Editor’s note: After publication, Yale made public that the Yale Women’s Center, a student-run organization, had voted within the last week, before students left for spring break, to cancel the event described in this piece.
On April 5, the Yale Women’s Center will kick off its annual conference, and this time will feature antisemitic guest speakers.
The YWC group is housed and funded by Yale and bears the university name. It purports to represent women on campus, providing menstrual and sexual products in an office staffed by students around the clock. Yale’s Office of LGBTQ Resources promotes itself as the center as a place of belonging. The topic of their conference, in their words, will be “pinkwashing and feminism in Palestine.”
More accurately, the conference will promote pinkwashing, misogyny and Jew-hatred in Gaza, using Yale’s campus and money.
First on the program is Ghadir Shafie, the co-director of the Palestinian Feminist Center for Sexual and Gender Freedoms. She openly supports the antisemitic boycott, divestment, sanctions movement and defends its co-founder, Omar Barghouti. In 2022, she said, “There can be no free Palestine without queer liberation.”
Of course, we know that the very notion of “queers for Palestine” is akin to that of “chickens for KFC.” Tel Aviv hosts gay pride parades, whereas homosexuality is punished with jail time in Gaza and by death in the West Bank.
The keynote address will be given by Sa’ed Atshan, another supporter of boycotting, divesting from and sanctioning Israel. A professor of anthropology at Swarthmore College, Atshan has propagated the falsehood that Israel was using white phosphorus in Gaza. In support of Hamas and the goals of its Oct. 7 massacred of Israeli civilians, he was already calling for a ceasefire just six days after it occurred.
“Let us not let the Zionists shape the narratives,” Atshan said in 2014. At the time, he was the adviser to the Tufts chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, the organization largely responsible for the rise of campus antisemitism since Oct. 7. He also called Birthright Israel, an organization that allows Jews to reconnect with their heritage by visiting Israel, “deeply racist.”
Isis Nusair will follow Atshan with a lecture on “gendered, racialized, and sexualized torture by the Israeli military in Gaza,” which she claims has been ongoing since 1948. She, too, has endorsed the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel and signed onto a call to boycott Israeli academic institutions.
The closing speaker at the conference will be Sarah Ihmoud, an anthropology professor at Holy Cross. She was rejected from a sociology position at Boston University in 2019 due to antisemitic bias in her research. She portrays Jewish Israelis as systematic rapists, describes rehabilitation of historic buildings as “Judaizing” Jerusalem and accuses Israel of “genocide” and “settler colonialism.”
The Yale Women’s Center is not alone in organizing this conference, the first full anti-Israel conference we’ve seen at Yale since Oct. 7. Three Yale University departments and centers are cosponsoring the event: the Department of American Studies, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. All four speakers are slated to present on campus.
Among the cosponsors of this “pinkwashing” conference is Faculty for Justice in Palestine and the undergraduate organization Yalies4Palestine. The latter offered nothing but justifications for the violence of Oct. 7, openly blamed Israel’s existence for Hamas’s terrorist violence against civilians and called on Yale students immediately after the massacre to “celebrate the resistance’s success.”
The Department of Anthropology and Grace Hopper College initially appeared on the list of sponsors as well, but was removed within the first day of the conference being publicized.
The Yale Friends of Israel student president reached out to the Women’s Center multiple times more than two weeks ago — long before this conference became public knowledge — to talk about including Jewish women in the center’s space and programming. The Women’s Center responded only once this conference was announced, writing in an email that it understands “the urgency in responding,” yet suggests delaying the meeting further to the “week of March 25.”
The Yale Women’s Center has not released any statement or held any event about the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7 and ongoing sexual abuse of Israeli hostages. It did, however, cosponsor an event with Yalies4Palestine on Dec. 5 about “Motherhood, Journalism, and the Gaza Genocide.” The center also endorsed Yalies4Palestine’s BDS campaign in April last year.
Yale students will hear multiple speakers from April 5 to 7 who demonize Israel, spread defamatory information and feed into antisemitic tropes. The university tacitly endorses these views by lending its name and funding to the primary organization on campus charged with defending the interests and rights of all women as it joins in the denial and glorification of rape by joining forces with Hamas supporters.
When Jewish women are raped in the name of a “free Palestine,” the anti-Israel vanguard, which the Women’s Center has proudly joined, celebrates. Are Jews expected to rely on this group for menstrual products anymore, let alone representation? The center may not even want to provide them, considering that Jews are genocidal colonizers.
Yale has done nothing — perhaps because the Women’s Center is in fact Yale. America should take careful note as future leaders and their institutions embrace pink-washers and misogynists.
Gabriel Diamond, a senior at Yale, is a research assistant at the Yorktown Institute. Sahar Tartak, a sophomore at Yale, serves on the student board of Chabad at Yale and is editor-in-chief of the Yale Free Press.
