Duke University. Photo: Ilyse Whitney / CC BY 2.0.

Let’s examine one department at Duke University to better understand the antisemitic fervor being experienced throughout academia, the campuses, and in academic publications.

Frances Hasso is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke “with secondary appointments in the Department of History and the Department of Sociology.” In 2024, she excitedly announced on X, “HAMAS OFFICIALLY DEFEATS ISRAEL!”

In 2024 and 2025, Hasso repeatedly made social media posts using the antisemitic slur “Zio.” For example, she tweeted “Just another Zio grifter … his page is for donations.”

A column in the politically left Slate explained, “‘Zio” [is] an anti-Jewish slur popularized by David Duke and his neo-Nazi followers.”

On Oct. 7, 2023, while Israelis were actively being murdered, raped, tortured, and dragged as hostages into tunnels in Gaza, Hasso shared the following post with her accompanying comment that she agrees “1000 percent”:

Anyone who mischaracterizes legitimate Palestinian resistance against colonial occupation as aggression or any other liberal inspired adjectives is not a friend of the Palestinians but a collaborator with liberal obscurantism & mass confusion that only benefits the colonialists.

The same month, Hasso posted, “The US empire cannot end soon enough.”

In late December 2023, The New York Times published an in-depth report detailing sexual assaults against Israelis during the Oct. 7 Hamas-led pogrom.

Hasso signed a letter calling the Times’ report “disgraceful.” She and the other signatories stated they, “Firmly reject The Times’ discreditable report and its exploitation of women’s bodies and struggles as a means to fabricate assault incidents and push propaganda for an unlawful occupation, thereby abetting the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.”

Just last month, Hasso shared a post on X, in which the original poster said, “Noone was raped on October 7.”

It is concerning — to say the very least — that the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the gender and feminist program at Duke University rejected a prominent report on sexual assaults against Israelis. Perhaps the motto at Duke should be: Believe all women, except Israeli and Jewish women.

In November of 2023, Hasso was a panelist at the scandalous, “A Round-Table Talk about Social Justice in Palestine,” hosted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). The event — which I attended — began with the audience being shown a short anti-Israel propaganda film titled “Gaza Concentration Camp,” chosen by Hasso. The film narrator stated that on Oct. 7, “Palestinians didn’t break through a border to enter Israel. … They destroyed a fence separating them from the homes they were forced out of.”

The film did not mention any of the Hamas-led atrocities on Oct. 7.

In a now-infamous moment at the event, a panelist, Rania Masri, said: “Oct. 7 for many of us from the region was a beautiful day. It was the day in which we saw that, we saw our brothers, we saw our fathers, we saw men break out of a concentration camp.”

Husso made no comment or objection to this.

Students took dutiful notes. Not a single panelist, moderator, or professor in the room objected to Masri’s hateful comments or even looked concerned.

Since the event, UNC administrators have made multiple apologetic statements distancing the university from Masri’s hateful comments.

But as far as I am aware, Hasso did not distance herself from Masri. In fact, the next year, Hasso made a post on X congratulating Masri for speaking out against the Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, tweeting, “Great job @rania_masri.”

Hasso recently shared a post alleging that “Israel keeps trying to kill Israeli hostages… all as [an] excuse to prolong the Genocidal plan of erasing two million Palestinians from Gaza. Israel’s priorities are Nazi’s war-time policies – fastracking Genocide (Final Solution).”

According to the US Department of State, “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is one example of antisemitism.

It is simply depraved to say that the government of Israel is trying to kill its own citizens being held hostage.

The Duke student newspaper estimates that tuition, board, and fees at the university for undergraduates will total $92,042 for the 2025-26 academic year. Why would Jewish families — or any families at all — pay such huge costs to send their children to be “educated” by professors like Frances Hasso?

Peter Reitzes writes about issues related to antisemitism and Israel.