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After City Council Hearings on Anti-Semitism at CUNY, Students & Faculty Pen Hated Filled Letter Accusing Israel of “Genocide”

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After City Council Hearings on Anti-Semitism at CUNY, Students & Faculty Pen Hated Filled Letter Accusing Israel of “Genocide”

By: Fern Sidman

Only a week after New York City Council hearings on the alarming escalation of visceral anti-Semitism on the City University of New York’s (CUNY) campuses, it has now been reported that the campaign to terrorize Jews and Israel supporters on campus has gained even more steam.

According to a report on the Vois Es Nais web site, a group of CUNY faculty and students have released a viciously antisemitic letter, accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide”. The malevolent missive also pledges to “unlearn Zionism. “ according to the report.

As reported in the Jewish Chronicle, the open letter, headlined “Not In Our Name”, reads like a manifesto, and appears to be a tool to pressure CUNY into supporting the BDS movement, as was indicated in the VIN report.

The message that is being broadcast by the anti-Semitic forces at CUNY who clearly play a predominant role on campus in terms of setting policy is one that is replete with seething hatred for Israel and Jews. This is of paramount concern due to the fact that is could possibly be used as propaganda to further disseminate anti-Semitism.

The signatories to the letter included Jewish staff and students who claim to be anti-Zionist as well as non-Jewish organizations as the “League of Young Communists” and “Rank and File Action.”  It is also quite possible that the ranks of these organizations also include self-hating Jews and rabid Israel detractors.

According to the VIN report, the latest CUNY-sponsored letter attacking Israel and Jews demands demands “resistance by any means necessary” for Palestinians and accuses Israel of “ethnic cleansing.” It also charges that Israel is funding “Nazi militia groups”, and claims that a mainstream definition of antisemitism “is a ploy to demonize anti-Zionist and Palestinian freedom of speech”.

The letter states that “the Zionist movement within CUNY aims to criminalize and demonize Palestinian students and workers”, and calls for the university to end its partnership with Hillel, which it accuses of being “anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, Islamophobic, and anti-Palestinian organization”.

Hillel is a national Jewish college student organization that has chapters at most colleges across the country with a Jewish population. They have been in existence since 1923.

The hate filled verbiage in the letter also called for  “global liberation, resistance by any means necessary, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the return of all land prior to 1948”. It added: “We commit to Palestinian liberation as defined by Palestinians.”

VIN reported that the letter calls Israel a “settler-colonial regime” that practices “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” against Palestinians.

It adds that Israel “funds Nazi militia groups abroad, arms fascists oppressing liberation revolutionary groups, inspires fascist regimes and white supremacists globally, and oppresses Black and Brown Jews of Color within the settler colonial state of Israel.”

VIN also reported that another terrifying aspect of the letter is that it threatens to persuade other Jews to join its hate-filled mission. It pledges to “create networks and programs within the CUNY Jewish population to question, critique, and unlearn Zionism.”

The fact that the letter was publicly presented on the very day that President Joe Biden made his first trip to Israel as president and declared his love of the Jewish state and that he considers himself a “Zionist” has not gone unnoticed.

In June, it was reported that over 50 City University of New York professors resigned from their union in response to a resolution passed by their union, the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY, on June 10, 2021. The resolution condemns Israel, citing the state’s actions during recent conflicts with Palestine. Included in the resolution, the union called Israel an “apartheid” state and considered their support for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).

The resolution comes at a time when the Jewish community is facing a sharp rise in anti-Semitic attacks in New York City, and amid backlash to the ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s decision to boycott Israel.

“I strongly stand with the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) members who resigned from their faculty union, following its recent passage of an anti-Semitic resolution,” said Council Member Eric Dinowitz.

“The resolution, and its anti-Semitic sentiment, led over 50 members to end their association with an organization meant to protect their rights and fight for better wages and working conditions. This marginalization of members is antithetical to the principles of organized labor, and with their resolution, PSC-CUNY has chosen to side with an internationally recognized terrorist organization rather than the only democracy in the region, a democracy whose coalition legislature includes Arab-Israelis.

A one-sided narrative disguised as support for the Palestinian people is offensive, and painfully reminiscent of the historical scapegoating of Jewish people. In my role as Chair of the City Council’s Jewish Caucus, I will work tirelessly to end discrimination towards Jewish New Yorkers and any marginalized communities throughout our city, unaccompanied by bias of any kind.”

As CUNY schools have morphed into a hotbed of the most egregious forms of bias, discrimination and over hostility towards Jewish students, professors, and other faculty, it was recently reported that the City Council Committee on Higher Education arranged a hearing in which both students and professors testified.

It was there that they told city lawmakers of their experiences of being targeted because of their Jewish faith.

Missing from the proceedings was CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez and his disinterest in providing testimony to the city council committee did not escape the notice of many in attendance.

The chancellor’s absence from the day of testimony caused him to miss out on the litany of horrific accounts of anti-Jewish prejudice that were related by students and professors at city universities.

The New York Post reported that former CUNY School of Law student Rafaella Gunz said she transferred to Yeshiva University because, “I feared for my physical and emotional well being” after she was demonized by other students over her Jewish faith and Zionist beliefs.

 

Joshua Greenberg, a Baruch College student, said he was assaulted for being a “Jewish, disabled student,” and complained about restrictions on prayer, as was reported by the Post.

“It’s completely unacceptable what’s going on at Baruch College,” he told the committee.

