But the Jewish student, who could be suspended for comments she made to pro-Palestinian demonstrators during a campus rally in May, didn’t stick around this week to wait for the verdict. Menaker left Monday for Mexico.
“They’re not going to ruin my vacation,” said the Russian émigré before her departure. “There are too many people standing by me — I received approximately 3,000 letters of support from the Russian community. If this university tries to suspend me I will fight it.
“If I can fight KGB back in Russia, I can fight this.”
During the Aug. 12 hearing, Menaker said seven witnesses — including campus police, the leader of the General Union of Palestinian Students and the leader of the Muslim Student Association — testified against her.
While she agrees with two accusations leveled at her — that she called a pro-Palestinian student a sharmoota (the Arabic word for “bitch”) and told another, “Go f— your camels” in response to other defamatory words — she continues to deny a third — that she used the derogatory phrase, “sand nigger.”
“I never even heard that word” before being accused of using it, she said. “I feel like someone’s inventing that thing to frame me up.”
Following the May 7 rally, the university issued the General Union of Palestinian Students a one-year probation and sent Hillel a letter of warning. The university also asked San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan to prosecute Menaker and two other students for hate crimes and other charges, based on evidence gathered by university police through interviews, witness statements and video footage from the rally.
But Hallinan last month “found no evidence that specific laws were broken” and declined to pursue criminal charges against the students.
Menaker was one of three students facing disciplinary charges stemming from the Hillel-sponsored rally, at which pro-Israel demonstrators and pro-Palestinian counterdemonstrators clashed.
Two pro-Palestinian students also faced counts, but recently accepted settlement agreements following separate hearings before an administrative law judge, said Ligeia Polidora, SFSU public relations director.
She declined to release the students’ names or details of the settlements.
As far as Menaker is concerned, however, the university “is trying to punish me for my pro-Israel stance” and that’s why she will not accept a settlement.
Since she will not settle, the administrative law judge has 10 days from the hearing date to come up with a recommendation for disciplinary action ranging from a warning to expulsion, said Polidora. Then SFSU President Robert A. Corrigan will decide whether or not to uphold those recommendations.
A decision had not been reached as of press time Wednesday.
A mother of three who immigrated to the United States in 1985, Menaker has shown little remorse for her words at the May rally.
Following her arrest later that month, Menaker received a groundswell of support from the Bay Area’s Russian-speaking Jewish community. Many emigres felt an unsympathetic American-Jewish community and the university had scapegoated her in order to look even-handed in the aftermath of the rally.
Menaker’s attorney, Alexander Anolik, who is also an instructor at SFSU, has continued to criticize the university for pursuing charges against his client. He called her behavior at the rally “minor” considering the hardships she endured in the former Soviet Union. A former refusenik and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, she has been “inundated with anti-Israel rhetoric in a hotbed of anti-Zionism, anti-Jewish, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism at SFSU,” he said.