Jewish group protests ‘anti-Semitic’ GWU prof at NYC event

A George Washington University professor accused of discriminating against her Jewish students will be featured at an American Psychological Association roundtable in New York this weekend as calls grow for her suspension and a federal civil rights investigation into her conduct.

Lara Sheehi — a psychology instructor who allegedly retaliated against Jewish students in a required diversity course she taught — is speaking at the 42nd annual spring meeting of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (SPPP), a division of the APA.

“The APA should be ashamed to provide a platform for these virulent anti-Semites,” Avi D. Gordon, executive director of Alums for Campus Fairness, said in a statement.

“New Yorkers have no tolerance for racism and incitement. This campaign sends a clear message that these bigots and the hate they represent are not welcome here.”

Gordon’s group, which monitors anti-Semitism on college campuses, purchased billboards to protest Sheehi and her husband’s presence at the conference, hosted at the Hilton in Midtown.

“Why is the American Psychological Association hosting anti-Semites?” the mobile billboards outside the event read.

Sheehi, the president of the SPPP and an advocate of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, will speak at a Saturday panel titled “State Violence, Debility and the Embodied Struggle” to “explore entanglements between policing, coloniality, and discourses of mental health; and revisit our field’s role in legitimizing in eugenicist logics.”

On the first day of classes in fall 2022, Sheehi allegedly opened her course by asking students to share about themselves. When one student mentioned that she was from Israel, she purportedly responded: “It’s not your fault you were born in Israel.”

According to a complaint filed in January with the US Department of Education, Sheehi went on to harass that student and others, accusing them of racism and encouraging others to demean and exclude them.

The complaint also claimed Sheehi brought a radical anti-Israel speaker to campus between the Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who once praised a Palestinian teenager who attempted to stab two Israelis to death in 2015, attacked the Jewish state during her visit, referring at one point to the presence of “white Israeli racism.”

When Sheehi’s Jewish students confronted her about the speaker, she accused them of racism, saying they had made “damaging Islamophobic anti-Palestinian” remarks about the guest.

“We were demeaned, and she twisted our words to make us look like the problem, which is pretty classic anti-Semitism, scapegoating the Jew, gaslighting the Jew, making us seem like we’re the issue,” one student told the Daily Caller.

The university then defended the professor when the students raised concerns about her behavior with the administration.

Sheehi also came under fire for a series of anti-Semitic statements on her social media in which she called all Israelis “f***ing racist” and said it was “so f***ing ridiculous how Zionism works.”

More than 500 academics have requested the university to suspend Sheehi for the remarks, saying it would be “highly inappropriate” to force any Jewish students to take classes with a professor whose online comments are “rife with profanity and hateful rhetoric against Zionism and Israelis.”

George Washington University conducted its own internal probe of the allegations in response to the DOE complaint.

In late March, the university announced the investigation, conducted by the law firm Crowell & Moring LLP, found “no evidence substantiating the allegations of discriminatory and retaliatory conduct,” but refused to release the full report.

Sheehi’s husband Stephen, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at William & Mary, also supports BDS and has signed statements in defense of Hamas terrorism.

He has also accused Israeli Jews of having a “psychotic relationship” to their land, which he and his wife frequently call an “apartheid” state.

“This compelling intimacy that Zionists feel to the land in Palestine,” he said in an interview last year, “is one built on a psychosis.”