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THE PROFESSORS WHO SUPPORTED THE STUDENT DEPORTATION FRENZY  
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Jacqueline Sweet
July 27, 2025
Drop Site
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_ GoFundMe donations, social media posts, and board memberships
reveal how a handful of faculty members are backing Zionist doxxing
outfits. _

College presidents testify at House hearing on “antisemitism” on
campus on July 15, 2025., Win McNamee/Getty Images

 

In March 2024, Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus (DJHC) emerged on
Instagram and X as another node in a network of organizations decrying
pro-Palestine faculty and students at Columbia University. The group
slowly grew to focus on what it called other “participating
schools”—such as CUNY, which it called
[[link removed]] a “hotbed
of antisemitism.” Like its fellow Zionist doxxing outfits Betar and
Canary Mission, its preferred solution was student deportation. On
Election Day, DJHC posted a clip of Trump promising to deport
“jihad-sympathizers and America-hating radicals,” and wrote
[[link removed]] “We have
the receipts!” It announced
[[link removed]] on social
media that it had names of students, once tagging Trump and House
Speaker Mike Johnson.

Throughout November and into December, the DJHC account continued
celebrating the prospect of student deportations. And on December 5, a
couple months before such deportations began in earnest, Jeffrey
Lax—chair of the business department at Kingsborough College at the
City University of New York (CUNY)—joined the advisory board of
DJHC. S.A.F.E. Campus, an organization that Lax had founded in 2023,
was already serving as DJHC’s fiscal sponsor, which allowed the
newer group to receive tax-exempt donations.

Lax is one of a small but active cohort of professors on American
campuses vocally supporting groups pushing student deportations, even
as the detention of students on visas and green cards has stoked
anxieties in many university communities. A longtime pro-Israel
activist at CUNY and a frequent contributor
[[link removed]] to right-wing media,
Lax has initiated repeated
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against colleagues, his union, and the university for alleged
discrimination from pro-Palestine members of the campus
community._ _Now, Lax appears to be reprising this role in groups
like DJHC, continuing to champion
[[link removed]] the
administration’s targeting of noncitizen student activists.

Last week, when CUNY’s Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez was
interrogated by House Republicans over alleged antisemitism
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the university system, lawmakers referenced many of the same incidents
Lax’s groups had focused on over the last year. Lax himself was in
attendance. “ I am so proud to have been involved in the process
that led to this day,” he wrote on X.
[[link removed]]

On the DHJC board of advisors, Lax is joined by prominent pro-Israel
agitator and former Columbia business professor Shai Davidai, who has
long been trying to penalize pro-Palestine voices at the university,
and who has also participated in a Columbia alumni WhatsApp group
where members aimed to identify
[[link removed]] student
protesters and call for their expulsion, firing, or deportation. And
Lax and Davidai are only the most prominent of a handful of campus
affiliates backing such groups. Drop Site News’ reporting reveals
that current and former instructors at least four schools across the
northeastern U.S. have publicly supported Betar, DJHC, and Canary
Mission. A few of their names appeared on the GoFundMe page for
Betar’s fundraising push last fall and winter.

The presence of professors with ties to the right-wing groups have
made students and faculty more fearful about participating in
activism—especially as these groups have claimed to have a direct
impact on Trump’s deportation decisions. Betar has claimed credit
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providing student names from its blacklist to the highest levels of
the Trump administration; former Betar director Ross Glick reportedly
met with aides to Republican Senator Ted Cruz, to present Betar’s
student list; he would discuss the targets with Cruz himself later in
February, and later credit those meetings, and meetings with other
Republican lawmakers, for the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil. When Columbia
graduate student Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested in April, DJHC wrote
“Thank you, @SecRubio, for getting rid of another Jew hater,” and
linked to Canary Mission’s profile of Mahdawi.

In May, a federal judge, in ruling to release
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University of Massachusetts, Amherst, student from Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, wrote that the student’s arrest
seemed to have been “almost exclusively triggered” by a Betar
tweet. Similarly, an internal Homeland Security memo
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days before ICE detained Tufts University student Rumeysa Öztürk
cited nothing more than the language Canary Mission used about her.
(Öztürk was released from detention in May.)

“For a college professor to be collaborating with the government to
intimidate, detain, or deport students for something they may have
said is a shocking violation,” a CUNY faculty member, who asked to
remain anonymous for fear of professional retaliation, told Drop Site
News.

Universities are generally tasked with protecting their employees’
right to personal political opinions and donations—a norm that
pro-Palestine students and professors have often called upon in
seeking to protect themselves from both university discipline and
state targeting. At the same time, Betar, Canary Mission, and DJHC
have raised questions about when speech crosses the line into targeted
harassment, and what responsibilities faculty and staff have to their
students when said students are being actively selected for
deportation and detention.

“It should be obvious and uncontroversial that academic freedom,
which protects scholars’ right to teach and publish and engage in
political speech, does not protect targeted harassment of
individuals,” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at
Columbia who has been repeatedly targeted by Canary Mission
[[link removed]] and DJHC
[[link removed]], told Drop
Site News. “What’s difficult is that in the last two years we’ve
seen once again attempts to claim—absurdly—that political speech
on behalf of Palestine is threatening to individuals, while targeted
harassment that actively endangers individuals is defended as
protected.”

Andrew Pessin, a professor of philosophy at Connecticut College, also
has a long history of opposing pro-Palestine student activism. In
2015, students complained to school administrators and wrote op-eds in
the student newspaper about one of Pessin’s personal Facebook posts
that referred to Gaza as a place filled with “rabid pit bulls.”
Pessin sympathizers responded with their own op-eds in outlets ranging
from _The Washington Post
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some of which called out a dissenting student by name. The student
ended up on Canary Mission in 2016, accused of “demonizing a
pro-Israel professor.”

