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Annelise Orleck did not expect that protecting her students would result in getting assaulted and arrested. Orleck is a professor of history and the former chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. On May 1, Dartmouth President Sian Beilock called police to break up a peaceful student protest on the Dartmouth Green. The students were protesting Israel’s war on Gaza and calling on Dartmouth to divest from companies that support Israel’s military occupation. This was one of many such protests sweeping college campuses.
New Hampshire state troopers in full riot gear arrived with armored vehicles in response to the Dartmouth students. Orleck joined other faculty and community members to stand between the police and students. The 65-year-old professor was body slammed to the ground and was one of 89 people arrested. Two reporters for the campus newspaper were also arrested, provoking national outrage from press freedom groups.
The police assault of Professor Orleck made national news and the videos went viral. Orleck was charged with criminal trespass and temporarily banned from portions of Dartmouth’s campus. The ACLU of New Hampshire issued a statement saying, “Use of police force against protestors should never be a first resort. Freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate are foundational principles of democracy and core constitutional rights.”
Dartmouth President Beilock apologized in a letter to Dartmouth students on May 7, “No one, including me, wanted to see heavily armed police officers in the heart of our campus… I am sorry for the harm this impossible decision has caused.”
Orleck has been a professor at Dartmouth for 34 years and is a renowned historian of labor, women’s issues, and Jewish history. She lives in Thetford Center.
The crackdown on peaceful student protest is often being characterized as a response to antisemitism. On May 7, President Biden denounced a “ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world.”
“There is no place on any campus in America, any place in America, for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind,” said Biden.
“I’m not seeing a wild rise of antisemitism on this campus,” countered Orleck. “My friends who teach at Columbia who are Jewish are not seeing it on the Columbia campus. I am seeing some Jewish professors and students saying that these words, ‘Free Palestine,’ make them uncomfortable. But I’ve been telling people this week since I was attacked, please can we keep separate uncomfortable from words, and uncomfortable from being slammed and harmed by men with guns who then drag you off to jail? That’s uncomfortable. That’s unsafe.”
Orleck says, “What is real is the surge of antisemitism that’s come out of Trumpist America and the January 6 protesters when they were storming the Capitol.”
“It’s a really frightening moment. I’m speaking out not just because I and my students were unnecessarily brutalized …but because I want to break that narrative about the protesters that’s appeared in very mainstream media outlets.”
Orleck sees the current crackdown in historical terms. “This is part of a 40-year right-wing attack on higher education as an institution that seems to be controlled by people of more progressive political ideas,” Orleck told The Vermont Conversation.
Orleck asserted that today’s student protesters are part of “a remarkable generation.”
“They feel like [the war in Gaza] is the moral issue of their time because this is a genocide. And I agree with them.”
