are slow to combat. But its detractors argue that MACA sometimes unfairly targets professors or attempts to trample on legitimate speech. Those critics are suspicious of an advocacy organization outside the university attempting to influence what goes on inside it.

Rand dismisses the notion that MACA should not have a say. “We’re consumers,” she told me in an interview. “If I’m giving you $80,000 a year, you’d better behave.”

Before founding MACA, which has taken steps to become a nonprofit, Rand was not an activist. She’s a lawyer, though she didn’t want to discuss the details of her day job, which has nothing to do with Jewish causes. But then came October 7 and the flurry of campus protests, a portion of which embraced rhetoric that left some Jewish students feeling intimidated and unwelcome. Rand thought that she and other Jewish parents — her son is a high-school senior — should do more than just “complain on Facebook,” she said.

So Rand created what would become known as MACA with the explicit goal of taking collective action. “We are resolute in NOT remaining silent!” reads the group’s current description.

MACA’s growth far outpaced Rand’s expectations. She thought maybe a thousand people would join. Just four days after its creation, the group had 36,000 members, and Rand shared a thought that had come to her in the shower, a vision of what MACA could be. What if everyone called a college on the same day to demand that it stop allowing “hate speech/harassment,” and they all introduced themselves as a member of this group? And what if “we weren’t very nice about it?” Rand wrote in the Facebook group. “We can’t threaten anyone but we don’t need to be genteel either.”

That ethos permeates MACA’s activism. Its strategy is simple: Be bold. Be numerous. Most days, calls to action are shared in the group. (I joined the group at Rand’s suggestion.) Those calls sometimes include a link that auto-generates a prewritten email, ready to be sent. On a recent Sunday, a group administrator presented eight tasks, including urging Columbia University to expel a student who’d said that Zionists “don’t deserve to live” (the student, who was banned from campus, has since apologized) and thanking Emory University’s president for standing against “the hostile occupation of Emory’s campus.” (At Emory, police officers used “chemical irritants” and got physical with demonstrators while arresting them, video shows.)

Rand said she doesn’t know how many of MACA’s members participate in these calls. “But if an administrator gets a few thousand letters” about an issue, she said, “it’s impactful.”

In March, members were asked to inundate Santa Monica College with emails. A faculty member teaching an ethnic-studies course had asked students to answer, among other questions, “What are your thoughts on the ongoing destruction and genocide by Israel in Palestine?” according to a screenshot of the assignment posted in the group. Said faculty member is “peddling propaganda instead of education,” reads the auto-generated MACA email, which also took issue with some of the assigned reading. (A spokesperson for Santa Monica College confirmed the assignment and said the college received hundreds of emails on this topic, some of which seemed to be from MACA members. The president issued a statement, saying that students “have the right to take reasoned exception to concepts and theories presented in their classes.”)

Christa Noel Robbins, an associate professor of art history at the University of Virginia, said she received more than 950 of MACA’s emails accusing her of using her authority to “promote indoctrination” after she canceled a class session in solidarity with a divestment walkout.

In her email explaining her decision to her students, Robbins referenced a documentary that they had just watched about the global refugee crisis, which included information about Gaza. Her choice, Robbins wrote, “comes from my own sympathies with the people of Palestine and out of a desire to see them live freely.” She held a make-up class session two weeks later.

The Jefferson Council, a group formed by UVA alumni, first published Robbins’s email as part of a series that highlights the supposed “wokeness” of certain professors. It worried that her “one-sided political advocacy contributes to a hostile environment for Jewish students.” When I asked Robbins about potentially alienating students who hold divergent opinions, she noted that, in her email, she told students that she did not expect their views to align with hers and that she welcomed discussion of the topic. “The classroom is a space where everybody is articulating their points of view,” she told me, “including professors.”

Members of MACA argued that, rather than facilitating discussions about curriculum, Robbins had put forward her own biases and “misinformation.” They urged the university to consider firing Robbins. (In an email, a university spokesperson said that prior to the walkout, the provost had asked deans to remind professors that course instruction “was expected to continue.” A report of a class cancellation “in contravention of that expectation” is under investigation. Robbins said she received no such reminder. She also said she met with the dean to discuss potential discipline but that ultimately it was not pursued.)