Pessin, meanwhile, went on a two-year hiatus
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the aftermath of the controversy and returned to campus with a
newfound zeal: “I had a new mission. I was energized,”
he recalled
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Jerusalem Post_ this February. He “began scouring the Internet
daily for campus anti-Israel incidents” and writing
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pro-Israel outlet _The Algemeiner_. Over the years, Canary Mission
has shared Pessin’s writings and posted at least ten times
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its X account about Pessin’s controversies at the school. Pessin
himself wrote
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Canary Mission in 2016 in _The Algemeiner_, sharing the group’s
press release and report on “anti-Israel activists at Columbia U.”

In December, Pessin joined the board of DJHC alongside Davidai, Lax,
and non-professor members like Sacha Roytman, a former head of digital
media for the Israeli army. Throughout that time, Pessin has amplified
pro-deportation content, and in June he shared a Canary
Mission post 
[[link removed]]on X targeting
University of Pennsylvania writing professor Ahmad Almallah. He has
since deleted that post, but shared other Canary Mission content 
[[link removed]]as recently as
last week. A donor named Andrew Pessin also gave $100 to Betar’s
public GoFundMe in November, the same month when the group first began
unveiling its Trump-era plans and posting about its “deport list.”
Pessin’s activities seem to have put his employer—both obligated
to protect his free speech and aware of the impact of right-wing
groups—in an uncomfortable position: A spokesperson for Connecticut
College told Drop Site News that the school “does not comment on
private actions taken by individual employees acting as private
citizens” but that “we expect all members of our community to act
in ways that reflect the College’s values” and that the College
“recognize that concerns may arise when those actions appear to
conflict with our community’s expectations or affect the student
experience.”

Other campus affiliates’ names have appeared on Betar’s GoFundMe
rolls. On October 22nd, someone named Jennifer Mass donated $400 to
the group, adding another $1,000 on November 13th. Jennifer Mass is
the name of a professor of cultural heritage science at Bard
College’s New York City-based Graduate Center; Mass follows Betar on
her public Instagram, and has posted critically about student
protesters at Columbia, calling them “an insufferable pack of
sanctimonious useful idiots.” “Come at me you miserable ignorant
cosplaying morons” she wrote in May 2024 in reference to student
activists. Scott Lorinsky also appeared on Betar’s GoFundMe as
having donated $1,000 in early January (the donor name was changed to
be anonymous by early May). A former board member at Bard’s Center
for Curatorial Studies, Lorinsky stepped down in early February after
reports
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that he had allegedly encouraged counter-protesters to drive their
cars into pro-Palestine protesters in New York. (Mass and Lorinsky, as
well as Bard College and Bard Graduate Center, have not replied to
requests for comment.)

After Drop Site News contacted all the individuals in this story to
confirm if they were the Betar donors, Betar US’s founder, New York
public relations executive Ronn Torossian, responded by accusing Drop
Site News of “harassing multiple Betar donors.”

Students at the aforementioned campuses have become the targets of
deportation campaigns. Betar’s now-deleted page of student targets
lists two CUNY students (allegedly both green card holders from the
Dominican Republic) as having been “detained March 2025 due to
involvement in pro-Hamas rally.” (Drop Site News has been unable to
obtain any additional information about these claims from CUNY or the
Trump administration; there has been no press about these students,
and it’s not clear if they were indeed arrested or detained.) And in
April, CUNY’s City College (CCNY) announced that “several students
on our campus—including graduate students working on the CCNY
campus—have had their visas revoked.”

Several CUNY sources told Drop Site News that they believe the
activism of faculty like Lax may have enabled outside groups’
targeting of university students. Lucien Baskin, a graduate student at
the CUNY Graduate Center who has been targeted on social media by Lax
both personally
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group S.AF.E. Campus 
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singled out for organizing a panel called “Globalize the Intifada!
Mapping Struggles for Palestine from the Streets to Our Classrooms.”
After the panel was ultimately cancelled by CUNY, Baskin said, student
organizers’ information appeared online on the websites or social
media accounts of the Project 2025-linked conservative website Campus
Reform
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Canary Mission as well as Lax and his group.

“This only took place because information about the event that was
shared internally within the community was leaked to doxxing
platforms,” he said. As a result, Baskin added, even as a citizen he
“felt unsafe speaking out against a genocide funded by my own
university,” given that he believes professors may be “doxxing
students and giving their names to the Trump administration.”

The escalation of the claims from groups like Lax’s to congressional
hearings is part of a larger intimidation effect that is chilling
discourse on campuses where these faculty members are active, even
those that have not had deportations so far, other faculty members
say. At Connecticut College, two professors (who asked not to be named
for fear of reprisal) told Drop Site News that discourse on the campus
has been stifled for years because students and faculty are afraid of
Pessin. “I think it’s a serious breach of professional ethics for
any professor to be involved with an organization whose explicit aim
is to deport our students,” one of the professors said. “Not only
does this harm individual students, it also creates a climate of fear,
anxiety, and censorship on a college campus.”

_JACQUELINE SWEET is an Investigative journalist. Work in Rolling
Stone, The Intercept, The Guardian, POLITICO, Drop Site News, Zeteo,
Mother Jones. Subscribe to Jacqueline Sweet
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_DROP SITE publishes Independent news on politics and war. Founded by
veteran investigative journalists Ryan Grim, Jeremy Scahill, and
Nausicaa Renner._

_ Subscribe to Drop Site [[link removed]]_

* professors
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* zionist doxing
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* zionist media posts
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* zionist board memberships
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* student deportations
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