Antisemitism report lets CUNY off the hook, offers no help against hate

Originally published in the New York Post.

As a Zionist Jewish professor and department chair at the City University of New York, I have witnessed and been a victim of the pervasive anti-Semitism on CUNY’s campuses.

In 2021, the EEOC substantiated my claim that CUNY and its faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, discriminated against me and other Jewish professors because of my religion.

So, I applauded when Gov. Kathy Hochul commissioned a report to expose and correct the hatred I had been fighting for years.

I should have known better.

Neither my EEOC complaint, nor my lawsuits against CUNY and its union, the latter of which is now being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, is mentioned a single time in the Hochul-commissioned report — and that’s just the start of its glaring omissions.

First, I want to acknowledge that the report condemns CUNY for failing to protect its Jewish community and recommends that it overhaul its policies related to anti-Semitism.

This is a welcome dose of reality.

Without acknowledging the problem, a solution is impossible.

The report also says that Zionism must be recognized as part of the identity of most Jews and suggests that CUNY should see anti-Zionism as equivalent to anti-Semitism.

I believe this is a critical change in posture, and that without it, racism can be more easily dismissed as a mere political disagreement.

These are undoubtedly steps in the right direction, and I commend the report for making them.

But beyond that, the report fails, seemingly willfully, on many levels.

The most glaring omission?

The singularly powerful administrator currently in charge of overseeing anti-Semitism complaints across CUNY’s 25 campuses and who presumably will be responsible for implementing the report’s recommendations, Chief Diversity Officer Saly Abd Alla, is never mentioned.

Nor is the fact that she is a former director at CAIR Minnesota and an activist for the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.

How did she secure that role with her background? And how is she still there?

The report doesn’t say.

It is inexcusable that Abd Alla, whom I and many of my Jewish colleagues see as incompatible with any effort to truly address campus anti-Semitism, skates by uncriticized.

The report should have started with a recommendation that she be immediately replaced with someone without an anti-Zionist history.

Also absent from the report is a clear recommendation that CUNY adopt a definition — any definition­ — of anti-Semitism.

In fact, the report says that recommending a definition would be too “controversial” to consider. It’s a stunning cop-out that speaks to how inadequate and toothless the report’s conclusions ultimately are.

How is the largest urban public school system in America supposed to confront something it hasn’t defined?

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism has been adopted by more than 40 countries.

It should have been simple to start there.

Particularly offensive is the report’s efforts to minimize violent anti-Semitic incidents.

Yes, “a few” violent incidents are mentioned, but others are ignored.

For example, a student on my campus beat someone with a baseball bat while saying “Kill Jews, free Palestine.”

But you won’t find this heinous incident in the report because, while it acknowledges that anti-Semitism violence is fomented at CUNY, it refused to address campus-adjacent incidents.

My message to Hochul and campus administration is simple. CUNY’s Jewish community is bleeding.

This report acknowledges the injury but refuses to administer the cure.

To stop the hatred and begin to heal our wounds, those responsible for getting us here need to be held accountable.

And something as basic as adopting a definition of anti-Semitism would be a meaningful place to start.

Jeffrey Lax is a professor of law and chair of the business department at CUNY, a co-founder of S.A.F.E. Campus, and a plaintiff in Goldstein v. PSC/CUNY.