
Md. hate crimes commission member posts pro-terror content
Good Tuesday morning.
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we report on the pro-terrorism social media posts of a Maryland hate crimes commission member, and interview a mother whose two sons are hostages in Gaza. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Julianna Margulies, Ben Sasse and Sheryl Sandberg.
A new survey commissioned by Hillel International found that more than 1 in 3 Jewish college students have felt they needed to hide their Jewish identity in the weeks since the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack and ensuing Israel-Hamas war, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen reports.
More than half of the 300 students surveyed said they feel scared on campus, and that they are unsatisfied with how their university administrations are responding to the uptick in antisemitic incidents and rhetoric on campus.
These concerns have manifested in a number of ways in recent weeks. A major fundraiser for The George Washington University that was held in New York City last week and featured the school’s president, Ellen Granberg, “went absolutely off the rails,” according to one attendee, who said Granberg was confronted by several participants who accused the administration of not doing enough to counter rising antisemitism on campus, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.
At the event, Granberg shared updates on the university’s efforts to combat antisemitism, noting that the administration has been working with local and federal police to bolster campus security measures, according to the attendee, who also shared notes taken during the meeting.
The university president, however, acknowledged that such work “needs to go deeper,” emphasizing a commitment to expanding “support for religious and fraternal community groups,” training staff and reconciling what she characterized as a “right to free speech with our community values,” according to the notes.
Despite her assurances, a number of parents in attendance still expressed dissatisfaction with the administration’s approach. “It is now life or death,” one parent said during the question-and-answer period.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloombergcalled the response by many students to Hamas’ terror attacks “painful,” noting that students on campus today “aren’t old enough to remember 9/11, and it’s clear they never learned its lesson: Intentionally targeting civilians for slaughter is inexcusable no matter the political circumstances.”
The blame, Bloomberg suggests, lies with college presidents, who “allowed campuses to become institutions of conformity.”
“For years,” Bloomberg writes, “they have allowed their campuses to become bastions of intolerance, by permitting students to shout down the voices of others. They have condoned ‘trigger warnings’ that shield students from difficult ideas. They have refused to defend faculty who run afoul of student sentiment. And they have created ‘safe spaces’ that discourage or exclude opposing views.”
But universities are beginning to respond to concerns about campus climate. A state official in Tallahassee set off panic after alleging that a professor at the University of Florida was disseminating antisemitic content in the classroom.
The allegation was untrue, but concern had risen to such a level that UF President Ben Sasse issued a statement distancing the school from the accusations — which Sasse said were “wrong on multiple counts” — and reaffirming the administration’s commitment to “protect everyone’s speech rights” while denouncing “political activism in taxpayer-funded classes.”
In a message to the school’s deans and cabinet, Sasse, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, noted that the individual in question was not a tenured professor but an instructor who had left the university in 2019, and had posted offending content online, not on campus.
“Education happens when someone engages new ideas,” Sasse wrote in the note outlining the “fundamentals” of the school. “Indoctrination happens when someone enforces political orthodoxy. It’s not our job to indoctrinate – it is our job to educate.” Read the full story here.
That seems to be the message at the University of Iowa, where the state’s Board of Regents instructed the Hawkeye State’s three public universities to eliminate all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) roles not mandated by law.
And that is the message to graduating seniors — and students considering their post-college employment options — being sent by some of the biggest names in finance, who signed onto a statement pledging that “[s]upporters of hate will have no place in our organizations or our community.”
The open letter has already been signed by Pershing Square’s Bill Ackman, Hudson Bay Capital’s Sander Gerber, Element Capital’s Jeffrey Talpins, Saba Capital’s Boaz Weinstein, Bank of America’s Zoya Raynes and Altitude Venture’s Jay Zeidman.
problematic posts
Maryland hate crimes commission member under fire for pro-Hamas posts

When Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown announced the inaugural members of the state’s Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention in August, he said Maryland residents “deserve a safe and inclusive state” and pledged to develop strategies to address hate crimes. Now, one of the members of the commission is facing criticism from a Jewish colleague and from the Jewish legislator who created the commission for comments she has made in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports.
Unsavory comparisons: In a series of Facebook posts published on and after Oct. 7, Zainab Chaudry, the director of the Maryland branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, offered praise for Hamas terrorists, compared Israel to Nazi Germany and called the wide swath of Jewish Americans who attended last week’s March for Israel in Washington “genocide sympathizers.”
‘Inflammatory rhetoric’: “As commissioners who are supposed to be showing leadership in the fight against hate, it’s disappointing and concerning that inflammatory rhetoric is being used instead of finding ways to bring people together,” said Meredith Weisel, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Washington office and a member of the Maryland hate crimes commission. “We may have disagreements on the policies in Israel and Gaza,” Weisel said of Chaudry, but her posts are “downright dismissive of the majority of American Jews.”