The “ethnic cleansing” of Jewish students and lecturers from German universities from 1933 to 1935 was one of the Nazis’ first goals met. Ninety years later, in the metropolis with the world’s largest Jewish population, the City University of New York has successfully completed a yearslong initiative to expunge all Jews from its senior leadership.
NY POST Spring will see the exit of the last two remaining Jews on the school’s 80-member senior-leadership team, in a city whose population is about 20% Jewish.
It will be the first time since its 1961 founding that CUNY’s senior leadership will be Jew-free or Judenrein, for those who fear the horrors of history repeating itself. This is just one of many systemic initiatives designed to expel the Jewish presence at CUNY.
The once-vibrant recruitment of students at New York City’s Jewish schools has all but ceased at most campuses, and there is now abundant evidence demonstrating it’s more difficult than ever for a Jewish professor to attain a CUNY faculty position.
But what bodes even worse for the city’s Jewish students and academic leaders is that CUNY seems hell-bent on replacing its Jews with anti-Semites. Three of CUNY’s most powerful leaders have documented ties or allegiances to Hamas-linked CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) and the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) against Israel movement.
Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez in 2021 hired Saly Abd Alla as the university’s chief diversity officer, overseeing 25 campuses and 230,000+ students. Abd Alla was a director at CAIR Minnesota, which pushed the BDS movement under her watch.
In what The Post’s Melissa Klein referred to as “a master class in ‘gaslighting,’” the chancellor saw fit to have Abd Alla investigate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism claims and oversee initiatives combating anti-Semitism at the university.
In doubling down and commending CAIR’s work, the chancellor also falsely denied Abd Alla’s connection to the BDS movement. Rodriguez famously skipped out on not one but two City Council probes into pervasive anti-Semitism at his university. He’s pushed a “discrimination portal” as a tool to combat anti-Semitism when, in fact, the portal does quite the opposite.
Is this some kind of cruel joke? You actually hire someone associated with an organization, #CAIR, that demonizes Israel and Jewish people to investigate the harassment of Jews and Zionists on CUNY campuses?
#ChancellorCUNY, @KathyHochul @NYCMayor @SenSchumer @RepJerryNadler ⬇️ https://t.co/WnlGpvV42G— Shira Bloom 🇺🇸&🇮🇱 (@ShiraGlenora) September 16, 2022
Overseen by Abd Alla, the portal uses the CAIR-endorsed Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which the nonpartisan nonprofit education organization StandWithUs has blasted as “deeply harmful,” “intended to cause confusion” and an attempt to “further the spread of antisemitism.”
Anti-Semitic groups and individuals created the JDA to undermine the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s widely accepted anti-Semitism definition that more than 1,110 entities have adopted or endorsed. The portal collects discrimination complaints from all protected classes but assigned only one group — Jews — a new definition of discrimination against them that Jewish people and groups have overwhelmingly rejected.
CUNY’s third anti-Jewish power broker is the 23,000-member faculty union president, James Davis, a well-documented BDS activist who repeatedly lied about it in City Council hearings. Under Davis’ leadership, Professional Staff Congress delegates have pushed #ZionismOutOfCUNY campaigns.
In June 2021, PSC adopted a vitriolically anti-Semitic, pro-BDS resolution that led to the swift resignations of about 300 mostly Jewish faculty members in protest. My organization, Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY, recently released a report that found alarming systemic anti-Semitism at the school’s very highest levels.
Just this month at Borough of Manhattan Community College, for example, taxpayer funds were used to create, endorse and publicly display vile posters trafficking in classic anti-Semitic tropes.
At Kingsborough Community College, professors with substantiated Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claims alleged they were placed under retaliatory investigation for following up with ongoing allegations of unaddressed anti-Semitic activity.
And CUNY School of Law is under state investigation for its faculty’s unanimous adoption of a BDS resolution as campus policy. Perhaps the report’s most important finding: The university doesn’t merely misunderstand anti-Semitism — its leaders actively work to promote and defend it.
iPetitions On May 13, 2022, (CUNY), in one of the most recent outrageous eruption of enabled/tolerated antisemitism at the City University of New York (CUNY), renowned Jew-haterNerdeen Kiswani was honored by the university with delivering its Law School’s commencement address.
Weeks earlier, in April 2022, CUNY faculty union leaders marched alongside Kiswani in demanding that their own Zionist faculty colleagues be ousted from CUNY, promoting a #ZionismOutofCUNY rally outside of the CUNY graduate center.
Kiswani is the founder and director of Within Our Lifetime, a group that demands the complete destruction of Israel and that has been banned from Instagram for violence-inciting hate speech.
Days after Kiswani’s commencement address, it was revealed that CUNY Law School had formally endorsed the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. In other words, Zionist Jews and Israelis would no longer be welcome to work at, with, or to attend CUNY School of Law.
Kiswani was named “Antisemite of the Year” by non-profit antisemitism tracker, Stop Antisemitism.org. In September 2020, Kiswani ignited a cigarette lighter and held it within inches of a man wearing a sweatshirt with an Israel Defense Forces logo on a subway, threatening: “I’m gonna set it on fire… I’m serious.” In July 2021, Kiswani virulently called for the death of Zionists. Kiswani advocates for Intifada and expressed solidarity with a USC graduate student who Tweeted her desire to “kill every mother*king Zionist.”
The City University of New York (CUNY) university system allegedly failed to address numerous antisemitic incidents and attacks in its schools over the past decade, according to a complaint.
The American Center for Law And Justice (ACLJ) sent a letter on July 19 to the Department of Education (DOE) requesting an investigation of CUNY, which includes 25 public campuses, to determine whether the university system discriminated against Jewish students and permitted a “hostile environment” for Jews. The complaint also asks the DOE to determine whether CUNY violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits any institution receiving federal funds from discriminating the basis of race, color or national origin.
CUNY’s culture is so severely anti-Semitic and at odds with the lived experiences of the school’s Jewish constituency that SAFE CUNY declined at this stage to offer the multiple layers of remedial recommendations necessary to eventually return the university to its inclusive roots.
Instead, as a first step in protecting Jewish students, staff and faculty members, we urged CUNY to formally adopt the IHRA anti-Semitism definition as the university’s Equal Employment Opportunity definition and incorporate it into CUNY’s discrimination policies and procedures.
We believe you cannot fight a problem you cannot define.
By embracing IHRA, the university might just begin to accept and endeavor to address the pervasive, deep-rooted, systemic anti-Semitism that’s infected its campuses and the highest levels of its leadership.
Jeffrey Lax is a CUNY professor, department chair and a founder of Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY.
Pray Hard says
Surprise, surprise, surprise …
Sincerely,
Gomer