Rutgers University briefly suspended — and then un-suspended — its Student Bar Association last week after the body attempted to impeach a Jewish member who complained about the organization sharing Hamas propaganda.
Yoel Ackerman, a 36-year-old father of three, attends Rutgers as a night student and said he had no interest in the student government body and served only reluctantly after being drafted by his classmates.
“My goal was just to go to law school. I thought I was going to a school that had world-class academia and professors and instead, I somehow found myself being witch-hunted because I’m Jewish,” Ackerman said.
Ackerman said on Oct 12 — just five days after Hamas massacred 1,200 Israeli civilians at a music festival — a Palestinian member of the Rutgers SBA shared a video in a group chat that denied Hamas’ atrocities and accused Israel of “staging” the slaughter.
When Ackerman later warned the Rutgers Jewish Law Students Association about the antisemitic SBA member in their midst, the school opened an investigation into Ackerman for “defamation and disorderly conduct.”
“I found out later that the person who opened the investigation against me without even talking to me was one of the deans of Rutgers,” Ackerman said.
It got worse.
After Rutgers launched the probe, he received a late-night call saying he and another Jewish SBA member would face an impeachment hearing, which amounted to a three-hour public berating in front of his colleagues.
“They called us Zionists and we had to apologize for our actions. I am still confused at what my actions were or what I did wrong and at the very end they gave me five minutes to speak,” Ackerman recalled.
“I came out of that feeling something like I never felt before. . . . It was a public lynching,”
It was only after SBA moved to suspend their own constitution to expedite his expulsion that Ackerman retained the services of the American Center for Law & Justice.
Rutgers then moved to suspend the SBA, though Rutgers last week reinstated it.
“The Rutgers-Newark Division of Student Affairs continues to conduct an inquiry in response to two student complaints. The situation involves claims and counterclaims between law students in the student-run organization,” the school said in a statement.
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