Taxpayer-Funded Holocaust Institute Program Manager Serves on State Holocaust Commission While Promoting Claims Israel Commits ‘Genocide,’ ‘Apartheid’ and ‘Ethnic Cleansing’

The program manager for the Cohen Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at a taxpayer-supported New Hampshire public college — who also serves on the state commission responsible for Holocaust and genocide education — has spent years promoting claims that Israel commits “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “genocide” while using her platform to spread demonization of the Jewish state, an After October 7 investigation found.

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Hannah Eliason, a scholar sympathetic to the antizionist movement that targets Israelis and pro-Israel American Jews for exclusion, manages programming for Keene State College’s Cohen Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and serves as a member of the Institute on the New Hampshire Commission on Holocaust and Genocide Education.

The Commission recommends model policies to New Hampshire public school districts and proposes education rules to the State Board of Education, while identifying curricula, teaching materials, and training opportunities for educators who teach about the Holocaust and genocide in public schools.

Eliason, who has expressed support for the discriminatory Boycott, Divest, Sanctions Movement, wrote a February 2022 Borgen Magazine article that characterized Zionism as causing “a campaign of Palestinian ethnic cleansing called the Nakba,” and wrote that Israel “continues to forcibly displace, unlawfully detain, systemically control and claim the lives of Palestinians in cold blood.”

She has since praised writings that described Israel as a “settler-colonial power” built through “ethnic cleansing” and called Israel’s post-October 7 war against Hamas an “American-funded, Israeli genocide.”