Why Is Duke’s Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Department Spending So Much Time Maligning the Jewish State?

Mishana Garschi is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Duke University gender studies program. According to her very own web page, Garschi’s interests “include Black feminist theory, feminist theory, popular culture, and the politics of diversity and inclusion.” She liked a post so much that she reposted it on X: “having a phd and being a zionists is nuts, you need to return that damn degree because you clearly lost all sense of critical thought [sic].” She also reposted, “zionism is monstrous [sic]” and “The Israeli occupiers don’t care about the hostages [sic].”

Those Israelis she calls “occupiers” pulled out of Gaza entirely in 2005. The only reason there any Israelis in Gaza today is because Israel was forced to fight a war it did not start and did not want, but after the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, the Israelis had no choice. As for Garschi’s claim that the Israelis “don’t care about the hostages,” then why is it the IDF has put an enormous effort into finding and rescuing hostages — so far a half-dozen — and why did it release terrorist murderers by the thousands from Israeli prisoners, to exchange them for some of the “hostages” that Mishana Garschi claims the Israelis “don’t care about”? How many Israeli soldiers gave their lives in the attempt to locate and rescue hostages? A dozen? Even more? No charge made against Israel is too preposterous for the mishana-garschis of this world. More on the disturbing situation at Duke’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies can be found here: “When Will North Carolina or Congress Investigate Duke University for Allowing Calls for Israel’s Destruction and Other False Claims?,” by Peter Reitzes, Algemeiner, May 12, 2025:

Last week, I reported in The Algemeiner that Frances Hasso, Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the same department, excitedly announced on X, “HAMAS OFFICIALLY DEFEATS ISRAEL!”

Hasso has repeatedly made social media posts using the antisemitic slur “Zio” — and also reposted on X, “Noone was raped on October 7 [sic].”…

No one was raped in Israel on October 7? Frances, have you really forgotten? There were eyewitnesses, Israelis in hiding who peeked through the cracks in the doors of their “safe rooms” or from other vantage points in the kibbutzim, and saw the atrocities — rapes, tortures, murders — being committed. We have the testimony, too, of the female hostages released by Hamas who have told their own harrowing tales of being raped that day, and subsequently too, when held hostage in Gaza. Even more important, the Hamas terrorists themselves recorded their rapes on their Go-Pro cameras; they were proud of themselves for raping the Yahudi women.

I’m sure Frances Hasso was just as fair-minded as she is able to be as she taught her students, if they knew what was good for them, to parrot the party line on Palestine.

Anne Allison, Hasso, Charles Piot, Wald, Anne-Maria Makhulu, Jessica Namakkal, Gabriel Rosenberg, Ranjana Khanna, Adriane Lentz-Smith, and Kathi Weeks signed a 2021 statement declaring, “We acknowledge our complicity in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians” and “express our solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

In 2023, Michael Hardt, Hasso, Rogers, Storti, and Robyn Wiegman endorsed a letter titled “Scholars Against the War on Palestine,” which demanded an immediate ceasefire, asserting their solidarity with Palestinians. The letter criticized Israel extensively while failing to acknowledge, even once, the violent assault by Hamas on Oct. 7 or the hundreds of hostages held by Hamas-affiliated terrorists at that time.

Last week, I detailed years of anti-Israel publications at Duke University Press. As an example, a recent Duke Press publication actually accuses Israelis of viewing Palestinians as rapeable. The author added, Israelis “carry their rifles as an extension of phallic power.”…

In fact, the Israelis have in the past been accused by the Arabs of “racism” precisely because they never do rape Palestinian women. Damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Well, we all know they don’t, not because they are “racists,” but because that is just something the Jews of the IDF would never do. As for those rifles carried by Israel soldiers, they are no more an “extension of phallic power” than are the rifles carried by soldiers in the hundreds of other armies in the world. How can such idiocy have been published by Duke University Press? Who’s minding the store?

It’s an outrage, of course, that the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke appears to be spending so much of its time maligning the Jewish state, a subject that has nothing to do with what its members are supposed to be teaching, researching, writing about. Duke has shown itself incapable of investigating the malignant anti-Israel attitudes and atmospherics of that department. This calls for Congresswoman Virginia Foxx and her Committee on Education and the Workforce to investigate, and hold public hearings, asking members of that department just what connection there is between what they are supposed to be doing, and the subject of Palestine.