Several groups have written letters or other responses about the report by the Chancellor’s Working Group on Antisemitism and Chancellor Joan Gabel’s response. They are copied below with only minor edits. The University Times also reached out to Hillel at Pitt and got no response.

An Alternative Vision for Confronting Antisemitism

We are Jewish faculty, staff, students, and alumni of the University of Pittsburgh. We are also friends and allies of our Jewish colleagues and neighbors. Those of us who are Jewish  know intimately the fear, sadness, and outrage of being targeted by antisemitism. Working, living, and studying within miles of the Tree of Life synagogue, we are reminded daily of the deadly consequences of antisemitic hate. Jewish people deserve to feel safe, included, and respected — not least at our university. We believe just as strongly that every member of our university community deserves the same, no matter their background or beliefs. Our safety, dignity, and humanity are intertwined. 

Antisemitism is not an island. Historically and politically, it is deeply tied to Islamophobia, racism, and other forms of social injustice. Resisting antisemitism requires shared struggle, and isolating ourselves as Jews puts our families and our communities at risk. Solidarity, not insularity, will lead us towards the future we want. University policy should reflect this reality.

Moreover, we refuse to let anyone use the pain of antisemitism to dismantle academic freedom, free speech, and open engagement within our university community. We do not believe that limiting higher education protects Jewish people; rather, these efforts undermine the critical thinking that builds resistance to autocracy.

With these values in mind, we present an alternative vision to the recommendations proposed by the University of Pittsburgh’s Working Group on Antisemitism. We cannot support recommendations that rely more on repression than education, that treat antisemitism as disconnected from other forms of injustice, or imply that political criticism of the state of Israel is tantamount to hate speech. (*) 

While we recognize that punitive measures may be necessary in egregious cases, we offer suggestions that rely on what a university does best—create opportunities for inquiry, engagement, and brave conversation. A healthy educational environment depends on mutual respect, dialogue, common goals, and restorative justice. Suppression does not lead to understanding; rather, it results in students who are afraid to learn and faculty who are afraid to teach. 

We propose this alternate vision as the starting point for an open and inclusive University-wide conversation. To further that aim, we ask the Chancellor to post this vision on the website alongside the Working Group's recommendations, and to circulate it alongside the recommendations.

Our vision for confronting antisemitism begins with the following ideas:

• Protect academic freedom while learning how to disagree better. Help community members cultivate the emotional resilience and dialogue skills needed to listen empathetically to critiques of what we hold dear. 

• Protect free speech. Suppressing peaceful protest denies community members the opportunity to grow and allows unexamined biases to fester. When speaking about complex, sensitive issues, some community members may inadvertently engage in harmful speech. If these community members are open to learning how to speak about these issues without doing harm, it is our role as an educational institution to teach them.

• Situate university responses to antisemitism within a broader context that recognizes antisemitism as one of many kinds of injustice that impact members of the University of Pittsburgh community.

• Formally recognize the diversity of the Jewish community. Although established Jewish groups on campus such as Hillel and Chabad represent important subsets of the Jewish community on campus, they do not speak for many Jewish students, faculty, and staff. Consult an expansive range of Jewish voices on redressing antisemitism and promoting Jewish interests rather than relying on a limited set of experts representing only one set of viewpoints.

• When a member of the university community does harm, give them the tools to work toward what Judaic traditions call teshuvah, or moral realignment. Hire experts in restorative justice who can lead us to accountability, recognition, and repair. 

• Offer trainings in dialogue, non-violent communication, facilitation, and de-escalation.

• Create a joint – delicious – Kosher/Halal dining area, with a learning kitchen that can be reserved by professors and student groups for cultural events and educational activities. We do not underestimate the power of shared space and good food to foster meaningful conversation.

• Hire new staff members in the OIEW who have expertise in antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of religious and ethnic discrimination. Make sure they have the resources they need to respond to every report promptly, effectively, and with compassion and care.

• Offer opportunities for interreligious and interracial education, dialogue and programming. Working together on shared service and justice projects – like protecting immigrants and attending to food insecurity – helps build alliances and trust. 

• Make it easier for instructors with different training and backgrounds to teach joint classes. We have the faculty to teach joint classes on Islamophobia and antisemitism and/or the commonalities between Arabic and Hebrew, but no clear pathway for instructors to get ongoing credit for teaching them. 

• Invest in Middle Eastern studies, including the study of Palestine and Israel. Consider a hire in Palestine/Israel studies, as they did at the University of Colorado.

