REPOST: Stories about CUNY Antisemitism
CUNY is once again in the news for antisemitism. So I wanted to repost two article about this phenomena where universities shoot themselves in the foot, in desperate hopes of “exposing Jews.”
While I have visited Columbia, Weill Cornell and NYU, I would never dare go on a CUNY campus as a Jew. I went on dates with a few CUNY students in 2017-2018. Their intelligence was a giveaway of why they buy the Mein Kampf narratives. The school has descended further since then.
The obvious reason for this rise in scapegoatting Jews and violent hate at CUNY is the nearby demographics of working class Muslims, including Islamists. For ex, Paterson, NJ has a Muslim majority population. They recently began naming streets after Palestine. Which is appropriate, because Paterson was not only the home of the Masjid Omar Mosque, which received federal investigations, before one of their members, terrorist Sayfullo Saipov, murdered 8+ people. Before that, Paterson was noted home to two al Qaeda terrorists linked with the 9/11 attacks, as well as others involved but never arrested. Following 9/11, Trump claimed that he saw “thousands” of people celebrating in New Jersey. I fear crediting that claim, because I was not there. [Paterson also frequently winds up in the news for their discrimination, but why focus on local discrimination when you can point fingers at the Jews on the other side of the world?]
One more note: Stop Antisemitism has pointed out that CUNY is not just antisemitic by Jewish standards, CAIR itself distanced from the Minnesota-based CAIR that infiltrated CUNY. “Chancellor Matos Rodriguez hired CAIR’s Minnesota Director Saly Abd Alla as CUNY’s Chief Diversity Officer, overseeing all 25 campuses and its students…. The Minnesota chapter of CAIR became so extreme that the national chapter of CAIR distanced itself from her group. As the Chief Diversity Officer for CUNY, Abd Alla oversees all issues of injustice, including antisemitism. However, under Abd Alla, CUNY received two Title VI complaints over the ongoing ignored instances of antisemitic behaviors at CUNY.” Essentially, CUNY had to import hate reprsentatives from Minnesota when their local Islam reps said they’re going too far.
Original article 1: CUNY professors quit union in protest over anti-Israel screed
https://nypost.com/2021/07/25/cuny-professors-quit-union-in-protest-over-anti-israel-screed/
Original article 2: How CUNY became America’s most anti-Semitic university
https://nypost.com/2023/04/06/how-cuny-became-americas-most-anti-semitic-university/
CUNY professors quit union in protest over anti-Israel screed
By Carl Campanile; July 25, 2021 4:27pm
CUNY students and professors at a pro-Palestine rally at John Jay College on May 28, 2021.
Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
At least 50 CUNY professors have resigned in protest from their faculty union after it passed a one-sided resolution condemning Israel for recent attacks on Palestinians and threatening to support the movement to boycott and divest from the Jewish state, The Post has learned.
The controversial resolution approved by delegates of the union, the Professional Staff Congress, outraged many professors — some of whom are descendants of Holocaust victims and have relatives in Israel.
“With the PSC CUNY resolution you have chosen to support a terrorist organization, Hamas, whose goal (`From the River to the Sea’) is to destroy the state of Israel and kill all my relatives who live there,” seethed Professor Yedidyah Langsam, chairman of Brooklyn’s College’s Computer and Information Science Department and its faculty council, in a letter of resignation to PSC President James Davis.
Langsam likened the situation to how Jewish professors in German universities felt during the infamous Nazi reign during the late 1930s.
“I personally have an uncomfortable feeling interacting with these faculty, and as many students have written, feel exceedingly uncomfortable on campus,” Langsam wrote of those supporting the resolution.
“For that reason, I have resigned from the PS-CUNY Union effective immediately, after being a member for over 40 years. I have urged my fellow faculty to immediately resign as well. You do NOT represent us and I will not be a part of an organization that supports those who wish to destroy us.”
The Professional Staff Congress, a union representing CUNY professors, passed a resolution condemning Israel in June.
Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
The PSC told The Post that at least 50 members have resigned or sent notices of their intention to do so.
The protest comes amid a backlash against Vermont-based ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s for announcing that it will no longer sell its products in the Israel-occupied Palestinian territories.
