"The chilling expungement of all Jews from City University of New York (CUNY) leadership positions was part of a broader, contemplated, and deliberate plan," claimed the group Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY (S.A.F.E. CUNY) in its new report on Saturday.
In the report, 'How CUNY Became the Most Systemically Antisemitic US University in Just Two Years,' SAFE says it uncovered evidence that there was a planned push to "purge" Jews from the CUNY leadership.
This was not always the case; CUNY was once a popular choice for Jewish students and staff, and the university regularly recruited from Yeshivas.
However, according to the SAFE report, CUNY began to dramatically change in the mid 2010s, sharply reducing recruiting visits to New York City’s Jewish schools, cutting advertising in Jewish media outlets, and seemingly deliberately curtailing recruitment of Jewish employees.
Through the early 2000s, CUNY regularly boasted of close to, or above, double digit numbers of campus presidents who were Jewish and well into double digits of senior leadership administrators who were Jewish, according to the report.
By the late 2010s, CUNY had a near-complete elimination of Jews both among its campus presidents and among its 45 other senior leadership positions. And by March 2023, there was not a single Jew among the 80 campus president and senior leadership positions.
"In a city with a 20% Jewish population, it is unfathomable that the largest urban US university located in that city failed to employ any Jewish administrative leaders by happenstance," the report said.
Anti Zionism and BDS
SAFE reported that CUNY's leadership on both sides of management and labor are "infected with Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), anti zionism, and support for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)."
The organization obtained private emails in which CUNY chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez "proudly championed" the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), hired a former CAIR director and BDS activist as CUNY’s top discrimination officer (Saly Abd Alla), and worked to include the widely rejected CAIR-endorsed “Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism” into CUNY’s discrimination process.
Additionally, Chancellor Rodriguez refused to attend two City Council hearings probing antisemitism at CUNY in June 2022. This was despite the first hearing being cancelled to accommodate him and rescheduled based on his availability.
Chancellor Rodriguez has also consistently rejected the widely accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, preferring the JDA, which is widely rejected. Rodriguez included the JDA on its discrimination portal page, directly undermining the demands of many members of the Jewish community.
As CUNY’s Chief Diversity Officer, Abd Alla oversees discrimination across CUNY's 25 campuses, which serve over 230,000 students. This includes overseeing investigations, diversity events, and all other discrimination matters related to antisemitism and anti zionism at CUNY.
Furthermore, SAFE found that James Davis, president of CUNY's 23,000 member faculty union, is a "publicly avowed" BDS activist.
"During the New York City Council’s June 2022 CUNY/antisemitism hearings, Davis not only invoked classically antisemitic Israel dual allegiance tropes, but also repeatedly perjured himself on a variety of topics, including staunch denials of his own public history of supporting BDS. SAFE uncovered a video where Davis proudly proclaimed to be a BDS member, despite having denied in his testimony any knowledge of this video. Under Davis, the union has adopted multiple BDS motions.
Honoring antisemites
SAFE also expressed concern over the fact that CUNY has repeatedly platformed known antisemites or pro-terror radical individuals. This includes asking Within Our Lifetime founder Nerdeen Kiswani to deliver the Law School's commencement address in 2022.
The previous month, CUNY faculty union leaders marched alongside Kiswani, demanding that their own Zionist faculty colleagues be ousted from CUNY by promoting a ZionismOutofCUNY rally on the steps of the CUNY Graduate Center. Kiswani has repeatedly called for death to Israelis, praised Hamas, and called for an intifada.
Not long after Kiswani's address, CUNY School of Law's faculty unanimously adopted the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement guidelines as campus policy. The policies even call for a ban on Hillel, the most popular Jewish cultural club in higher education. SAFE notes that CUNY School of Law has no Hillel Club.
A few years prior, in 2017, CUNY invited Linda Sarsour to deliver a commencement address despite nearly 9,000 petition signatures "imploring the university not to honor Sarsour's long and ugly history of antisemitic comments and her virulent bigotry towards/against Jews."
Failure to respond
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 2021 determined that CUNY's Kingsborough campus and the PSC faculty union pervasively discriminate against Orthodox and Zionist Jews, banned them from faculty groups, and harassed and retaliated against them on campus. The EEOC also determined that events were purposefully scheduled on Friday night in order to block observant Jews from attending.
According to the report, President Claudia Schrader has refused to meet or even speak with the observant and Zionist Jewish victims of the 2021 EEOC findings, including one victim who reports directly to her.
KCC President Claudia Schrader refused to condemn a KCC student who beat an orthodox Jew with a baseball bat and yelled, “kill all the Jews!”
Another worrying finding was that two professors complaining about antisemitism on February 20, 2023, were immediately placed under investigation by CUNY. According to the report, the University has refused to even provide these professors with a copy of the complaint filed against them.
"Egregious retaliatory behavior like this is one of the many factors that currently make CUNY an unsafe place for Jews," said SAFE. It noted that over a dozen legal actions, including several under Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and under City or State law, have been filed by Jewish students and faculty members against the university over the past few years, but that CUNY has never responded to any of them.
"At the highest levels, we have found that the university doesn’t merely misunderstand antisemitism, its leaders actively work to reject and detract from the very meaning of antisemitism as it is defined by the overwhelming majority of Jews," said the report.
"There is evidence that such antisemitic views and tropes aren’t merely tolerated by the university, but rewarded."
S.A.F.E. CAMPUS was started by CUNY law professor Jeffrey Lax. It advocates for Zionist Jews who are discriminated against and excluded from college campuses.
Following the publication of the report, Lax said "Long before the nation was talking about widely infested campus antisemitism, we told you that it was coming and detailed exactly how it was happening across one of the largest and the most antisemitic university of them all."
Trial attorney Jim Walden reposted the tweet, writing "we have a lawsuit to bring."