An Israeli law professor was only minutes into her online lecture about the erosion of the rights of women and sexual minorities in her country on Monday when an eruption of hate and misogyny filled the screen.
The Queens College event — which was happening over Zoom — was abruptly interrupted by what appeared to be a group of attendees who turned on their cameras and microphones and began yelling slurs, including “kill all the Jews” and “go back to Auschwitz.” Instead of faces on the screen, pornographic and disturbing images appeared, including pictures of dead bodies and video clips of male masturbation.
Even for the professor, Yofi Tirosh, a seasoned civil rights activist accustomed to hostility, the incident was shocking. She and a moderator quickly removed the disrupters, but after she resumed speaking, frustration and tears threatened to overwhelm her. She managed to complete the lecture without revealing her distress, she said in an interview.
“There’s nothing for Palestinians in this protest,” she said, explaining her frustration. “It doesn’t do anything for the cause of ending the war. And in an ironic way, it illustrates my research topics, the connection between misogyny and patriarchy and violence and militarism.”
The event, an annual lecture sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at Queens College, illustrated how even Israeli academics critical of the war in Gaza such as Professor Tirosh, a law professor at Tel Aviv University, are being hit with antisemitic attacks as they deliver their views, presumably because they are Israeli.
The lecture had been advertised online and was open to the public. In an email, a Queens College spokeswoman said an investigation had determined that one person had registered as multiple attendees, then exploited a wrongly configured screen-sharing setting in the Zoom lecture to make the disruption happen from all those accounts at once. The college added that it would take immediate steps to reinforce its security protocols to prevent future incidents. Another similar disruption, which happened earlier this month during a Zoom lecture about an archaeological expedition in Africa, was also being investigated.
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The post Antisemitic Slurs Disrupt Queens College Zoom Lecture About Israel appeared first on New York Times.