State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli has warned Ben & Jerry’s parent company, Unilever, that New York might restrict investments in the firm over the move.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo also is facing pressure to enforce his own 2016 executive order to suspend doing business with any company engaged in the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel.
Davis, who just took over as PSC president, acknowledged to The Post that the union’s anti-Israel resolution has caused “distress” among members but also claimed that conservative forces are attempting to exploit the controversy and damage the group by urging people to resign.
“We are in active dialogue with members who have expressed concern over the resolution. Some have decided to remain, some to resign, and some to take time to think it over,” Davis said.
“Many members are absolutely sincere in their distress, but we also know that a pressure campaign has been launched by people who were not PSC members in the first place and have been waiting eagerly, since the 2018 anti-union Janus v AFSCME Supreme Court decision, for an opportunity to peel members away from the PSC.”
But professors enraged over the PSC resolution argue that it ignored key facts — for example, that Hamas was shooting rockets into civilian population centers in Israel during the recent dispute with the Jewish state.
Instead, the resolution says, “PSC-CUNY condemns the massacre of Palestinians by the Israeli state’’ — while decrying Israel’s “expansionism and violent incursions into occupied territories.”
PSC-CUNY “cannot be silent about the continued subjection of Palestinians to the state-supported displacement, occupation, and use of lethal force by Israel,” it says.
The resolution adds that the Palestinian struggle for “self determination” is akin to the struggles of “indigenous people and people of color in the United States” and blacks in apartheid South Africa.
The PSC missive added that this fall, it will “facilitate discussions … and consider PSC support of the 2005 call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)” against Israel.
Langsam raged in his letter to the union, “Your unbalanced motion fails to address the over 4000 rockets fired from Gaza into residential areas.
“You fail to address the apartheid behavior of the Palestinian government (not a single Jew is permitted to be in Gaza) while neglecting to mention that Palestinians are members of the Israeli Knesset and are now part of the ruling coalition.
“You equate the careful bombing by the Israeli Air Force in order to minimize any collateral damage with the actions of the Palestinians who use their own civilian women and children, hospitals, and schools as shields for their launching sites.
“By endorsing this resolution you have made many Jewish faculty and students uncomfortable with being associated with Brooklyn College and CUNY to the point of fearing for our safety. Have you and your colleagues forgotten the exponential increase in anti-Semitic attacks against Jews in the NY City area?” Langsam said.
A person holding a sign at the John Jay College rally calling for a boycott on Israel.
Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
“Where is your resolution in support of your fellow faculty and students?”
Langsam said Israel is fair game for legitimate criticism but that the resolution was “one-sided” and is “nothing more than plain Anti-Semitism, disguised in the PC `woke’ terminology of today as Anti-Zionism.”
A group called “PSC Exit” has launched a campaign to show professors how they can legally quit the union.
“Our union has evolved over the last many years in ways that make it unrecognizable,” the anti-PSC group said. “They now spend money and time on activities that have nothing to do with our careers. Instead they focus on foreign politics even when much of the membership has no interest in these activities.
“We have therefore decided to no longer fund this union with our wages. We can no longer remain members of this union.”
The growing exodus will hurt the union’s pocketbook. A professor whose gross pay is $100,000 kicks in $1,050 a year to the PSC, or 1.05 percent of salary.
How CUNY became America’s most anti-Semitic university
By Jeffrey Lax; April 6, 2023 8:00pm
The City University of New York has successfully completed a yearslong initiative to expunge all Jews from its senior leadership.Christopher Sadowski
The “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.
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.
Abd Alla was a director at CAIR Minnesota, which pushed the BDS movement under her watch.
Three of CUNY’s most powerful leaders have documented ties or allegiances to the Hamas-connected Council on American-Islamic Relations and the boycott, divestment, sanctions 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.
CUNY’s most powerful leaders have had documented ties or allegiances to the Hamas-connected Council on American-Islamic Relations. [Google Maps]
Never mind that CAIR’s Minnesota chapter is so extreme that even CAIR national has distanced itself from it.
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.
Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez has famously skipped out on two City Council probes into pervasive anti-Semitism at his university. [AFP via Getty Images]
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.
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.
