The decision by the New Jersey School Ethics Commission to dismiss charges against the first Arab and Muslim member of the Westfield Board of Education over her allegedly antisemitic social media posts was greeted with disappointment and a vow to appeal.
The complaint was filed by the Deborah Project, a nonprofit public interest law firm based in Merion Station, Pennsylvania dedicated since 2016 to protecting Jewish civil rights in the American educational system, on behalf of local resident Stephanie Siegel.
Deborah Project Legal Director Lori Lowenthal Marcus said she planned to file an appeal in superior court challenging the ruling, adding “we remain convinced that Ms. Sahar Aziz has violated her ethical obligations to the Westfield School District.”
In a statement sent to The Jewish Link, she expressed confidence “that our position will be vindicated.”
Aziz is a distinguished professor of law and chancellor’s social justice scholar at Rutgers Law School and director of the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights, which engages in research, education and advocacy on law and policy that adversely impact the civil and human rights of America’s diverse Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities,” according to its website. The center has recently come under fire from the Jewish community for sponsoring programs spotlighting “the settler-colonization of Palestine” and others related to the West Bank and Gaza.
The complaint cited Aziz’s anti-Israel views on social media and said she had signed a public manifesto that characterized Israel as “apartheid” and refers to “racial supremacy of Jewish-Zionist nationals.” Siegel had argued that Aziz’s posts could lead to bias and threats against Jewish members of the school district.
Lowenthal Marcus had said that Siegel, a Zionist, her children, and others who share her views, were implicated as “racists” and felt attacked by Aziz.
The commission, which voted Dec. 19 to formalize the dismissal, acknowledged the statements were “controversial and likely to be perceived as offensive and hurtful to members of the district’s Jewish community as well as the Jewish community as a whole,” but they didn’t violate ethics rules because they didn’t relate to the school district. It also noted the posts were made on a private social media account and didn’t reference the district. However, it denied Azis’s request for sanctions against Siegel, ruling that the resident’s complaints weren’t frivolous.
In her defense, Aziz called the move to oust her from the schools board “punitive” and “retaliatory” because she has been an advocate to improve the district’s diversity, equity and inclusion and called the campaign against her an example of the district’s “troubling record of intolerance.” She also argued that “calls for freedom, justice and/or equality for the Palestinians or statements that criticize Israeli policies, are not the same as anti-Jewish hate,” and that “blurring” the two amounted to censorship of constitutionally protected political speech and academic freedom.
At its annual reorganization meeting in May, the Westfield board, in a surprise move, replaced Aziz as its vice president with another member by an 8-1 vote, with Aziz casting the only dissenting vote.
Several months before that at a volatile board meeting where audience members both sharply criticized and defended her, Aziz said she had been repeatedly subjected to Islamophobia during her tenure on the board and denied she was antisemitic.
IIn September 2021, Lowenthal Marcus noted that the Westfield council adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. IHRA is a non-legally binding resolution adopted by 31-member countries, including the US, stating that “antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” and cites several examples, including the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.”
Lowenthal Marcus said Aziz’s statements met the criteria for antisemitism and violated state regulations requiring education officials to refrain from making remarks that suggest apparent bias. “If Aziz simply had spoken about the opinions she has and engaged in scholarship advancing them, this would be a different case,” wrote Lowenthal Marcus in her filing to the omission. “But Aziz has publicly bound herself in writing to placing her personal opinions at the center of Westfield’s classrooms,which means placing everyone else’s opinions at the margins or beyond. That is the essence of bias.”