U of Minnesota Pays Holocaust Scholar After Job Offer Pulled

University of Minnesota

The University of Minnesota agreed to pay Holocaust studies scholar Raz Segal $250,000 as part of a settlement for rescinding his hire as head of the university’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Segal, who is Israeli American, accused the institution of pulling the offer because of backlash to his comments on Israel’s war with Gaza. The week after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, he called Israel’s retaliatory actions a “textbook case of genocide” in an op-ed for the magazine Jewish Currents.

The University of Minnesota offered Segal the job in June 2024, but two days later, two professors resigned from the center’s advisory board in protest. Five days after the offer, the university’s then interim president, Jeff Ettinger, rescinded it, according to a news release from the Center for Constitutional Rights, a progressive legal advocacy organization.

A public records request from the CCR showed donors had raised concerns about the hire. The day before the offer was revoked, donors sent Ettinger a message saying Segal used tropes “offensive to Jews” and that fundraising for the center would likely “grind to a halt” if he were hired. Another email a day later stressed that Jewish donors could “withdraw their support” from the university.

“The attack against me by these donors presented a world turned upside down: my commitment, as a Jewish scholar of the Holocaust and the grandchild of four Holocaust survivors, to stopping a livestreamed genocide in front of our eyes posed, in their minds, a threat to Jews,” Segal said in the release from CCR. “This settlement represents a successful refusal to accept the world of lies that blur an ongoing genocide, and a commitment to continue the intertwined struggles for truth, justice, and accountability—in Palestine and on our campuses.”

Briana Reenshuler, a University of Minnesota spokesperson, emphasized that the settlement agreement “contains no admission of liability or wrongdoing by either party.”

“The University remains focused on advancing our core educational mission and promoting thoughtful inquiry across all of our centers, departments and programs,” she wrote in a statement to Inside Higher Ed.

Segal now serves as an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies and endowed professor in the study of modern genocide at Stockton University in New Jersey. He directs the Master of Arts program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.