{N} ew York has the world’s largest diasporic Jewish population, yet its public university system has a long-standing antisemitism problem so pronounced that it inspired both federal and statewide legislation this year. Last month it was reported that, following a City University of New York (CUNY) law-student commencement speech featuring an anti-Zionist blood-libel rant, future ceremonies will not include student speakers. And two weeks ago, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that, next spring, an independent reviewer will issue recommendations for antisemitism policy at CUNY.
But for silenced Israeli-born fine-arts professor Tamy Ben-Tor, next spring is not soon enough, banning all speakers is too broad, and potential legislation is too vague. Right now, CUNY’s Hunter College Master of Fine Arts program is sending Ben-Tor and others a clear lesson: Supporting Hamas is okay; mocking that support is not.
In a parody video posted to Ben-Tor’s personal social-media account following Hamas’s brutal October 7 attacks, she says, “Dear Hamas freedom fighters: I’d like to start by acknowledging that I just had a cappuccino on the land of the Lenape People.” The three-minute video lampoons those who broadcast their piety — denouncing cruelty to Native Americans, LGBTQ people, and animals — but are “on the fence about the massacre of the babies.” As Ben-Tor notes, after all, “They were colonizing babies. They were Zionist babies.”
The response has been the cancellation of Ben-Tor’s class, a campaign for her termination, and an onslaught of condemnation and threats from students and professors who — in real life — cheer on the massacre of those same “Zionist babies.”
Among the groups leading the charge against Ben-Tor are Hunter’s Palestine Solidarity Alliance and CUNY for Palestine, who tweeted a doctored version of “zionist Hunter Professor” Ben-Tor’s video, splicing in messages glorifying “martyrs” and finally exclaiming that “our liberation is near.” Since October 22, the post calling for Ben-Tor’s “immediate” termination “for her Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian and anti-Indigenous racism” has garnered over a 1.1 million views and 2.6 thousand likes.
These same student groups, after successfully silencing Ben-Tor for her satire, later mobbed the office of CUNY’s chancellor, their faces swathed in keffiyehs, using megaphones to un-ironically demand Israeli artists be banned and waving signs condemning CUNY as “home to RATS, COCKROACHES, ABSESTOS, ZIONISTS.” A man bending to rescue a burning Israeli flag was pushed down and kicked.
A dozen CUNY student organizations also circulated a schoolwide email petition describing the morning of October 7 as “a wave of resistance,” which “has shown us that true dignity and strength can be demonstrated in the face of occupying forces, providing a sense of empowerment.” The letter asserts that to call Hamas’s action “‘abhorrent’ is blasphemous,” that terrorism is Israel’s fault, and that Israel will soon cease to exist. Circulating the letter was a Master of Fine Arts candidate who, on her Hunter webpage, features her artsy diorama of a tiny head-scarfed terrorist with a machine gun, a full-sized kitchen knife, and the words “Globalize the Intifada.”
Might this not make Israeli students feel a tad uncomfortable?
Worse yet is the classroom instruction of MoMA-featured Hunter sculpture professor Yves Laris Cohen. Laris Cohen, along with four other faculty members and 67 students, signed the letter accusing Ben-Tor of “unprofessionalism” and “open hostility and aggression” toward students who “dare to wear symbols and language that support [the Palestinian] struggle and oppose a genocide.”
Yet Laris Cohen sat pretty when he assigned his class articles on how Israel “is a machine for the conversion of grief into power [and violence]” and on the need to see Hamas’s bloody “liberation” as a promising potential end to Israeli “oppression and occupation.” For emphasis, he read aloud one article’s “urgent” regret that as days were wasted arguing over being “sufficiently decent about Hamas’s victims, Israel geared up its genocide machine.”
In class, Laris Cohen directed students on how to join him at anti-Israel rallies, and expressed frustration with CUNY’s board of directors and the “pretty right-wing” Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which is “swift to condemn any pro-Palestinian thing as antisemitic, saying, ‘If you’re anti-Zionist, you’re antisemitic.’” He noted that the ADL might even suggest that libeling its board of directors as rich Jews is antisemitic — but “that kind of reactivity then reinforces it all over again.”
The ADL would certainly find this antisemitic — and so should CUNY.
Where is the school system’s administration in all this? As Ben-Tor endured threats necessitating NYPD involvement, program heads issued a neutral note against cyberbullying and pushed Ben-Tor to email the student body. She apologized “to anyone who feels hurt or offended,” but staunchly defended her “emotional response to the odd affiliation of several intellectuals in our society, with a patriarchy of terrorists who wish to destroy everything we all stand for.”
Tragically, Ben-Tor now stands alone against academia’s hate disguised as virtue, which she dared to name and mock. CUNY must explicitly defend her freedom and punish glorifying terrorism in classrooms and listservs. That means wading into specific incidents immediately, not waiting for a “review” in the spring.
Otherwise, Governor Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams should push to install more accountable leaders of a school system that’s become a parody of its own motto: “The education of free people is the hope of mankind.”