The University of Minnesota is paying $250,000 to a professor whose job offer was rescinded in 2024 after backlash to his comments calling the war in Gaza a genocide.
Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, said the settlement was significant because it showed others who have faced academic repercussions for their speech about the “ongoing genocide in Palestine” that they could push back. The University of Minnesota withdrew an offer to lead its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies days after it was extended.
“We’re seeing an increase in this push and successful legal action against universities,” he said. “It’s possible to fight back and to be successful, and that shows many others that that’s a path that’s worth pursuing.”
In a statement, the University of Minnesota said it had settled all of Segal’s outstanding claims and that neither party admitted wrongdoing. “The University remains focused on advancing our core educational mission and promoting thoughtful inquiry across all of our centers, departments and programs,” it said.
Segal, who is Jewish and a dual U.S.-Israel citizen, grew up hearing stories from his Holocaust survivor grandparents. He developed an academic interest in genocide when traveling in India and reading an essay by Arundhati Roy about the destruction of Indigenous groups. He earned a master’s degree at Tel Aviv University, wrote his thesis on the Holocaust in the Carpathian Mountains and later authored two books about the Holocaust in Hungary.
In the spring of 2024, the University of Minnesota interviewed candidates to lead the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Emails obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights in a public records request show he was the clear favorite of multiple committees who reviewed candidates.
“There is almost unanimous (and enthusiastic) support for providing him a tenure home in the department should he be appointed as the CHGS director,” wrote History Department Chair Sarah Chambers to the interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Ann Waltner, in April 2024.
The search committee also named him as the favorite, noting that one committee member had called his vision “breathtaking.” They praised his international connections and fundraising skills. The committee also questioned how he might engage with others who held different points of view, but members differed in the seriousness of this concern.
On June 5, the university offered Segal the position. But two days later, two board members from the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies resigned in protest. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas sent out an email alert asking their members to contact the university to reverse the decision. In its June 9 action alert, JCRC noted that Segal had published an article describing Israel’s actions as genocide just six days after the militant group Hamas staged a brutal attack on Israel, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and capturing 240 hostages.
“Outrageously, Segal accused Israel of genocide on Oct. 13, 2023,” the June 9 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.”
Segal said that by that time, Israel was showing “unashamed expressions of intent to destroy across the political and military leadership,” bombing evacuation routes and starving Palestinians. He noted that his article also decried the mass murder in Israel as a war crime. He told Sahan Journal in 2024 that he sees warning of genocide in early stages as part of the job.
“We have a professional obligation as scholars here to raise the alarm when we seek clear indications of the risk of genocide,” he said.
Several emails released by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based legal and advocacy nonprofit whose key issues include Palestinian solidarity and fighting the criminalization of dissent, suggest some donors threatened to pull support if Segal were hired.
On June 10, Interim University President Jeff Ettinger wrote to Segal to rescind his appointment.
“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 positon [sic] of Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies,” Ettinger wrote. “Because of the community-facing and leadership role that the Director holds, it is important that these voices are heard.”
While noting that the university did not admit wrongdoing, Segal said Thursday that it had broken with its core principles.
“Under intense donor pressure of this sort, the university actually decided to completely violate its commitment to research and to truth, and of course its commitment to academic freedom, in order to make basically a calculated decision, a financial decision,” Segal said. “All of this in support of an ongoing campaign of destruction, an ongoing genocide.”
He questioned where the influence of donors would stop.
“There’s nothing to stop … donors from coming to say, well, I don’t like the way that you teach about slavery in U.S. history, I don’t like the way the biology department teaches about human evolution,” he said.
Academic freedom concerns
At the time, university faculty decried the rescinding of Segal’s appointment as an unprecedented interference into the hiring process and a violation of academic freedom. As a result, the faculty senate passed a vote of no confidence in both Ettinger and then-Provost Rachel Croson.
William Jones, the president of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities’ chapter of the American Association of University Professors and the associate chair of the history department, said Thursday he was glad to see Segal “compensated for his mistreatment,” but that the university had more work to do to restore trust.
Jones said he’d like to see a “public acknowledgement that the university was wrong in what it did, that it violated its own principles, and that this won’t happen again — that that faculty can be hired and do our jobs without fearing a political backlash, and that the university will stand up for core principles of academic freedom.”
Jaylani Hussein, executive director of CAIR-MN, said he was glad Segal had reached a settlement, but that the ordeal had damaged the reputation of both Segal and the University of Minnesota.
“It will be a black eye on the university, and I hope the professor is vindicated,” he said.
Hussein noted that not everyone was lucky enough to receive a settlement. CAIR supported a former staffer who was fired from a diversity, equity, and inclusion role at the University of Minnesota after a series of social media posts against the war in Gaza — including one photograph where she appeared next to a person whom she did not know who was holding an Israeli flag painted with swastikas. A federal judge dismissed her lawsuit; an appeal is ongoing. He said he hoped Segal’s settlement was the beginning of a trend.
‘We don’t weigh in on faculty decisions’
Ethan Roberts, deputy executive director for JCRC, said his group had worked closely with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies on developing standards to incorporate Holocaust and genocide education into Minnesota schools.
“The center has a very outward-facing role. It’s not just, students are taking classes there,” he said. “We don’t weigh in on faculty decisions. The center, however, because its mission is so intertwined with our mission, so outward-facing — it’s a partner. It needs to have credibility at the Capitol, not just on campus.”
He said JCRC objected to Segal’s characterizations of Israel’s actions in Gaza at a time of rising antisemitism on campus.
“When he wrote that piece, they were still trying to identify people who had been raped and tortured and murdered at Nova, their charred remains,” he said. “Israel was still looking for Hamas terrorists within their borders.”
Roberts said he’d alerted the community to Segal’s appointment and asked them to make their voices heard, but he said he didn’t organize donors. Ultimately, he noted, it was the university that made the decision.
A ‘crushing realization’
By June 2024, as the Segal employment dispute played out, 37,000 Palestinians had been killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and the International Court of Justice had issued three provisional rulings that it was “plausible” that Israel’s actions could amount to genocide.
Two years later, according to the United Nations, the death toll has risen to 73,000 Palestinians. In September 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars voted in favor of a resolution that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.” A wide majority — 86% — of those who voted supported the resolution. That same month, a United Nations Commission also found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.
“Israel has done exactly what it said it will do. It destroyed Gaza,” Segal said. “There has never been such a broad consensus on an unfolding case of genocide like there is about Israel’s attack on Gaza among Holocaust and genocide studies scholars, among all major human rights organizations in the world.”
Segal is dealing with a related issue at Stockton University, a public university located near Atlantic City, N.J. Earlier this week, the university removed language calling the war in Gaza a genocide from the website of the master’s program in Holocaust and genocide studies that Segal directs. The Press of Atlantic City reported that the text was removed following a complaint from the university’s largest donor. Stockton University did not respond to a request for comment.
Segal said his experience with the University of Minnesota proved a “crushing realization” that ”the universities that we trusted have revealed themselves to be intellectually and morally absolutely bankrupt.” Still, he said, “we can’t really give up on the pursuit of documented truth, on reason.”
He’d hoped to build up the institution of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota to make it more internationally relevant and significant. But two years later, the director position remains unfilled, and Segal expects it will stay that way.
“Which serious scholar would take this position?” he asked.
