Jonah S. Rubin

Bleak future for West Bank pupils as budget cuts bite At an hour when Ahmad and Mohammed should have been in the classroom, the two brothers sat idle at home in the northern West Bank city of Nablus.

Unable to meet its wage bill in full, the Palestinian Authority has cut teachers' pay to 60 percent...The budget shortfall stems in part from Israel's decision to withhold customs tax revenues

www.gjsentinel.com/news/nationa...

“Education Cannot Wait” Gaza’s decimated universities are trying to build an improvised academic life under siege.

“We are doing our best to keep the academic continuity alive even as infrastructure and daily life crumble around us,” he said. The situation is “not sustainable,” Bassam Al-Saqqa, vice president for academic affairs at IUG, admitted to me, “but education cannot wait.”

Here is my testimony, arguing for the latter point: that the Trump and also maybe the Biden admin acted unconstitutionally in its response to the student protests securisync.intermedia.net/us2/s/folder...

Well worth a watch

“Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm.”

Oh great. Now a US Civil Rights Commissioner is speaking about "bloodthirsty neighbors." Glad to see some good old fashioned Orientalism in this hearing.

Did one of the Commissioners really just ask a student to explain demographic patterns of where 18 year olds are choosing to go to college? Why would they have any knowledge of that?

...And of course the student answers telling him she doesn't know the study he's talking about.

Why is a law professor testifying on a panel about student experiences? Was the US Civil Rights Commission unable to find another Jewish student who would support Trump's weaponization of antisemitism and attacks on higher education? Wouldn't be surprising since the vast majority oppose him.

Genevieve Lakier making an essential point. IHRA requires universities to censor pro-Palestine speech and violate the First Amendment.

Here is the study that Harvard Law Professor Benjamin Eidelson just cited in his testimony to the US Civil Rights Commission showing more young Jews identify as anti-Zionist than Zionist in the Greater Boston area. Past studies back this finding.

ma.cjp.org/hubfs/Boston...

Carly Gammill from Stand With Us is straight up lying when she testifies that the vast majority of Jews see Zionism as a core part of their identity. As she well knows, research published just this month shows that only 37% of US Jews identify as Zionist.

www.jewishdatabank.org/databank/sea...

Tenured Jewish prof. says she's fired for pro-Palestine post Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College may have become the first institution since Oct. 7 to oust a tenured faculty member for such statements, though the professor is appealing the decision and still rece...

Mark Goldfeder citing Muhlenberg College as a place where anti-Palestinian speech codes are not enforced harshly enough. This is the same college that fired a tenured professor for reposting a Palestinian poet to her personal Instagram.

www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Eugene Volokh describing himself as "center-right" is like Fidel Castro describing himself as "center-left."

Anyone check if Dave Matthews band was in town?

Mia Valentina Paz Faria A 7-year-old from Venezuela who was living in Austin, Texas Detained for 70 days “I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

UPDATE: Staff at the ICE concentration camp in Dilley, Texas have begun raiding the dormitories of kids and their parents to confiscate and destroy letters from the children. This is in response to the ace reporting by @micarosenberg et al for ProPublica:

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

- 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas.

Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children.

www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

See? More of this, please

In final report investigating campus antisemitism, Task Force on Antisemitism recommends best teaching practices The Task Force on Antisemitism <a href="https://www.columbia.edu/content/report-4-task-force-antisemitism" rel="">issued</a> its fourth and final report investigating antisemitism in the classroom on ...

That last phrase is doing a lot of work. What's stopping you from just protecting it, Columbia?

"Schizer said that the goal of the report and of the task force was to 'protect free speech and academic freedom to the maximum extent possible.'"

www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2026/01...

Young and old struggle to get their studies back on track in Gaza Palestinians are working hard to restart their education after Israel's war forced universities and schools to shut.

"This is what education is like for many in Gaza. The majority of Palestinians in the enclave live like Nibal and her family: displaced and forced to survive in temporary shelters barely fit for habitation."

www.aljazeera.com/features/202...

Gaza Humanitarian Disaster Continues as Ceasefire Plan's Deeply Flawed Second Phase Begins The Gaza humanitarian disaster continues as the flawed second phase of the ceasefire plan begins. Middle East Understanding Policy Project's Josh Ruebner discusses the situation unfolding in Gaza.

btlonline.org/gaza-humanit...

“I Will Not Trade Speaking Out for Palestine for My Safety”: We Stand with Professor Mohja Kahf — Palestine Legal Across the US, professors—like Palestine Legal client Mohja Kahf—are continuing to speak out against Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians, in defiance of racist attacks and repression. Professo...

palestinelegal.org/news/2026/2/...

This is very much not the point, but do the antisemites Trump employs really think you can't be both a criminal and shomer shabbos?

Federal government used pro-Palestinian protest, online posts, and written commentary as evidence to deport Columbia affiliates, documents reveal <i>Updated Jan. 28 at 11:14 a.m.</i>

www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2026/01...

𝗣𝗦𝗖 𝗖𝗨𝗡𝗬 𝗖𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗯𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗠𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗿

Read full statement here: psc-cuny.org/news-events/...

From Venezuela to Palestine: Stop the Big Oil War Machine Throw sand in the gears of genocide and war. Join us in flexing our economic power—the backbone of BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) tactics for human rights. We'll learn how the Trump administ...

I'm attending a @theactionnetwork.bsky.social event: From Venezuela to Palestine: Stop the Big Oil War Machine. RSVP here: actionnetwork.org/events/from-...

The Companies Behind ICE Sludge built an interactive map of every ICE contractor working with the Trump administration.

New: We built an interactive map of every ICE contractor working with the Trump administration.

readsludge.com/2026/01/16/t...

West Bank's Birzeit University still reeling one week after Israeli army fired on students Israeli soldiers intervened on January 6 during a rally in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners, at which the film 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' was to be screened. Around a dozen people were injured.

www.lemonde.fr/en/internati...

Make schools, churches, and hospitals protected spaces from ICE | NEA The Protecting Sensitive Locations Act will make sacred spaces of care and connection off-limits to ICE and other federal agencies.

Make schools, churches, and hospitals protected spaces from ICE www.nea.org/advocating-f...

It's incredibly demoralizing to constantly see the highest institutions of government and academia and the most important and widely seen news outlets knuckle under one after another, but then to see the gulf between that and the bravery of communities and neighbors and teachers - that's something

We've removed the paywall from this guide so everyone can access it. 👇 Stay safe.

There have been nine ICE shootings. There will be more. I think it may be time to consider these actions in the historical context of the Central American death squads supported by previous iterations of U.S. imperialism. And ICE's hostile incursion into "blue" cities as a form of imperialism, too.