This Passover at Georgetown, an Anti-Israel Referendum in the Spirit of Pharaoh

“Mah nishtanah halilah hazeh?” Why is this night different from all other nights? Jews around the world read these words in the Haggadah, the ancient Passover guide that tells the story of Pharaoh’s oppression of the Jewish people in Egypt. While the first night of Passover may be different from all other nights, the insistence of the Georgetown University Student Association (GUSA) to hold an anti-Israel campus wide referendum over the Passover holiday is sadly more of the same antisemitism that has overtaken the campus. Once again, Jews are being singled out for unequal treatment at Georgetown.

GUSA’s scheduling of the referendum during Passover is no oversight. GUSA broke its own rules to advance the referendum without the approval of the Senate’s Policy and Advocacy Committee (PAC), which typically determines whether to send legislation to the full Senate. According to one GUSA senator, John DiPierri, “Every single rule related to our procedure was broken.” Another, senator Saahil Rao, complained that this directly impacted the referendum that was advanced: “There’s obviously a lot of controversial language within this referendum, and I thought we should have debated as a senate on how to present this issue to the student body in the most objective way possible.”

By rushing the resolution, GUSA has organized a Passover crisis for Georgetown’s Jewish community. While haste is nothing new for people who still eat unleavened bread for eight days to commemorate the Exodus from Egypt, the spiraling antisemitism that has seized college campuses since Hamas’s brutal attack on Oct. 7, 2023, is something else entirely.

Seventy-three percent of American Jewish college students surveyed in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre said they have personally experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism. In particular, 87 percent of Jewish college students are concerned that anti-Israel protests and petitions to boycott the State of Israel lead to hate crimes and violence against Jewish students, according to February 2025 polling.

Unfortunately, Georgetown already has a poor track record of protecting its Jewish students. A series of protests chanting for the destruction of Israel escalated on Sept. 20, 2024, to a vandalism incident where the John Carroll statue outside Healy Hall was spray-painted with an inverted red triangle, a symbol used to indicate planned retribution against primarily Jewish individuals. Students have reported a series of antisemitic incidents at Georgetown, and the Chabad rabbi was struck several times by a Lyft driver.

Worse yet, the permeation of anti-Jewish ideas into the Georgetown ethos is not just random; it’s institutional. Georgetown previously hired Nader Hashemi as the director of its Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) after he had publicly presented a conspiracy theory that the man who attacked Salman Rushdie in an attempt to fulfill Iran’s fatwa to assassinate the author of The Satanic Verses was being secretly orchestrated by Israel’s Mossad. Jonathan Brown, chair of the university’s Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies and son-in-law of convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad member Sami Al-Arian, has repeatedly made comments like: “Israeli security forces are lunatics. Israel is insanely racist.”

Even Georgetown’s medical school is infected with the plague of antisemitism. Multiple medical students posted disturbing content on social media, mocking the Oct. 7 massacre and invoking classic antisemitic tropes — from accusing Jews of global control to justifying terror as “resistance.” Jewish medical students, a small minority at Georgetown, described a climate of fear, harassment, and professional retaliation, with messages like “Free Palestine” sent privately during Zoom classes. Perhaps Georgetown’s policies are partially compromised by its close relationship with Qatar, a major Hamas financier. Georgetown’s campus in Doha hosted a panel in 2024 titled “Israel’s war on Palestinians.”

Georgetown has also platformed figures like Mohammed El-Kurd, who publicly praised Hamas’s atrocities as “resistance” and plays into ancient blood libel tropes by accusing Israelis of harvesting Palestinian organs and “a thirst for blood.” These actions have placed Georgetown under federal scrutiny — and raise urgent questions about whether its institutional culture protects bigotry under the guise of free speech.

The Hebrew word Haggadah means “telling” in English. On account of the Passover referendum targeting Georgetown’s small Jewish community, we must take stock of what Georgetown — a university that espouses Jesuit values such as “respect for each person’s individual needs and talents” — is telling the world. When Jewish students are cornered, intimidated, and treated as pariahs during the very holiday that celebrates their emancipation, it is not just reprehensible. It is also symbolic.

Let us be clear: Jewish students do not ask for special treatment. They ask for equal treatment. And just as in every generation, we are commanded to see ourselves as if we, too, were taken out of Egypt. Freedom and safety for Jews are not relics of an ancient story. They are also urgent demands for today.