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 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 “We have the receipts!” It announced 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 to right-wing media, Lax has initiated repeated lawsuits 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 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 at 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.
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 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 for 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 a 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 prepared 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 and DJHC, 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 to Breitbart, 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 in the aftermath of the controversy and returned to campus with a newfound zeal: “I had a new mission. I was energized,” he recalled to The Jerusalem Post this February. He “began scouring the Internet daily for campus anti-Israel incidents” and writing for pro-Israel outlet The Algemeiner. Over the years, Canary Mission has shared Pessin’s writings and posted at least ten times on its X account about Pessin’s controversies at the school. Pessin himself wrote about 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 on X targeting University of Pennsylvania writing professor Ahmad Almallah. He has since deleted that post, but shared other Canary Mission content 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 surfaced 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 and via his group S.AF.E. Campus , said he was 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 and 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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