Princeton University is launching a new anthropology course on “Gender, Reproduction, and Genocide” in Gaza, a class whose description puts the Israel-Hamas war on par with the Holocaust. The for-credit, graded course is being taught by a “noted Palestinian feminist” who has made provably false claims that Hamas did not kill babies or rape women on Oct. 7, and also called for an end to the Jewish state.
“Drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist thought, we examine how genocidal projects target reproductive life, sexual and familial structures, and community survival,” the course description reads. “Students will engage reproductive justice frameworks, survivor testimony, and Palestinian feminist critiques of colonial violence, while situating Gaza within comparative histories of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and genocide against Black and Indigenous populations.”
Undergraduates who take the class can get credit toward an anthropology major or toward a minor in “gender and sexuality studies.”
Instructing the course is Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a scholar who “retired” under pressure last year from her professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem after she was suspended—and arrested and briefly detained for incitement—for her inflammatory, anti-Israel rhetoric.
The suspension came in March 2024, after Shalhoub-Kevorkian accused Israel and its supporters of lying about Hamas’s atrocities, including rapes and killing babies. She also said the State of Israel should be destroyed.
“It’s time to abolish Zionism,” she said, according to the Times of Israel. “It can’t continue, it’s criminal. Only by abolishing Zionism can we continue. They will use any lie. They started with babies, they continued with rape, and they will continue with a million other lies. We stopped believing them, I hope the world stops believing them.”
She also claimed Israelis act scared when they hear her speaking Arabic, adding they “should be afraid because criminals are always afraid. They cannot dispossess my land, they cannot displace my people. They cannot kill and not be afraid, so they better be afraid.”
In late March, Shalhoub-Kevorkian changed her tune and, according to a university official she met with, “clarified” that, as a feminist, she believed Oct. 7 victims’ claims that they were raped. She did not retract her allegation that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Seven months later, Princeton welcomed Shalhoub-Kevorkian to its anthropology department as a Global South Visiting Scholar. She was later named the Stanley Kelley, Jr., Visiting Professorship for Distinguished Teaching.
Princeton, which is a relatively small university that does not have medical, law, or business schools, is by far the wealthiest university in the country when measured by enrollment, with $4 million in its endowment per full-time student.
The university’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, has largely flown under the radar while his Ivy League counterparts at far larger Columbia, Penn, and Harvard universities—which are more dependent on federal grants—were forced to resign over their handling of campus anti-Semitism.
The Trump administration suspended dozens of Princeton’s federal grants—totaling roughly $200 million—in April, but half of those were restored by August.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s course—and her presence on campus in an exalted visiting professorship—could bring fresh scrutiny to Princeton.
Among the required readings is an essay titled “Reprocide in Gaza: The Gendered Strategy of Genocide Through Reproductive Violence,” by Hala Shoman, a former Gazan dentist and self-described political and social activist. Reprocide, she writes, is “the systematic targeting of a group’s reproductive capacities … as a deliberate strategy of erasure.”
“Israel has weaponized reproductive health through direct military targeting, siege conditions, forced displacement, environmental toxicity, and gendered violence,” Shoman wrote, arguing the Jewish state has intentionally bombed fertility clinics and “has created conditions in Gaza that make pregnancy dangerously high-risk.”
Shoman also alleged Israel has widowed nearly 14,000 women and cited Salama Maarouf, the head of Gaza’s Government Media Office, without noting Hamas controls the agency.
A Princeton spokeswoman directed the Washington Free Beacon to the university’s academic freedom and free expression webpage, but did not comment further.
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