• Hire faculty who research the proliferation of antisemitism, Islamophobia, white supremacy, conspiratorial thinking, and other forms of hate.

• Offer students scholarly resources to think through the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism with precision and nuance.  

As Jewish members of the University of Pittsburgh and allies, we stand committed to the principles of academic freedom, free inquiry, diversity, equity, and inclusion that form the bedrock of higher education. We cannot meaningfully confront antisemitism — or any other form of injustice — if we abandon those fundamental values.

(*) Scholars widely debate the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. See https://www.wellbeing.pitt.edu/civil-rights-title-ix/religious-accommodations/definition-antisemitism and for a deeper dive: https://pitt.libguides.com/antisemitism

The letter can be found here, where anyone interested can sign it. Chancellor Gabel will receive the names of all signatories along with a tally of how many signatories identified as Jewish; but not specifically which signatories are Jewish. The total number of signatories and the total number of Jewish signatories will be made public, but not the names of signatories.

From the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Association of University Professors

Dear Chancellor Gabel:

The University of Pittsburgh’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is deeply alarmed by the recently released “Report of the Working Group on Antisemitism” (“Report”) and the accompanying Office of the Chancellor’s “University Response to the Working Group on Antisemitism’s Report and Recommendations” (“Response”). We are concerned about the process through which the report and the response were generated, about their implications for academic freedom, and about the proposed path forward. The process clearly ignored established norms of shared governance and denied opportunities for broad community input. The recommendations of the Report and the Response pose grave threats to academic freedom; moreover, those recommendations seem to us both practically unworkable and legally dubious.

I. Process

The Working Group on Antisemitism was formed in December 2024. This followed a November 2024 proposal for the creation of a similar group through the University Senate that generated considerable pushback: several members of the Faculty Assembly suggested that these concerns should be handled through the Senate’s established Equity, Inclusion, and Anti-Discrimination Advocacy committee (EIDAC). At the December meeting, attendees were told that the question of forum was moot and that a Working Group would be formed outside of Senate procedures and without Senate input, under the auspices of the Chancellor’s office.

This opaque and unaccountable process clearly violates long-established norms of shared governance cherished at Pitt and upheld by the AAUP. Creating a committee comparable to EIDAC but focused solely on the concerns of a single group — a committee that offered privileged status to a private community organization while excluding many campus stakeholders — elevates the speech and concerns of some faculty and students while ignoring others and excluding other under-represented and targeted groups. This process appears to violate equal protection norms and amplifies the antisemitic trope that Jews deserve and receive special treatment.  

A democratic society and functioning institution must balance the needs of faculty and students of all identities and viewpoints, not structurally privilege some over others; specifically, the Report and Response ignore the rampant anti-Muslim rhetoric and practices polluting our campus and our community. There was no opportunity for faculty, students, or staff with differing views, either as individuals or through established organizations, to offer contrasting viewpoints, express their own concerns, or otherwise participate. Instead, those with differing opinions are implicitly threatened with punishment.

We also note with alarm the selective — and highly politically biased — proposed involvement of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh (JFGP) [i] in proposing, monitoring, reviewing, and enforcing Pitt policies, and the exclusion of other Jewish groups including Ratzon, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Jewish Bund. This is unfortunately consistent with the Report’s and the Response’s identification of “Jewish” concerns with those of some Jewish groups and individuals who tolerate no criticism of Israel or its actions. Indeed, we are disturbed by your consistent and repeated homogenization of “Jewish” views, concerns, and opinions throughout your Response. This is both a blatant example of viewpoint discrimination by the University and a violation of norms of university self-governance.

We note that your response calls for discussion through shared government mechanisms, but this is too little, too late, a clear attempt to provide a veneer of legitimacy to a flawed process. The Report and Response have been published, and any opposition will be easy to portray as obstructionist or worse. Meaningful participation and disagreement have, at this point, been structurally precluded.

II. Academic Freedom

Although we dispute many of the assertions in the report and response and question their glaring omissions, we focus here on their implications for academic freedom. While the Response avoids endorsing any specific definition of antisemitism, the report does not. It strongly intimates that anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli views are antisemitic (ironically perpetuating the antisemitic trope that all Jews are responsible for the actions of the state of Israel). [ii]

Given that your response applauds and largely endorses the report and offers no definition of antisemitism of its own, members of the University community can only conclude that you share the Report’s understanding of antisemitism; you certainly do not dispute it. Our concern is that this kind of ambiguity has — and we suspect is intended to have — a chilling effect. Creating a climate of fear and uncertainty where punishment is promised for the violation of norms and definitions that remain undefined will exacerbate the self-censorship that is already widespread on campus. This does a tremendous disservice to our students, who are frustrated at the repressive climate that already exists on campus. [iii] It is also, plainly, a violation of academic freedom.

