Northwestern Tells JVP: Change Your Constitution or Risk Discipline Under New Anti-Discrimination Policy
29th April 2025
Northwestern University warned its Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) chapter that its constitution, which bars Zionist Jews from joining, violates the school’s new anti-discrimination policy, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
The constitution for the anti-Israel student group states that “members are expected to be anti-Zionist and identify with Judaism” and requires a faculty adviser to be a “Jewish anti-Zionist or support anti-Zionist philosophies.” According to its mission statement, JVP aims to build an “anti-Zionist Jewish community on campus.”
The group seems committed to that goal, playing a significant role in anti-Israel campus activity with an adviser, Sarah Schulman, who has repeatedly blamed the Jewish state for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. But JVP’s constitution doesn’t square with Northwestern’s updated non-discrimination policies, which incorporated the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism. That definition states that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” is a form of anti-Semitism.