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A Carnegie Mellon University architecture student says she was subjected to a “cruel campaign of antisemitic abuse” by a professor who said in class that her project looked like “the wall Israelis use to barricade Palestinians out of Israel,” and suggested her time would be better spent pondering “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.”
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Pittsburgh federal court, Yael Canaan, who graduated this year from the Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture, accused Associate Head for Design Fundamentals Mary-Lou Arscott of targeting her for being Jewish, at one point allegedly emailing her a link to what the suit describes as a “violently antisemitic blog.”
Arscott had previously denied Canaan an extension on an assignment so she could attend a memorial service for the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in 2018, Canaan’s freshman year, according to the suit. There had been other “jarring incidents that smacked of antisemitism,” the lawsuit goes on, saying the atmosphere eventually got toxic enough that Canaan began to feel unsafe on campus.