An Israeli scholar whose job offer to lead the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies was abruptly put on hold this week said he is still considering a faculty appointment.
The U’s decision came after two members of the Holocaust center’s board resigned and a local Jewish advocacy group sent out an action alert, calling attention to a controversial article Segal published shortly after the start of the Gaza war.
But Raz Segal and many other scholars said the U’s about-face raises questions about political interference in the academic hiring process.
By Wednesday afternoon, a petition asking university officials to allow Segal’s job offer to proceed had garnered more than 200 signatures from scholars and researchers across the country.
Sumanth Gopinath, an associate professor of music theory who is president of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Sahan Journal that rescinding Segal’s directorship offer would have a “chilling effect” on faculty, students, and staff.
“It shows that the central administration can side with outside groups when those groups demand actions that violate academic freedom,” Gopinath said.
A job offer, and a ‘pause’ in the process
On June 5, Segal received a job offer to lead the U’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
An Israeli historian who currently teaches at Stockton University in New Jersey, Segal looked forward to the opportunity to build collaborative relationships across Minnesota’s Jewish, Indigenous, and refugee communities.
But on June 10, Segal received a letter from the university’s interim president, Jeff Ettinger. The letter informed Segal that the university had paused the process for selecting the center’s director.
“In the past several days, additional members of the University community have come forward to express their interest in providing perspective on the hiring of the position of Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies,” the university said in a statement that same day. “Because of the community-facing and leadership role the Director holds, it is important that these voices are heard. Our focus is on the mission of the Center. Accordingly, the Interim President has paused the Director selection process to allow an opportunity to determine next steps.”
“People have told me that they can’t remember a case where a university president has withdrawn an offer of employment that followed an absolutely legitimate search process,” Segal told Sahan Journal in an interview.
The pause of the hiring process came after two of the Center’s 14 advisory board members resigned in protest of Segal’s appointment, an article in TC Jewfolk, and an action alert from the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.
The June 9 action alert, asking JCRC members to email university leadership to rescind Segal’s appointment, described Segal as a “prominent anti-Zionist professor.” The action alert generated hundreds of emails, said Ethan Roberts, deputy executive director of JCRC.
“Outrageously, Segal accused Israel of genocide on Oct. 13, 2023,” the action alert read. “His debunked extremist views include calling Israel a ‘settler-colonial power’ and dismissing concerns about campus antisemitism. This person is plainly unfit to lead this venerable Minnesota institution.”
On June 11, JCRC announced that Ettinger had invited the group to meet with him and had promised more community involvement in the search process going forward. “Clearly, we’ve been heard,” the group said in a post to its website.
Roberts said in an interview that it was important for the university to involve “representative voices within the Jewish community” in the search process. He described the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies as an important partner for JCRC, which has worked with the group on state laws requiring education on the Holocaust and other genocides. Because the director role is so public-facing, he said, the process merited more public engagement.
“The more responsibilities that a position has to the broader community, the more important it is to bring in the broader community in choosing that person,” Roberts said.
But withdrawing Segal’s offer to direct the center sparked a backlash, too. The petition asking the U to reconsider its decision called the move “an outrageous violation of both academic freedom and the integrity of the faculty hiring process, dictated by protests from a handful of faculty and outside groups.”
The University of Minnesota Twin Cities chapter of the American Association of University Professors, an academic freedom advocacy group, also sent a letter to university leadership, expressing alarm and urging the university to continue with the normal hiring process.
“By overriding the College’s job offer to Professor Segal, the central administration has rewarded the brinkmanship of two faculty members acting outside the norms of acceptable faculty conduct, overruled a comprehensive faculty-led process of evaluating candidates for this position, and violated established policy and precedent regarding collegiate hiring practices,” the letter read.
And Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations- Minnesota, told Sahan Journal he planned to ask Ettinger for a meeting too. “For an expert like that to be treated in this manner is extremely troubling,” he said.
Segal, who is Jewish and Israeli, described the pushback against him as a “crude silencing campaign.”
He said the same day the university announced its pause of the director position, he received a call from the university provost offering him an academic position in the history department without the directorship of the center. He said he is still interested in the academic position, though he has not yet received a revised job offer.
“But I do think that the university has made a terrible mistake here,” Segal said. He hoped the university would offer him the full job, as it was originally intended, he said. “Otherwise, this would be legitimizing the silencing, the intimidation, the interference in the hiring process, and everything that comes with it.”
An Israeli Holocaust scholar criticizes his home country
Segal grew up in Israel, the grandson of Holocaust survivors on both sides of his family. He recalled speaking to his grandparents about their stories when he was young. But his professional interest in genocide was sparked when he was traveling in India, shortly before beginning a master’s program at Tel Aviv University. He encountered the Arundhati Roy essay “The Greater Common Good” at a bookstore, and read about the construction of large dams in India and the “destruction of Indigenous groups.”
It was a lightbulb moment for Segal.