Robbins is concerned about what she called “very well-coordinated political entities” attempting to shut down conversation about Palestine by alleging antisemitism. (The American Association of University Professors has raised the same concern — not about MACA specifically but about “powerful campus outsiders” who, in the organization’s view, want to curtail acceptable political critique.) “The purpose is to silence us,” Robbins said.

From MACA’s perspective, some professors should be silenced, or at least made to practice far more discretion than they’ve shown. During our conversation, Rand said she did not understand why some faculty members who teach a subject like math, for example, feel the need to make inflammatory comments about Israel. “What does that have to do with anything? It’s just ridiculous,” she said. Rand also pointed to examples like a Cornell University history professor who called October 7 “exhilarating” in a speech. (He’s since apologized.) Or the Stanford University lecturer who, according to one account, told freshmen that Hamas’s assault was justified and singled out Jewish students in some kind of pedagogical exercise meant to impugn Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (The lecturer, whose contract was not renewed, has sued the university.)

As Rand sees it, MACA acts defensively. “We don’t seek out people unless they’re doing something that’s truly antisemitic,” she said. When I asked her for her views on free-speech principles, she echoed the same idea. “I don’t want to shut everybody down,” she said. “But I do want to shut down obvious antisemitism.”

But what is “obvious antisemitism” and what is merely speech — whether in lectures or during classroom conversations — that, while offensive to some, should be allowed, or even encouraged, on a college campus?

In March, a few MACA members urged others to oppose what they deemed to be a “pro-terror” panel at Binghamton University. Three scholars at the university planned to draw parallels between the Armenian and Assyrian genocides and “the ongoing genocide/atrocities committed against Gazans,” according to a description.

An email addressed to Binghamton leaders and to public officials was shared in the Facebook group. The email, which is more than 1,800 words long and full of footnotes, criticizes the panel’s “Orwellian mischaracterization of the word ‘genocide’” and demands that the university’s president outline steps he will take to remove “hate-mongering, antisemitism, and a pro-terrorism ideology” from Binghamton’s “staff, curricula, and lectures.”

Kent F. Schull, who directs the university’s Center for Middle East and North Africa Studies, a sponsor of the panel, was supposed to moderate the discussion. In the lead-up to the event, Schull said that some colleagues had also raised concerns about the panel’s framing. He said he told them that the term “genocide” is “part of the conversation right now. We have the court case in front of the ICJ, the International Court of Justice. This is part of the global discourse. We need to be a part of it.”

Schull did not hear from MACA directly. But the day before the panel a friend forwarded Schull a petition opposing it — its text is the same as the email MACA members were asked to send. Schull found the petition “unsettling” and said it was a “mischaracterization of what we’re doing.” Because of the pushback, one panelist felt unsafe participating, he said. Plus, another panelist was sick. Canceling seemed like the best thing to do.

In the Facebook group, MACA members took a victory lap. “The power of emails,” one person observed. “Proof is in the results.”

According to Hillel International, antisemitic incidents on college campuses soared after October 7. Some Jewish students are “afraid to go out of their dorm room. They’re afraid to walk on campus. They’re afraid to have a Jewish symbol on a necklace,” said Leonard Saxe, a professor of contemporary Jewish studies at Brandeis University who, along with colleagues, surveyed Jewish students about their perceptions of hostility on campus. “The question that I would ask, especially of my colleagues who believe in unfettered free speech,” said Saxe, is, “Would you accept … the same kinds of feelings of intimidation if the target of the intimidation is a member of another group?”

Many MACA members have expressed gratitude for a forum in which they can share their fears freely. A common post in the group is from a parent asking about a particular college’s level of hostility toward Jews, or requesting advice. Someone wanted to know if any currently enrolled students hung mezuzahs on their door frames. (There have been reported incidents of Jewish students’ dorm-room doors being graffitied or set on fire.)

