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<\/a><\/p>\nBanners hanging from the fence outside Northwestern University during a pro-Palestinian protest, Evanston, Illinois, April 27, 2024. (Jacek Boczarski\/Anadolu via Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Judge Georgia Alexakis declined Monday to issue a restraining order in a lawsuit filed by Northwestern Graduate Workers for Palestine and two graduate students. The plaintiffs claimed that an antisemitism training required by the school for enrollment was biased and discriminatory toward Palestinian and Arab students.<\/p>\n
\u201cNorthwestern University\u2019s Training is not intended to foster a civil and collaborative workplace or remedy discrimination but rather is aimed at suppressing political anti-Zionist speech and speech critical of Israel,\u201d the complaint read.<\/p>\n
The \u201cAntisemitism Here\/Now\u201d training video, produced by the Jewish United Fund of Chicago, the city\u2019s Jewish federation, did not ask students to agree with its contents. Fewer than three dozen students declined to watch it in protest.<\/p>\n
Attorneys for Northwestern said that 16 students currently face enrollment holds for failing to watch the training, though they added that they were unsure if all students affected did so out of protest.<\/p>\n
In her ruling, Alexakis acknowledged that the graduate students affected by the holds face \u201cirreparable harm,\u201d but said that the student\u2019s lawyers had failed to prove Northwestern had a discriminatory motive in requiring the video.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause the plaintiffs have failed to meet their burden in this threshold inquiry, we do not move on to conduct a balancing of the harms,\u201d Alexakis said in her ruling, according to the school\u2019s student newspaper, The Daily Northwestern. \u201cFor that reason, I have to deny the motion.\u201d<\/p>\n
The complaint also criticized the school for adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance\u2019s definition of antisemitism, which the complaint said \u201ceffectively limits Arab students, and particularly Palestinian students, in their expressions of nationalist aspirations and protest against mistreatment of their ethnic group.\u201d<\/p>\n
The antisemitism training was announced by Northwestern in March in an email to the student body that cited President Donald Trump\u2019s Jan. 29 executive order, \u201cAdditional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe truth is that Northwestern\u2019s antisemitism training discriminates against Jewish students who are anti-Zionist, against Palestinian students, and against all people of good conscience, and it has nothing to do with Jewish safety,\u201d said Jonah Rubin, the manager for campus organizing for Jewish Voice for Peace, at a press conference. \u201cIt\u2019s about Northwestern trying to cozy up to an increasingly authoritarian administration.\u201d<\/p>\n