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U of Minnesota Pays Pro-Palestinian Holocaust Scholar After Revoked Job Offer
The University of Minnesota agreed to pay Holocaust studies scholar Raz Segal $250,000 as part of a settlement for rescinding his hire as head of the university’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Segal, who is Israeli American, accused the institution of pulling the offer because of backlash to his comments on Israel’s war with Gaza. The week after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, he called Israel’s retaliatory actions a “textbook case of genocide” in an op-ed for the magazine Jewish Currents. The University of Minnesota offered Segal the job in June 2024, but two days later, two professors resigned from the center’s advisory board in protest. Five days after the offer, the university’s then interim president, Jeff Ettinger, rescinded it, according to a news release from the Center for Constitutional Rights, a progressive legal advocacy organization. A public records request from the CCR showed donors had raised concerns about the hire. The day before the offer was revoked, donors sent Ettinger a message saying Segal used tropes “offensive to Jews” and that fundraising for the center would likely “grind to a halt” if he were hired. Another email a day later stressed that Jewish donors could “withdraw...