Help us End Jew Hatred at UC Merced!

Dear friends,

We are beginning the New Year with action. Professor Abbas Ghassemi teaches in the engineering school at UC Merced. He ran a Twitter account that he filled with Jew-hating propaganda.

He shared a picture captioned "The Zionist Brain," which indulged in the worst of Jew-hating tropes. It depicted Jews as cruel, money-obsessed, and manipulative. The only difference between the image he shared and a classically anti-Semitic cartoon is that Ghassemi used the term "Zionist" instead of "Jew."

Following outcry from Jewish organizations, including members of the End Jew Hatred movement to which The Lawfare Project provides legal support, the school launched a disciplinary investigation. Micha Danzig—a board member of Herut North America, which is an End Jew Hatred partner—published an open letter to UC Merced calling on it to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism.

This is where you come in.

We are not content waiting for UC Merced to complete the investigation, and we cannot let them think the Jewish community and our allies have forgotten about this issue. Together with our partner organizations, we are calling on you, our supporters, to mobilize and demand action.

We have three demands:

• We demand accountability and consequences for Professor Ghassemi.

• We demand that UC Merced invite recognized experts to provide training on the protections afforded to Jewish students, as a minority community, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

• We demand that UC Merced adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

We have also prepared an email for you to send directly to university administration. Do not let them sweep this under the rug. We need to act NOW to End Jew Hatred at UC Merced.

Click here to send the email, and feel free to add your own comments to explain your position.

With gratitude for your support,

Brooke Goldstein
Executive Director, The Lawfare Project