Anti-Israel Professor no Longer Listed as Northeastern Jewish Studies Faculty member

(This article originally appeared on jns.org on October 19, 2012)

A Northeastern University professor has been removed from the faculty list of the school’s Jewish Studies program following the release of a video by Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) revealing the anti-Israel measures he took in the classroom.

Prof. Denis Sullivan—whose name was previously listed as a Jewish Studies program faculty member but is now no longer on the webpage for that program—remains the head of the Boston-based school’s Middle East Center, according to APT President Charles Jacobs.

“This makes four staffers at Northeastern who have been dismissed or have had their positions shifted in the wake of our video exposes,” Jacobs said.

Both Sullivan and Northeastern’s media relations department did not return requests from JNS.org. Lori Lefkovitz, director of the Jewish Studies program, told The Jewish Advocate she could not confirm that Sullivan was no longer a faculty member for the program.

Students who take Sullivan’s classes “tell me all the time about the incredible bias that he has, and Denis Sullivan will disagree with them and give them a bad grade because of it,” Jason Pressburg, former director of Israel Programs at Northeastern Hillel, said on the APT video. Pressburg said Sullivan is “vehemently anti-Israel” but “claims to be unbiased.”

One of the readings for Sullivan’s course, as displayed on the video, is “Al Haq Position Paper: Sixty Years of Nakba: Israel’s Continued Policy of Forcible Displacement.” Other readings listed in his syllabi include “How Israel Brought Gaza to the Brink of Humanitarian Catastrophe,” “Israel’s Lies,” “Human Rights in Palestinine and Other Occupied Arab Territories,” and John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s “The Israel Lobby.” In 2009, he took his students to the Cairo office of the Arab League.

Jacobs wrote in an op-ed that Sullivan’s “lectures, syllabi, curricula, and invited guests are shown on our video to be clearly designed to poison the minds of students against the Jewish state.”

The APT video including the information on Sullivan, as well as other APT videos on campus anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, is available to view at www.shameonneu.com.