We are not reassured by references to dialogue and civil engagement. “Civility” and associated notions like “respect” have a long history as tools for repressing the views and concerns of minoritized populations. We also worry that dialogue and civil engagement initiatives often effectively teach our students that the only safe course of action is to avoid controversial topics, lest they be accused of incivility or disrespect for expressing views to which some people vehemently object. In this connection, we note with trepidation the idea that merely “being confronted with protest activity” that expresses views with which some people disagree was named in the Report as part of the “background” climate of antisemitism on campus. Both academic freedom and free expression rights protect faculty, staff, and students in their pursuit and discussion of ideas that some would prefer to suppress or ignore.

The report and response frequently invoke time, place, and manner restrictions on speech while failing to specify their boundaries for faculty, staff, and students. Such restrictions have been repeatedly used, at Pitt and elsewhere, to selectively repress disfavored speech through a climate of racial and colonial intimidation. Time, place, and manner requirements under the First Amendment cannot and should not be used to engage in viewpoint discrimination or to make it impossible for any group to express its views. While the Response acknowledges that these restrictions must be clearly defined, we object to their historical, repeated, and continuing use as tools of censorship.

Finally, we are aghast that the response asserts that “the University understands that perceptions of safety are as important as safety measures themselves.” This position is wholly inconsistent with academic freedom and would make much teaching (and potentially research) nearly impossible. It can also easily be weaponized to attack racially, sexually, religiously and politically vulnerable people — students, staff, and faculty alike — on the grounds that their very existence is frightening to those around them. If followed to its logical conclusion, this understanding would require that the University be closed.

III. Future Action

We agree with much of what the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine and an autonomous group of Jewish faculty have called for in their replies to the Report and Response. We believe that to have any legitimacy or viability, this process must start again from the beginning. Specifically, we call for:

1.Withdrawal of the Report and Response as inconsistent with established norms and practices of shared governance. In the absence of such withdrawal, we urge the University Senate not to participate in the laundering of the report and response through sham processes of “consultation.”

2.Explicit repudiation of proposed “public safety” collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh and the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh.

3.An in-person, transparent discussion of the entire process to this point, including the selection of Working Group members and information about resignations from the Working Group.

4.A good faith and genuinely collaborative process to create an inclusive mechanism to address these issues and the harm done by the Report and the Response.

5.Recognition of the expertise of the AAUP on the use of time, place, and manner restrictions on speech and collaboration with the AAUP and relevant shared governance committees on any discussions of such restrictions. 

6.Full recognition and respect for faculty rights to engage in teaching and scholarship on the subjects of their expertise — including human rights, genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, world history, world politics, and all other topics—and full affirmation of the right of Pitt community members to express their views, including views critical of Israel, Zionism, and Islamophobia, consistent with nationally recognized AAUP parameters and the law.

Signed by the leadership of AAUP: Michael Goodhart (Political Science), president; Ruth Mostern (History), vice president; Harry Hochheiser (Biomedical Informatics), secretary-treasurer; and Anjali Vats (Law), member at large of the Executive Committee

[i] We note that JFGP is highly controversial; it routinely denounces local elected officials and sues political opponents in attempting to protect and advance its own extremist positions. Its formalized role in University governance and policy-making is both a shocking instance of viewpoint discrimination and in potential violation of the University’s 501(c)3 status. Moreover, the collaboration between Pitt and JFGP is an ironic reversal from Pitt’s past criticism of student protests as illegitimate because they involved “outsiders.”

[ii] E.g., p.1, paragraph 3 (“Background”) and p. 4, section 3, paragraph 2 (“Training, Education, and Contextual Understanding”).

[iii] Pitt has “earned” an F grade and a rank of 219 out of 257 schools in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression College Free Speech Rankings and a Hostile Campus designation from the Council on America-Islamic Relations. It was also successfully sued by the ACLU over its treatment of Students for Justice in Palestine. 

Full statement from Working Group member Jennifer Murshatashvili

The urgency to create this committee emerged from the initiate of faculty senate leadership after three Jewish Pitt students were violently attacked. When I was named to the committee’s leadership, my home was targeted, and I was subjected to extensive online hatred and harassment. No faculty member should have to endure that for serving the University. It should serve as both a lesson and a warning to all of us about the current environment in our country, in our city, and on our campuses. I hope these facts alone underscore the urgency of this work to members of our community. 