“I never thought about genocide in this way at all,” he said.
Segal’s master’s thesis, which focused on the Holocaust in a small Jewish community in the Carpathian Mountains, opened with a quote from that essay. The intersections of different communities’ histories have been key to his intellectual trajectory, he said.
“The perspective of survivors, and those who face state violence, has always been front and center in my research,” he said.
Segal is the author of two books about the Holocaust in Hungary, and leads the master’s program in Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University.
More recently, though, he has gained attention for his statements about the current war in Gaza. On October 13, he published an article in Jewish Currents, a progressive Jewish magazine, describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide.”
This article and its timing — coming just six days after the militant group Hamas staged a brutal attack on Israel, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and capturing 240 hostages — were at the center of much of the criticism of Segal’s appointment.
“If I think about really great scholarship, it’s thoughtful, it’s measured, it’s not snap judgments,” JCRC’s Roberts said. “How on earth he could have made a decision it was textbook case of genocide, six days after October 7, as an academic, is absolutely astounding to everyone.”
Segal said he sees warning of genocide in early stages as a professional duty, in keeping with the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
“We have a professional obligation as scholars here to raise the alarm when we seek clear indications of the risk of genocide,” he said.
By October 13, he said, he had already seen many indicators of genocide, including expressing intent and dehumanizing language. An IDF spokesperson had said that the Israeli military was focused on “maximum damage” rather than accuracy.
“Eight months into this, Israel has done what it told us it will do,” Segal said. “I would have been overjoyed to be absolutely wrong.”
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, Israel has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians in the war that began October 7. Segal also pointed to other indicators of genocide since his October 13 article: the destruction of schools, universities, churches, mosques, agricultural fields, bakeries, museums, libraries, and archives. In January, the International Court of Justice found it “plausible” that Israel has committed acts that violate the genocide convention, though it stopped short of ordering a ceasefire.
“Unfortunately, and very, very sadly, it was very clear to me as a scholar of the Jewish world, as a scholar of the Holocaust, as a person who thinks first and foremost about Holocaust survivors and accounts of Holocaust victims, what we’re seeing in front of our eyes is the beginning of an unfolding genocidal assault,” Segal said.
Since his rescinded appointment became public, Segal said, he had received hundreds of emails from community members in Minnesota and around the country. That outpouring showed him the potential for building collaborative relationships in the Twin Cities, he said. But he’d also heard from people in the university community who saw an “incredibly dangerous precedent” in the “silencing of a scholar and of scholarship on purely political grounds.”
Challenging times for Jewish students
Roberts pointed to a challenging year for Jewish students and faculty at the University of Minnesota. Bias reports at the University of Minnesota more than doubled in the 2023-24 school year compared to the previous year, according to data collected by the Star Tribune. A third of the reported incidents pertained to antisemitism or Israel, though only about 1 to 2% of undergraduate university students are Jewish, Roberts said.
He also criticized the university’s response to a pro-Palestine encampment. University officials negotiated an agreement to consider pro-Palestine protesters’ demands to end a nearly 10-day encampment, a rare peaceful resolution as campuses throughout the country grappled with mass protests for Palestine. But Jewish students who had been asking the university to make commitments regarding antisemitism did not receive the same consideration, Roberts said.
But Segal’s appointment would be more damaging than all those incidents combined, Roberts said. “He’s such an extremist,” he said. “This center is so important. It needs a unifying, respected force in the field.”
Professors question academic freedom
Professors at the University of Minnesota and beyond raised questions of academic freedom in the hiring process.
Gopinath, of the U’s AAUP chapter, said that Segal’s hiring had followed a normal process that involved Zoom interviews; a search committee selecting finalists and inviting them to campus; finalist job talks; and the search committee recommending their selection to the dean.
But the administration’s actions had interrupted a normal hiring process, AAUP said in its letter.
“This intervention in a search process in the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) egregiously violates principles of academic freedom, faculty governance, and institutional norms,” the letter said.
The separate faculty petition also expressed concerns about academic freedom. Six of the seven search committee members were on the advisory board of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and the full board was invited to meet with each candidate and provide feedback on the candidate pool, the petition says.
“By overruling the faculty experts who selected Dr. Segal, the University of Minnesota’s administrators have effectively issued a vote of no confidence in its own faculty,” the petition reads. “This move endangers the University’s reputation as an internationally-renowned research institution.”
Tarnished reputations
As Segal waits for a revised job offer from the University of Minnesota, he is heading to Bulgaria for a research and writing fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
He applied for the job directing the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies because the center and the University of Minnesota have a strong reputation, he said.
But he questioned whether the university would maintain that reputation in the face of the backlash to his rescinded appointment.
He’d been hearing from many colleagues in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies — including people who disagree with his position — and many of them were “unbelievably angry” about what happened to him, he said.
“This has the potential of tarnishing the reputation of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota,” he said. “And I’m not sure that the university leadership is understanding what they’re doing.”
