A zine distributed at last week’s 5C club fair is raising concerns among students for what some describe as antisemitic ideas and propaganda.
Several copies of the zine, titled “Palestinian Solidarity, COVID-19, and the Struggle for Palestinian Liberation,” were laid out on an informational table run by the Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC).
ASPC later stated that they did not produce the zine and that they were not aware of its presence on the table until after the fair. At the time of this article’s publication, it is unknown who printed it.
Spanning 40 pages, the zine was created by Sheyam Ghieth and Rimona Eskayo, two artists unaffiliated with the Claremont Colleges. Plastered across the cover is an illustration of a woman wearing a keffiyeh and a mask, with the words “Mask Up We Need You” filling the space above her.
A table of contents prepares readers for 12 subsections with titles such as “Pandemics Are A Tool Of The Colonizer,” “Covid-19 Never Ended” and “A Mask Is A Beacon Of Global Solidarity.”
Almost immediately after the club fair, the zine was met with backlash. Haverim at the Claremont Colleges — a social organization whose mission claims to “defend Jews on campus” — published a Sept. 5 statement criticizing the zine for “antisemitic and anti-American conspiracy theories and propaganda.”
The statement specifically criticized the zine for the connections it draws between Israel, the United States and disease as a weapon, arguing that it promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories.
“Such conspiracy theories are part of a historical trope that Jews are responsible for disease,” the statement reads. “During the Middle Ages, Jews were regularly blamed and persecuted for having caused plagues.”
Other 5C community members outside of Haverim were similarly critical of the zine, according to Emilio Bankier PO ’27, Haverim’s vice president. He said that he has been in contact with various students, administrators and professors who agreed that the zine has antisemitic messages.
“We’ve always had to fight very hard for people to understand,” Bankier said of some Jewish students’ experiences discussing antisemitism on campus. “What in one sense was reassuring here with this is that we didn’t have to fight very hard at all.”
Oona Eisenstadt, professor of Jewish studies and religious studies at Pomona, called for ASPC to issue a formal apology.
“The booklet is deeply anti-intellectual,” she wrote in a Sept. 11 email to Pomona’s faculty members. “It’s a fever dream. In every line complicated forces are reduced to a single intentional conspiracy.”
Bethany Slater, the executive director of Claremont Hillel — a religious organization centered around celebrating Jewish culture — similarly called for an apology.
“Whether or not ASPC intended to distribute it, it seems reasonable to expect ASPC to be eager to issue an apology, condemn the content, and explore restorative practices that involve the entire campus community,” she said in an email to TSL. “After all, it’s not just Jews who are harmed by the circulation of conspiracy theories.”
Kenneth Wolf, chair of the faculty at Pomona, also commented on the damage of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
“When someone throws a little conspiracy theory bomb in the middle of things and people don’t immediately disavow it, it just leads to more problems,” Wolf said.
The extent of these criticisms on campus was reflected Monday when a new message appeared on Pomona’s Walker Wall: “Why do [Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)] and ASPC spread anti-Jewish propaganda? We are not afraid.”
In a matter of days, the message was painted over to read: “Anti-Zionism is not anti-Jewish propaganda.”
Both SJP and ASPC denied any affiliation with the zine.
In a Sept. 11 email to the Pomona community, ASPC’s Executive Board claimed that the zines had been mistakenly mixed up with their own materials.
“We did not realize and were not notified of this until after the club fair, and we did not produce the zine,” they wrote.
In an ASPC Senate meeting the following day, ASPC President Devlin Orlin PO ’25 expanded on the email.
“I don’t think that the role of ASPC is to issue an apology that says that Zionism is an integral part of Judaism,” Orlin said. “But I still think that pamphlet is not necessarily something on campus that I would be proud was on that table, and it was a mistake, and so here is my apology.”
For some students, though, an apology didn’t seem necessary.
“I don’t recall receiving an apology or really pressuring the ASPC to give us an apology when I wasn’t seeing direct involvement in boycotts,” Zyad Sibai PO ’25 said during the meeting.
Without an apology and a lack of claimed ownership for the zine, Wolf suggested that the incident highlighted a greater issue of anonymity at the colleges.
“If you don’t stand up for what you believe in and let people know that you believe in it, everything is muddied from the very beginning, as far as I’m concerned,” Wolf said. “If something is done anonymously, it’s always problematic.”