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

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 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.

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