The founder of Mothers Against College Antisemitism advised the group’s over 61,000 followers to take advantage of a new executive order allowing the deportation of Hamas supporters.
The founder of Mothers Against College Antisemitism advised the group’s over 61,000 followers to take advantage of a new executive order allowing the deportation of Hamas supporters.
The founder of Mothers Against College Antisemitism advised the group’s over 61,000 followers to take advantage of a new executive order allowing the deportation of Hamas supporters.
The day after the presidential inauguration last month, Elizabeth Rand, the founder of an organization called Mothers Against College Antisemitism — or MACA — posted a note to the more than 61,000 members of the affiliated Facebook group notifying them that: “We now have an executive order authorizing the deportation of foreign students who support Hamas.” She advised followers to take advantage of it and to file complaints against students and faculty members who supported Hamas’s efforts, providing a link to a tip line for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
If her critics were aghast, Ms. Rand, a Manhattan lawyer, did not see this call to exile as especially inflammatory. She had not clicked on the link herself, she said, as a means of explanation and would not even “know who to report.” Rather, in her view, she was simply providing a solution for worried parents who believed their children might be studying alongside nefarious foreign actors. “If you have a situation where your student is being harassed or threatened by a student on a visa, this is a tool,” she told me. “Whether people do it or not is up to them.”
Inspired by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Ms. Rand created her Facebook group, which has since evolved into a nonprofit, two years ago in the wake of the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. The controversy around her has emerged more recently. Last month, leaders of the Association of Jewish Studies, a scholarly group, wrote to a dean at Oberlin College in Ohio to express concerns about attacks from MACA members and others on a professor who taught a class called “Jews and Power.” The letter noted that the campaign waged against him had set “a very dangerous precedent” that threatened the academic freedom of the entire Oberlin community.
It is at New York University, though, where Ms. Rand has a son in his freshman year, that she has become particularly divisive. Since the fall, students and faculty members have grown increasingly aggrieved over the attention she and her organization have been given by administrators, in particular the university’s president, Linda Mills, who has seemed indifferent to their own concerns about the school’s affiliations with Israel.
This latest chapter in discord began in mid-December, during finals, in the aftermath of two days of relatively quiet pro-Palestinian protest at Bobst Library, the tall, blocky sandstone building overlooking Washington Square. Roughly 50 students and a few faculty members were involved in a series of actions that included a sit-in on the 12th floor, where the offices of top administrators are found. This site was expressly chosen to reiterate longstanding demands from students to discuss disclosure of the university’s interests in Israel and the possibility of divestment from them.
The demands again went unmet. There were some banner drops, a “study-in,” during which Palestinian writing was read, and some picketing outside the library. Still, the police arrived and eight arrests were made. Though all the charges were quickly dropped or adjourned for dismissal, 13 students were suspended for a period between six and 18 months while three faculty members who participated had their access to certain buildings restricted, one of them saying that she was not given a sufficient reason for the cutoff. John Beckman, the chief spokesman for the university, described the protests as disruptive.