A 57-year-old attorney and assistant professor at Penn State Dickinson Law told a news outlet that watching her sons navigate situations where hostility toward Zionism and hostility toward Jewish identity appeared to blur together had reshaped her thinking in ways her own life had not previously prompted.
The professor, identified as Martin, co-founded the independent Center for Jewish Legal Studies and received a seat on the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission through an appointment by Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, in July. Martin described the panel's purpose as enabling Pennsylvanians to work, live, and take part in public life without facing discrimination. She told a broadcast outlet that the commission should be a place where every resident feels represented and where enforcement stays grounded in law rather than political considerations. Her appointment carries a five-year term.
Martin told a broadcast outlet that antisemitic incidents spreading across American university campuses following the October 7 attacks reshaped her professional direction during the years her sons were enrolled. Martin and her husband Jeff — now retired — raised their sons in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Though her own Jewish identity was rooted more in cultural tradition than in religious observance, she expressed to a broadcast outlet her desire for her sons, Max and Sid, to be raised attending synagogue and participating in both religious and Sunday school education. The family's two sons, she mentioned, are often likened by others to older Jewish men spending an afternoon over a chessboard, and the entire household joined their Harrisburg congregation — Temple Ohev Shalom, a Reform synagogue — on a group journey to Israel.
Sid made a subsequent visit to Israel through a Birthright programme, and Max has a similar trip in the works. Their mother told a television news outlet that both sons carry a deep connection to their Jewish heritage.
Max received a degree from New York University and Sid from Pennsylvania State University, the public campus where Sid's mother holds a staff position. Martin, who identifies as both Black and Jewish, recounted to a television news outlet that her sons encountered racial discrimination during their high school years but did not face antisemitism until Max attended NYU, where she said the hostility he experienced was of a wholly different order — including an incident in which hot coffee was allegedly thrown on him in a university library. She added that the events following October 7 had altered her understanding of how widespread antisemitism could be in the United States, and that she had previously been more focused on concerns about her sons' racial identity than their Jewish one. She also noted that some of the students participating in campus protests appeared, in her view, to have limited familiarity with the geographic meaning behind the phrase "from the river to the sea," a slogan referencing territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
In a television interview, Martin spoke about how a particular experience had altered both her personal outlook and her approach to the public voice she holds — views grounded in a background that moved from childhood in Washington, D.C., through undergraduate study at the University of Rhode Island, and ultimately to legal training at Howard University. Her account, shared with a television news outlet, described an early career spent in the Rhode Island attorney general's office, where drafting hate crimes legislation and serving on the then-governor's Commission on Prejudice and Bias formed part of her prosecutorial work.
Her academic post at Penn State centres on law and Holocaust studies, and she has described her research focus as antisemitism alongside anti-discrimination law. The Center for Jewish Legal Studies was established to fill what Martin viewed as a gap in legal scholarship around protections for Jewish civil rights.
At a Northwestern University School of Law conference on international law, Martin addressed allegations of genocide directed at Israel, telling attendees that her remarks focused on what she characterised as the misuse of the word "genocide" and on tracing the origins of the "settler colonialism" narrative.
In an interview with a prominent broadcaster, Martin put forward the position that "anti-Zionism" should be written as a single unhyphenated word — along the lines of how "antisemitism" is now standardly rendered — arguing that the term has, in her view, shifted away from denoting opposition to a historical political movement and now operates as a channel for hostility directed at Jewish people. She also put forward the view that, with Israel existing as an established state, the underlying ideological question from which the term emerged has largely been settled.
After the Pennsylvania governor's family observed Passover with a seder at the official residence in 2025, an intruder entered the property and set fires using Molotov cocktails. Separately, a speaker had argued to a broadcast outlet that opposing the existence of Israel as a nation while raising no comparable objections to other countries having their own states amounts to targeting Jewish people specifically.
Cody Balmer entered a guilty plea to the assault charge and received a custodial term handed down by the court. Court documents state that he carried out the attack on Shapiro's residence over his stated objections to the governor's positions on Palestinian affairs. Martin told a television news outlet that she had a brief encounter with Shapiro at a Pittsburgh event hosted by businessman and philanthropist Robert Kraft, though no formal meeting between her and the governor has taken place to address antisemitism or her advocacy for the state to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition of the term.
The IHRA definition — which the commission has already adopted — covers examples such as drawing comparisons between Israeli policy and Nazi conduct, or contesting the Jewish people's right to self-determination by characterising the founding of Israel as rooted in racism. Martin has called on Shapiro to extend that same definition across the legislature through an executive order, arguing in remarks to a television outlet that it stands apart from other definitions by addressing antisemitism as it manifests through opposition to Zionism, and that no other framework accomplishes that as effectively through its accompanying examples. She put forward that position after joining the commission, where she attended her first meeting in September.
Orientation sessions for incoming commissioners are scheduled for sometime between late October and early November. The body is authorised to seat 11 members yet currently operates with one vacancy, she noted, adding that her intention was to absorb as much as possible about its rules and procedures in order to serve commonwealth residents to the best of her ability. She went on to say that developing antisemitism awareness training for organisations that turn to the commission for guidance is a goal she intends to pursue.
Martin appeared before a Pennsylvania legislative panel to give testimony on antisemitism reported at schools across the state. The commission's leadership told a broadcast outlet that the body's role — and its commitment to protecting the rights of all people, regardless of political affiliation — needs to be better communicated to the public, and that families encountering discrimination in public schools have a resource in the commission. Separately, FBI data show that Pennsylvania has recorded 395 hate crime offenses across 325 incidents since January 1, 2025.
Roughly a quarter of those cases — 83 in total — were tied to religion. Of the 54 religion-based hate-crime incidents recorded, roughly 65 percent had Jewish people as the victims — a share that also accounts for around 17 percent of all hate-crime incidents logged overall. Estimates place the Jewish share of Pennsylvania's population at roughly 2.7 percent.
Figures released by the Anti-Defamation League put antisemitic incidents across Pennsylvania at 281 for 2025, a count representing a 40 percent drop from the total recorded the previous year. Together, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were the source of just over half those recorded cases — a combined tally of approximately 149 of the total. Among higher-education campuses, 32 of those recorded events took place, while another 21 were logged at K-12 institutions across the state.
The commission provides a path for people affected by incidents at state agencies and public institutions to seek resolution without resorting to litigation, Martin explained to a news outlet, noting that court proceedings carry both financial costs and delays that lead many people to avoid them altogether. She stated that equal and fair treatment should not be a complicated ask and expressed a desire to leave a meaningful mark through her work. She also expressed a desire to bring honour to the Jewish community.
