On June 10 the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) of the City University of New York passed a grievous resolution littered with viciously demonizing misrepresentations of Israel and modern-day libels of Jews. The CUNY Alliance for Inclusion (CAFI), a group of CUNY faculty enthusiastically endorsing civil dialog and exchange of ideas and vehemently opposed to demonization, arose in response. Sadly, on December 2, the CUNY Law Student Government Association (LSGA) further magnified the PSC’s offense by passing a resolution that, following in historic antisemitism’s unreserved disparagement of Jews, “proudly and unapologetically” endorses Boycott Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). The LSGA resolution attacks Israel with the mendacious, ahistoric chant of “apartheid, genocide, war crimes.” It launches a wholesale offensive maligning and attacking Jewish student groups and programs as well as faculty research and collaborations with a host of universities and corporations, attempting to shame such groups by name. Its 24 supporting organizations seek to exclude Jewish students who support Israel from a host of groups including those advocating for work against climate change, and those fighting for women’s rights. It thereby appropriates for itself the right to separate good from bad Jews and to quash Jewish self-expression it disfavors as it trashes academic freedom by seeking to bar opinions contrary to its own from CUNY and its groups. This directly contradicts Dean Capulong’s 2021 stated Law School goal to "recognize and respect one another's right to be part of our community."

The LSGA’s resolution reeks of historic redemptive anti-Judaism that demonizes Jews and Jewish institutions as satanic, with slanders that are precise inversions of the truth. For example, it is truly shameless to charge that Israel – whose people have experienced genocide in the recent past - with genocide against the Palestinian people, a population that has expanded manyfold since Israel’s founding, all while some Palestinian leaders actually call for the genocide of Jews. It is sad that, after millennia of being labeled stateless outsiders, the LSGA portrays the Jewish State as the outsider amongst nations. It is disheartening that this portrayal is from students supposedly learning to think clearly and rigorously in the service of fairness and justice who now misguidedly oppose these ideals. The rights of both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students must be supported.

A frenzy of anti-Semitic vilification of Israel under the cover of “anti-Zionism” is sweeping American education and, is metastasizing into attacks on Jewish life in the United States. In April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service excluded Jews and the “politically unreliable” from civil service, including teaching at universities in Germany. Further legislation that month targeted Jewish student enrollment. Many German university administrators, professors and student fraternities supported these restrictions. In response to the CUNY LSGA resolution, which echoes a tragic period of Jew hatred, responsible CUNY administrators and officials in NYC and beyond must now speak out. A great university must champion diversity and cultivate a tradition of inclusive civil discourse and engagement on complex issues and conflicts and stand against historic hatreds and limitations upon speech and association.  

In July, CUNY Chancellor Felix V. Matos Rodriguez, through a spokesperson, responded to the grievous PSC resolution by stating that “membership organizations” only “speak for themselves” and “do not necessarily represent the views of the City University of New York.” While certainly true, this initial response has not deterred the LSGA. The libelous defamation of Israel in both resolutions and the LGSA calls to marginalize Jews and Jewish clubs and institutions at CUNY now demand a more forceful response, akin to the recent reactions of the leaders of NYU and Columbia to similar provocations. Jews are the second highest targets of hate crimes in the US (FBI 2020 statistics) and the highest in NYC (NYPD statistics); The Chancellor should not allow any group within CUNY to usurp CUNY's imprimatur to fan ugly flames of hatred in our university.

We therefore call on CUNY Chancellor Felix V. Matos Rodriguez and CUNY Law School Dean Eduardo R.C. Capulong to publicly reaffirm the principle of academic freedom and unequivocally assert CUNY’s rejection of BDS and all acts and declarations targeting Jewish students and faculty and their organizations and programs. We call on the Chancellor and leaders at CUNY to meet with representatives of CAFI and other faculty who are concerned about threats to academic life and civility at CUNY so that we can work together for diversity, equity and inclusion at CUNY. The time has come for the defamation of Jewish life and historical aspiration to end.

The CUNY Alliance for Inclusion