Michael Goldstein, an administrator and an adjunct professor of communications and government relations at Kingsborough Community College in the Manhattan Beach section of Brooklyn told the committee that “it is horrible for Jews at CUNY”, claiming that anti-Semites defaced a photo of his dad, Leonard Goldstein, the former longtime president of Kingsborough, at the Brooklyn campus, according to the Post report.

In March of 2019, the Jewish Voice reported that Professor Goldberg penned an article that was published in the New York Daily News on in February of that year that said: “I’ve worked at Kingsborough for 20 years, and within the City University of New York network for 30 years. The anti-Semitic vandalism and death threat perpetrated outside my office this past February was unlike anything I’ve experienced before. The reason for their attack? I’m Jewish, politically conservative and I believe in Zionism, the civil rights movement of the Jewish people.”

Goldstein also explained in his piece that appeared in the New York Daily News that  in an attack in February 2018, the assailants defaced a photo of his father with anti-Semitic graffiti, and he later learned that the incident occurred a day after Kingsborough Professor Katia Perea, a member of the radical Progressive Faculty Caucus (PFC), an unsanctioned group of faculty members, apparently told an administrator who refused her request to fire him, “I guess I will have to handle this myself.”

“This was my jarring introduction to the PFC and its unending campaign of harassment… It was also my introduction to the inertia of the Kingsborough and CUNY administrations,” he wrote, adding that the college refused to classify the incident as a hate crime and denied his requests for added security.

“This was just the beginning of an orchestrated, aggressive movement to destroy me,” he said.

Besides the multiple manifestations of Jew hatred on CUNY campuses, students attending private colleges and universities also voiced concerns about the rising rates of anti-Semitism on their campuses and shared their stories of being subjected to hostilities because of their Judaism.

The Post reported that former NYU student Adela Cojab Moadeb said the downtown private college became “very unsafe for Jewish students” where pro-Palestinian supporters “equated Zionism with Nazism” and students were exposed to the burning of the Israel flag. She added that, “I was afraid.”

In a 2019 article that Cojab Moadeb wrote for the New York Post, she describes how uncomfortable she felt as a pro-Israel Jewish student on the NYU campus, due to the BDS protests that targeted Jewish students and groups on campus. Viewing these protests as creating an unwelcoming environment for pro-Israel Jewish students led Cojab Moadeb to sue the university for discrimination, invoking the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin on any program and activity that receives Federal funds or other Federal financial assistance.

The Jewish advocacy group AMHCA testified that it has logged more than 150 antisemitic incidents on 11 CUNY campuses since 2015 when the group began its tracking. More than 60 of those incidents involve acts that directly target Jewish students for harm, including swastikas and other types of genocidal vandalism, bullying, suppression of movement and assembly and denigration. Most of the acts targeting Jewish students for harassment on CUNY campuses have been Israel-related, and these acts have more than doubled over the last year, according to a statement sent to media by AMCHA.

Serving as an expert witness at the New York City Council’s hearing on rising campus antisemitism AMCHA Initiative’s Director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin warned that faculty-driven boycotts of Israel are directly fueling antisemitism, and she will urge the legislators to prohibit faculty from using university positions and resources for anti-Israel political advocacy, including the implementation of an academic boycott of Israel (Academic BDS).

“Our research has isolated two major sources of campus antisemitism. The first are anti-Zionist student groups whose presence on campus is highly correlated with acts of harassment. A less well-known, but frankly far more dangerous and long-lasting source of campus antisemitism – and one which we believe deserves your immediate attention – are faculty who use their academic positions and the prestige and resources of their institutions to carry out the anti-normalization campaigns demanded by Academic BDS,” Ms, Rossman-Benjamin testified.

During her testimony, Ms. Rossman-Benjamin also delivered a statement from 106 civil rights, religious and education organizations deeply concerned antisemitism will “skyrocket” if CUNY faculty are permitted to implement Academic BDS. Dozens of the groups are NYC-based, including CUNY-specific organizations such as Hillel of Baruch, City, John Jay, Pace, School of Visual Arts (SVA), Fordham, FIT and The New School; Chabad at Brooklyn College; Bulldogs for Israel at Brooklyn College; Students Supporting Israel at City College of New York; Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY; and the CUNY Alliance for Inclusion.

“It’s crucial to understand that although an academic boycott of Israel claims to target Israeli universities and scholars, its implementation on U.S. campuses, such as CUNY, will directly harm Jewish students,” wrote the organizations.

The Post reported that during their testimony, CUNY senior vice chancellor for institutional affairs Glenda Grace and vice chancellor for student affairs Denise Maybank rattled off programs and events at various campuses to help combat anti-Semitism.

“We understand more has to be done.” Grace said.

Maybank said “I hear you” and that more has to done to deal with “uncivil discourse” before it crosses the line into discrimination, as was reported by the Post. She said it “remains our responsibility” to make students “feel safe and welcome on campus.”

At one point, CUNY officials said they did not use the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which includes “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

CUNY, in a statement, said, “Making sure everyone feels safe and protected at our campuses is a top priority at CUNY, which is arguably the nation’s most diverse university system and attracts people of all backgrounds and nationalities.

“CUNY leadership was pleased to testify today about the University’s ongoing efforts to combat antisemitism, violence, hate, racism and intolerance of any kind on our campuses, in our country and in the world. This is important but hard, never-ending work, and we are always learning new ways to improve our efforts. CUNY is committed to fostering an environment where all faculty, staff and students can work, teach and learn free from any form of discrimination.”

 

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