Last updated: Mar. 9, 2026

Julia Alekseyeva

Julia Alekseyeva is a professor who idolized a murderer, demonized Israel and spread hatred of the police.

Julia Alekseyeva is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

In 2021, Alekseyeva posted on X that she had been active with the anti-Israel organization IfNotNow (INN), but left it because she “did not agree with its collusion with racist and imperialist power structures, partially through the performance of nonviolence.” She indicated on X that she had left INN by August 2020.

As of January 2025, Alekseyeva was listed on the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) as an assistant professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the Department of English. She was also listed as teaching at the Penn School of Arts and Sciences.

Also as of January 2025, Alekseyeva was slated to teach the course “Arts of Abolition and Liberation” at Penn in the Spring of 2025.

As of December 15, 2024, Alekseyeva’s Instagram bio said: “...comics-maker imagining the Bright Socialist Future.” As of December 17, 2024, Alekseyeva’s Instagram account had been made “Private” and said: “No longer active on here. Find me on Substack.” As of January 2025, the Instagram account bio said: “Writer / Artist / Socialist / Antifascist” and “This account is private,” along with a link to her personal website.

In November 2020, Alekseyeva posted on Facebook a photo of the book she wrote called: “Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution.”

Alekseyeva received a PhD from Harvard University (Harvard) in comparative literature; film and visual studies in 2017.

As of January 2025, Alekseyeva’s LinkedIn said she was located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

On June 3, 2021, Alekseyeva posted on X: “Totally outrageous…This school should be ashamed to be yet another institution conflating Zionism and Judaism.” Her post was in response to a post about a teacher at a private Jewish school who was fired after he posted about the “morally and intellectually corroding clutches of Zionism.”

Zionism is the belief that Jews have the right to self-determination in their own national home, and the right to develop their national culture. Zionism is a core part of the identity of most Jews.

On October 14, 2021, Alekseyeva posted on X: “This is so excellent!! Beautiful and very thorough comic on Jewish claims to indigeneity in Israel…” Alekseyeva’s post shared a link to a comic article titled: “When Settler Becomes Native - Examining the claim of Jewish indigeneity in the land of Israel.”

One method anti-Israel activists use to spread anti-Semitism and deny Israel’s legitimacy is to claim that Jews are not indigenous to the Land of Israel. The claim takes multiple forms, including the “Khazar myth” which alleges that Ashkenazi Jews are ethnically European and are not descended from the ancient Israelites of the Bible.

The same comic article that Alekseyeva posted to X promoted the idea of “Nakba” and referred to Israel as a “settler colonial regime.”

The term “Nakba” is generally translated as “catastrophe” in Arabic, referring to the outcome of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It is a term used to delegitimize the creation of the State of Israel by drawing a comparison to the Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, meaning “catastrophe.”

On Saturday, October 7, 2023, approximately 2,900 heavily armed Hamas terrorists breached Israel’s border with Gaza. They executed numerous war crimes on civilians, including mass murder, beheadings of children, rape of men and women, torture, kidnappings and mutilation.

Hamas broadcast videos of their butchery on social media, often to victims’ accounts for families to see. Israel retaliated with a war called “Swords of Iron.” As of November 10, 2023, approximately 1,200 Israelis, the vast majority of them civilians, were murdered during the attacks. Hamas kidnapped 242 Israelis, including at least 30 children. At least 3,500 people were wounded, many severely.

A terrorist detained by Israel admitted he raped an Israeli woman when he broke into a kibbutz house during the October 7, 2023 attack. In March 2024, a former hostage of Hamas publicly stated she was sexually abused and tortured while in captivity.

For more information on the October 7, 2023 terror attacks, see the Canary Mission page on Hamas.

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.” BDS is an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement,” although leading BDS activists have admitted [00:01:01] this is not true.

One of the demands of BDS includes [point 3] what is generally known as the “right of return,” a demand discredited as a way to eliminate Israel. Barghouti has said that the “right of return” is a means to “end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”

Barghouti has said that BDS “aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.”

In his activism, Barghouti has also said [00:05:55] regarding Israel: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No…rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”

The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas in 2017.

BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.

The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments and student groups, backed by their own anti-Israel members and affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of, or divestment from, Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.

Boycott resolutions [p. 10], although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.

BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. On one campus, when the student government debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats against those opposing it.