We are witnessing a historic rise in antisemitism in the US, including forms of Jew-hatred that differ from older variants. Universities should study these new developments, educate our communities about them, and create new opportunities for serious learning about Israel, Zionism, the Middle East, and these new forms of Jew hatred. This report makes important recommendations along these lines. The report is the beginning of a longer institutional process. 

When I joined this committee, my goal was to contribute to outcomes that would improve life for everyone at Pitt, not only Jewish and Israeli members of our community. The university should be truly open fora where anyone should feel safe to express any idea. Clear free-speech rules, visible time, place, and manner restrictions, strengthened reporting systems, and consistent enforcement protect both the right to protest and the right of others to teach, learn, and work without harassment, intimidation, or disruption.

These recommendations also help protect the pluralist character of the University. A university should be a place where people with fundamentally different identities, values, and political commitments can debate difficult ideas openly and safely. No one should have to fear exclusion, retaliation, or harassment simply for their identity or their beliefs. It is encouraging that the university is taking immediate action on these goals. 

Statement from Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine

We are a group of concerned faculty and staff who condemn in strongest terms the University of Pittsburgh’s “Report of the Working Group on Antisemitism” and the Office of the Chancellor’s response to it. These documents will increase discrimination and repression rather than protecting any group from harm.

We call upon the University to rescind and renounce the Report and to take further reparative action to avoid harm to our shared community.

The report fails the University of Pittsburgh and the city of Pittsburgh in numerous fundamental ways:

1. The report explicitly lists statements critical of Israel or Zionism as expressions of antisemitism. While we can agree on combating racism and attacks on any specific population group, there is no basis for banning critique of any state or any ideology.

2. Rather than uplifting unity and solidarity, the report distinguishes antisemitism from bias against any other group, ignoring the repression, censorship and discrimination faced by any group in our community other than Zionist Jews; especially Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, and those who support their struggles. The report ignores the fact that the only students disciplined during the Gaza war were those who protested the war, as well as the fact that the university suspended Students for Justice in Palestine on spurious grounds (a decision later found to be illegal and reversed by the courts, not by Pitt’s administration).

3. The report positions specific groups known for their support of Israel as the only Jewish groups that are entitled to claim antisemitism. It ignores the fact that many Jews do not regard such groups to represent them, nor the fact that many young American Jews do not identify with Israel and that they oppose its policies. Those young people, who support justice for the Palestinians and whose positions are ignored in this Report, are our students and members of our community. To speak for all Jews, as this report does, itself moves dangerously into antisemitic tropes of Jewish uniformity.

4. The report calls for fostering partnerships and exchanges with Israeli faculty and institutions, which has nothing to do with combatting antisemitism. Its inclusion in the recommendation verifies that the Report is intended to improve the image of a state that has just committed genocide, is placing an entire population under occupation, and whose leading politicians support apartheid conditions and increasingly favor ethnic cleansing. While the university may not support BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), there is no reason for it to foster collaboration, especially at a time when faculty and students have justified personal and professional reasons to eschew collaboration with a state whose leadership has been charged with war crimes and the commission of genocide; that encourages violent settlers to terrorize an occupied population; and when leading Israeli politicians openly favor ethnic cleansing. 

5. A particularly troubling recommendation concerns coordination between campus police and the security staff of a private organization, the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, a community organization that has consistently attacked critics of the state of Israel who have expressed dissent through legal and civil channels.

6. The working group that wrote the report was selected without any input from the faculty or student groups, taking it out of the hands of shared governance where the idea for such a commission had originally been discussed. The working group worked in secret, and its Report was not made available for public comments by the university community, before the chancellor drafted her own response to it. The way the “Working Group on Antisemitism” was selected and worked recalls the worst days of Pitt’s previous administration that led to unionization and the departure of all of Pitt’s senior administration. Transparency and voice are as essential today for a healthy spirit of the University as they were then.

7. While Chancellor Gabel’s response requires its own detailed response, one item that stands out is her statement that “the University understands that perceptions of safety are as important as safety measures themselves.” This is a dangerous statement: does it mean, for example, that a white person’s perception that black people are a threat is equally valid as the real existence of threat to that person? Are rich people justified in feeling that poor people are a threat? And who is going to decide whose “perception” of threat is more valid than another’s?

