Newton, Massachusetts is a well-to-do placid suburb of Boston. One-third of its population of 91,000 is Jewish. And many Newton parents — Jews and non-Jews alike — have been alarmed over the hiring of Maryam Abu-Hasaballah, a recent graduate of the University of Connecticut, as a social studies teacher at Newton’s Charles E Brown Middle School. For Abu-Hasaballah turns out to be not only a virulent hater of what she describes as a “settler-colonial genocidal” Israel, but is herself a close relative of a Hamas killer. More on Abu-Hasaballah can be found here: “Massachusetts Suburb Hires Anti-Zionist With Alleged Family Ties to Hamas Fighter to Teach Social Studies,” by Dexter Van Zile, JNS, September 3, 2026:
Jewish parents who sent their children off to college have known for a while that their progeny were going to be confronted with professors who use university classrooms to spread lies about Israel, and to make them feel guilty for proud Jews, proud Zionists and proud Americans.
After the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, they further learned that their children were likely to be harassed on college quads, in cafeterias and at university libraries by activists from campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Student Association.
Still, this was a college problem—something to be faced in early adulthood. Not anymore.
Now the problem threatens to manifest itself in places like the Charles E. Brown Middle School in Newton, Mass., a city of 91,000 residents, about a third of whom are Jewish. The school has recently hired a pro-Palestinian propagandist—with alleged family ties to a member of Hamas’s military wing who participated in the events of Oct. 7—to teach social studies.
The new hire, Maryam Abu-Hasaballah, a recent graduate of the University of Connecticut, wrote her honors thesis condemning UConn for its response to the anti-Israel protests that erupted on the school’s main campus post-Oct. 7, during which Hamas murdered, raped and kidnapped its way across southern Israel.
In her 2025 thesis, Abu-Hasaballah—listed as a member of the teaching staff at Newton’s Charles E. Brown Middle School—accused UConn president Radenka Maric of using campus police to deprive the post-Oct. 7 protesters of their right to free speech because of a pro-Israel bias.
Abu-Hasaballah accused Maric of “doing nothing to accommodate, collaborate or work with [protesters] in the slightest,” adding that Maric’s “silence, personal ties to Israel and endorsement of police action only proved to the students that their fight was necessary at UConn.”…
The pro-Palestinian protesters were wreaking havoc at the UConn campus, threatening Jewish students, calling for the disappearance of the Jewish state (“from the river to the sea/Palestine will be free”), disrupting classes, vandalizing campus buildings by scrawling slogans on their walls. Naturally the college’s president, Radenka Maric, did the right thing, calling out the police to arrest those who refused to stop their violent protests that caused so much mayhem on campus. According to Maryam Abu-Hasaballah, however, the police were summoned to stop those protesters only because of Radenka Maric’s personal bias in favor of “genocidal” Israel.
Abu-Hasaballah’s suggestion that Maric acted out of personal bias is ironic, given that Abu-Hasaballah’s own family apparently has familial ties to a member of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Imad Atta Hassouna.
In fact, her cousin Mohammed Imad Atta Hassouna was not only a member of Hamas, but took part in the atrocities carried out on October 7, 2023. The IDF killed him on October 18, 2023. How likely is it, with her first cousin being a Hamas murderer, that Maryam Abu-Hasaballah will present an objective view of the Arab-Israeli conflict to her young charges?
A close reading of Abu-Hasaballah’s thesis reveals that the author glosses over the horrors of the Oct. 7 massacre. The phrase “Oct. 7” appears nowhere in the thesis, nor is there any mention of the violence Hamas perpetrated that day. The author describes Hamas as “a militant Palestinian nationalist group,” making no mention of its oft-repeated desire to destroy the Jewish state.
Her description of Israel, by contrast, is particularly harsh, largely affirming the UConn protesters’ assessment of the country as a genocidal outpost of settler colonialism. In her introduction, Abu-Hasaballah wrote that “the beginning of this war triggered [a] series of events that would eventually lead to the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government.”
There is no mention in her senior thesis of what triggered the war between Israel and Hamas. She passes over in silence the October 7 atrocities, instead skipping blandly over it to begin with the IDF’s response to that attack, that “would eventually lead to the genocide of Palestinians.”
Abu-Hasaballah also downplayed expressions of antisemitism by the UConn protesters she lionized. In particular, she accused the Trump administration, which threatened to deport foreign agitators to their countries of origin, of silencing “pro-Palestinian protest under the guise of scapegoating activists as antisemitic, aggressive or threatening.”
Pro-Palestinian protests on campuses across the land have been exactly that — antisemitic, aggressive, and threatening. Protesters have surrounded Jewish students and have prevented them from moving, all the while screaming in their faces about “Israeli genocide.” The protesters have called for the disappearance of the Jewish state and its replacement with a 23rd Arab state — that is the meaning of the chant “from the river to the sea/Palestine will be free.” They have occupied and vandalized campus buildings. In just one case, at City College of New York, protesters caused $3 million in damages. Hillel houses, too, have suffered serious damages at a half-dozen universities. Maryam Abu-Hasaballah mentions none of this in her thesis, in which she presents pro-Palestinian protesters at UConn, and elsewhere, as nonviolent.
Maryam Abu-Hasaballah wrote her senior thesis at UConn on the failure of the university to support anti-Israel protests on campus, ascribing this to the “Zionist” sympathies of its president, Radenka Maric. In her discussion of those protests, she never mentions Hamas by name; nor does she refer to the atrocities carried out on October 7, 2023. She makes no mention of the 1,200 Israelis murdered, nor of the 250 people whom Hamas kidnapped. Instead, her thesis is all about those who according to her, bravely protested on the UConn campus against the “genocidal” Jewish state, and whose protests, she claims, a pro-Zionist university president unjustly suppressed.
The question asked by a concerned parent, Nurit Friedlaender, remains unanswered. Did those who hired Maryam Abu-Hasaballah do any due diligence? Did they read her thesis? I suspect that they did not, for if they had, they would have understood that she will find it impossible to. be objective about Israel and the Arabs. Come to think of it, I suspect she will also find it impossible to objectively teach about the United States, which for so many Muslims, and not just those in Iran, remains the Great Satan and leader of the camp of Infidels. It’s likely that letting her go at this point would make her a cause célèbre, which CAIR would exploit as part of its campaign against “Islamophobia.” But after her first, probationary year as a teacher, given what she is almost certain to teach about Israel and its Arab enemies, her contract need not be extended.
mgoldberg says
I gather they liked what they saw in her work. A ‘progressive’ which in their minds means hating capitalism, hating all colonial designated western governance and thinking that this is what makes their diversity so righteous and meaningful. How stupid can they get. And of those one third of the entire student body that has to have their children be indoctrinated by this jihadist, what will they do, if anything?
jerry glenn says
Massachusetts surges in the national Islamopandering derby