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Though there are points of consensus, the group is not monolithic. There’s active debate — about politics, about DEI, and about tactics. Recently, one member argued against trying to cancel a screening of the documentary Israelism, in which two young American Jews find their idealism about Israel challenged after witnessing the country’s treatment of Palestinians. In a different post, a member cautioned that while “far left” professors promote their political views in the classroom, many others do not, and many students are staying out of the fray. “Your kids will be successful. Please don’t make them fear the world,” she cautioned. Some took her point to heart, while many others said she was downplaying how bad things are.

Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, who directs the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh, is in the Facebook group, though she’s not a very active member. Murtazashvili is from Pittsburgh. Her bat mitzvah was at the Tree of Life synagogue, the site of a 2018 mass shooting that claimed 11 lives, the deadliest attack on Jews in the United States. The concerns expressed by parents in MACA are “extremely real,” she said.

“People don’t want to give up on these institutions,” Murtazashvili said. “They invested in them. They have their children there. Right? They want these places to do better.”

As for MACA’s activism, though Murtazashvili described herself as a free-speech absolutist and personally would not advocate for canceling events, she also said that sending emails and posting on social media are now completely typical methods for raising awareness about one’s campus cause.

“In the broad panoply of protest culture,” she said, “what I’m seeing from these parents is pretty anodyne.”

Some on the other end of MACA’s megaphone feel differently.

In February, Rand shared a clip that had been circulating on pro-Israel social-media accounts of a pro-Palestine protest at Hunter College. It shows a demonstrator leading a chant, telling “Jews on campus” to “pick a side.” Rand encouraged MACA members to go to the college’s Instagram page and make their displeasure known. “Don’t use any canned language,” Rand instructed. “Just let it rip.”

Let rip, they did. MACA members inundated the comments of a post celebrating an award to Heba Gowayed, a Hunter College sociologist, for her book, Refuge, which is about displaced Syrians. Many of their comments expressed disappointment, anger, and disgust with Hunter College — “What an antisemitic snake farm!” wrote one person — but some of them targeted Gowayed, who told me she had not attended the protest that MACA members were upset about.

One person called Gowayed a “rabid antisemite” who has “no business teaching anything.” Another said it’s “shameful” that someone who “spews hatred against Jews on social media every day” was awarded a prize named for a Jewish sociologist, Mirra Komarovsky, the daughter of Zionists. (Gowayed is vocally pro-Palestine on her X account. She said in an email that she is “quite deliberate” with her language and does not tolerate antisemitism.)

One Instagram commenter called Gowayed a “terrorist,” adding, “Maybe she would like the Gaza treatment the Jewish women are receiving. #maca.” (All comments on the post have been removed.)

When Gowayed first scrolled through the vitriol, it scared her, she told me in a phone interview, which she thinks is the goal. “The point of the group is fear. Right? It’s not conversation. It’s not communication. It’s not an attempt to create safe spaces,” she said. “On the contrary, what it does is it attempts to antagonize people for their right to speech, for their academic freedom, for their voices.”

Gowayed, who is Egyptian American, also said it felt like MACA members were eager to attack that post, which included her photo, because of her name and her skin tone. Commenters did “not give second thoughts to who this human being is, or to my humanity,” she said.

Rand says that MACA’s Instagram “sting” had nothing to do with Gowayed’s race, or with Gowayed at all. Whenever the group deployed this tactic, members typically commented on a college’s most recent post. “It could have been a picture of a building,” Rand said. “It could have been a picture of a bird.”

I started to press Rand about Gowayed’s accusation of racism. She cut me off: “I don’t give a flying — you know. I don’t care. So if you think you’re going to get me to say, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ I’m not saying it.”

Saying sorry is not the point of MACA. The point, as Rand sees it, is to slow the avalanche of antisemitism she believes is engulfing Jewish students. When I asked Rand about professors’ feeling intimidated by the group, she said, “We all feel intimidated, spending $80,000 a year to send our kids someplace where they have to hide in the library, or they’re being pushed and shoved, or they can’t get into their classes, or there are swastikas in the bathroom.”

If those professors — the ones who, in Rand’s view, are spreading lies — don’t like it, she has some advice: “Let them shut up.”