8. The Office of the Chancellor promises to create an independent external advisory board to help manage the policing of antisemitism at Pitt, comprised of both campus and community members, and in conjunction with sweeping changes to Pitt’s management of Title VI compliance. This is a threat to academic freedom, it strips faculty of compliance power and sidelines existing shared governance bodies.

9. It is particularly remarkable how out of touch and anachronistic this report is with current realities, when our political field is undergoing a dramatic shift in the United States and globally. The recent vote by half of the Democratic members of Congress to eliminate funding Israel, and the attitude of the majority of Americans, including American Jews toward unapologetically oppressive Israeli practices, cannot be answered with politically motivated accusations of antisemitism. These only devalue the meaning of the term, and thereby do great disservice to the cause of fighting antisemitism.

For these reasons, the undersigned group calls upon the Chancellor to take the following reparative actions:

1. Remove the Antisemitism Report from the Pitt website and disavow it.

2. Do not form a new antisemitism committee, since there are already administration and shared governance committees and offices with mandates to address discrimination without bias toward any single group.

3. End Pitt police collaboration with the Jewish Federation public safety team and issue a public statement to that effect.

Statement by Andrea Goldschmidt, associate professor, Department of Psychiatry, and member of the Pitt Jewish Community affinity group for faculty and staff 

I respect the tremendous amount of time and effort my colleagues put into their work on the task force. At the same time, I was surprised at the brevity of the report as the culmination of 1.5 years of work. This stands in sharp contrast to the very lengthy and thorough reports I have seen come out of other universities.

I should note that I have very little “insider” knowledge and, to my understanding as a School of Medicine faculty member who has been active and visible with respect to issues affecting the Jewish community at Pitt over the past several years, there were no listening sessions or focus groups with the Jewish community during the course of the task force’s work. Thus, I can only assume that the brevity of the report, in contrast to what I see as the enormity of the problem, reflects either that there was so much internal disagreement on the task force that the short report reflects the only areas of confluence among its members, or that the task force was somehow hobbled in its work before it even began.

A significant gap I identified in the report is that it does not grapple with the challenge of how antisemitism presents today, especially in left-leaning academic circles. The university can (and should) continue to speak out forcefully about rejecting all forms of hate and discrimination, including antisemitism (recommendation #2) — but if the consensus within academia continues to be that anti-Zionism is *not* antisemitism, that all forms of criticism towards Israel are legitimate (no matter how biased) and should never be conflated with antisemitism, and that antisemitism only presents in the form of Nazi symbols and blatant negative stereotypes about Jews, it is very easy to summarily dismiss such condemnation as not applicable to the types of discrimination and exclusion Jews are very clearly experiencing on campus and in the community.

This essentially allows a hostile classroom and campus climate to continue festering, as none of the actors responsible for this hostile climate believes they are behaving in antisemitic ways and therefore they can continue to insist that are exempt from the administration’s condemnation of antisemitic behavior.

Statement from Students for Justice in Palestine

Students for Justice in Palestine at Pitt wholeheartedly condemns the University of Pittsburgh’s “Report of the Working Group on Antisemitism” and the chancellor’s response to it.

The report falsely conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism. While we can agree on combating racism and attacks on any specific population group, there is no basis for banning critique of any state or any ideology.

The report calls for fostering partnerships and exchanges with Israeli faculty and institutions, which has nothing to do with combatting antisemitism. This only aims to normalize and further indoctrination of pro-Zionist and pro-Israel ideologies among our campus community, failing to acknowledge the state of Israel has actively been commiting a genocide against the Palestinian people as found by the UN, the ICJ (International Court of Justice), and countless independent human rights groups.

Rather than uplifting unity and solidarity, the report distinguishes antisemitism from bias against any other group, ignoring the repression, censorship, and discrimination faced by any group. Our organization, along with many other students, has called for the Pitt administration to properly address hate crimes and racist violence. There have been numerous instances of anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobic violence, which have been ignored by the University and any resolution mechanisms already in place. Victims have been dismissed, and when SJP called on the university to act in a manner of redress, this demand fell on deaf ears.

Pitt administrators have ignored the numerous calls for meetings and policy reform, instead electing for campus police to collaborate with the Jewish Federation’s private security team. … To increase surveillance and policing on campus in the name of “perceptions of safety” is a direct threat to marginalized students who already experience disproportionate violence from police. We want non-carceral solutions that result in accountability and repair rather than false solutions.

We echo calls to disavow the report, end Pitt Police collaboration with the Jewish Federation’s public safety team, and create mechanisms to properly address hate and violence for ALL students.