[Read the full report on the Top Ten Jew-Hating Professors in America: HERE.]

In a stealth campaign to circumvent campus censors and reach students directly, the David Horowitz Freedom Center distributed 2,500 newspapers across the George Washington University campus containing its new report naming the “Top Ten Jew-Hating Professors in America.” The report exposes and ranks ten professors who have abused their academic positions by promoting fantastic libels against Jews as “colonial settlers” and imperialist aggressors through university events, classroom diatribes, and academic publications.

GWU Professor Lara Sheehi was ranked #3 on the list. “Professor Lara Sheehi’s mandatory diversity class at George Washington University comes with a non-optional quotient of Jew hatred,” states the report, which goes on to describe how the professor made it her mission to target and harass Jewish and Israeli students for their heritage and beliefs. When these students complained about her conduct to the GWU administration, Sheehi retaliated by filing disciplinary charges against them.

On the first day of the class, which students enrolled in the Professional Psychology Program at the university are required to take, Sheehi asked students to describe their cultural background and heritage. When a student identified herself as Israeli, the professor responded, “It’s not your fault you were born in Israel.”

Sheehi also invited Israeli academic, Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, to give an address on campus.  Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a notorious anti-Semite who has invoked ancient blood libels against the Jewish people by falsely accusing Israel of testing experimental weapons on Palestinian children.

During her speech, Shalhoub-Kevorkian made comments demonizing Jews and Israelis, stating that “good deeds done by Jews and Israelis are done to mask sinister activity.” She stated that Israel’s humanitarian efforts across the globe were an attempt to “use tikkun olam [the Jewish value of bettering the world] to camouflage [Israel’s] oppressive power.” She further advocated for violent “resistance” against Israel (a euphemism for terrorism) and praised a Palestinian teenager who participated in the violent and unprovoked stabbing of an Israeli child in 2015.

Following Shalhoub’s outrageous and anti-Semitic diatribe, Jewish students in Sheehi’s class described in class why the address had made them feel “vulnerable and unsafe.” One Jewish student correctly labeled the talk as a two hour diatribe against the Jews and expressed her doubt that the university would allow any other cultural or religious minority to be thus targeted.

Instead of validating and addressing these students’ legitimate concerns, Professor Sheehi outright denied that the lecture had amounted to anti-Semitism. She claimed that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,” and asserted that this declaration was a “non-negotiable truth” like a “historical fact.” Incredibly, Sheehi took this line of thought even further, adding that “Zionism in and of itself indicates that Jewish folks are different. There are many people who say that Zionism in and of itself is an antisemitic movement. Why? Because it locates that Jewish folks are that much more different that they need to have a space unto themselves.”

Having failed to persuade Professor Sheehi of their concerns, Jewish students in the class tried several times to bring their concerns to the university administration and to ask for an alternative to taking her required course. The GWU administration was not responsive. Even worse, once Sheehi learned that these students had complained about her to the administration, she began spreading lies about them, calling them “combative” and racist and ultimately filing disciplinary charges against them.

“She turned the faculty against the Jewish students by spreading lies about us and our conduct, she disparaged us in front of our classmates, calling us Islamophobes,” a student from the course, speaking anonymously, told The Algemeiner.  “She smeared our name in a community where success as a therapist really depends on relationships with our faculty supervisors and our colleagues. The disciplinary proceedings effectively silenced us, making it clear that you can’t be a Jew and you can’t speak up about antisemitism safely in this program.”

While Professor Sheehi’s conduct in the classroom has only recently come under scrutiny, it is clear that her Jew hatred—and likely her expression of it in the classroom—has been going on for years.

The Canary Mission, an organization dedicated to exposing anti-Semitism, has collected a number of her tweets and comments. On August 4, 2020, in response to a story about Israel offering aid to Lebanon in the wake of a deadly industrial explosion, Sheehi tweeted: “F**K YOU AND F**K YOUR ‘AID’. Destroy Zionism and commit to land back, then we’ll take you seriously you f**king genocidal f**ks. F**k you.”

In April 2022, Sheehi tweeted: “MY RAGE CAN LIGHT A THOUSAND SUNS RIGHT NOW. F**k ALL settlers. #LongLiveTheResistance #PalestineWillBeFree.” As the Canary Mission website explains, “Among Palestinians and anti-Israel activists, the term ‘resistance’ can be a euphemism for nationalistic terror. It is often used to excuse or even glorify anti-Israel and anti-Semitic violence.”

For her blatant discrimination and abuse of Jewish students and her unwarranted hostility and wishes for violence against the Jewish homeland, Professor Sheehi deserves to be named one of the top Jew-hating professors in America.

“We call on the universities implicated in this report to put an immediate end to the Jew hatred infecting their campuses and to take action against faculty who continue to promulgate anti-Semitism on campus, creating an unsafe environment for Jewish students,” said Freedom Center Founder David Horowitz. “If they should fail to do so, we urge Congress to withhold all federal funding until they eliminate this cancer in their midst.”