Connect with us

RSS

‘Lift Your Voices’: New York City Mayor Meets With Jewish Students to Discuss Campus Antisemitism

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and US Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) meeting with Jewish college students to discuss antisemitism at City Hall on Sept. 23, 2024. Photo: Dion J. Pierre/The Algemeiner

New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) and US Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) met with Jewish college students on Monday to discuss campus antisemitism at public and private universities in the five boroughs.

Held at New York City Hall, the “roundtable discussion” saw Jewish students of the City University of New York (CUNY) and other colleges in the area express their concerns about the alleged failure of school administrators to equally enforce rules proscribing ethnic and racial discrimination when they are violated by antisemitic anti-Zionists. As in other states across the country, colleges in New York have seen a rise in extreme pro-Hamas activity, ranging from the promotion of antisemitic conspiracies, hate speech, harassment, and assault. The situation, Jewish students told Adams, must be addressed as a civil rights issue.

Responding to their concerns, Adams condemned the activities of pro-Hamas students and pledged to do what he can to combat campus antisemitism within the bounds the law, citing Jewish support for African American civil rights in the 20th century. He also explained that his power to act is to some extent complicated by the multiculturalism of New York City, where a plethora of groups believe in competing and often mutually exclusive interpretations of history. Recognizing the claims of one group, he noted, could be perceived as denying those of others and squelching free speech.

“Whatever the law allows me to do, I’m going to do to ensure New Yorkers are safe,” he said. “And it’s unfortunate, but some of this speech is protected speech, and we have to be honest, this is the country that we’re in, we’re in a country that’s not like over there, where whatever you say you could be rounded up and arrested because you said it. That is not who we are as Americans. And sometimes that’s a plus. Sometimes, it’s a plus that we’re able to come together and rally in front of the UN and talk about how we felt and the anger of what happened on Oct. 7. And sometimes it’s not a plus when people are able to say they are Hamas.”

He continued, “We may hate that, but that’s protected speech in this country. And we have to find a balance of making sure that we raise our voices to counter the hate that we’re seeing, that is really becoming widespread in this country. And we all see it. And it hurts me, and I’m sure it hurts [Torres], and all of us who are pushing back against this hate, but this is the country we are in … But we should demand from those entities and institutions on our college campuses and ground that they should not be safe havens for those who are violating the policies, those who are being funded with taxpayer dollars, those who are using violence — they should not be able to exist on these campuses.”

Adams also commended Jewish students for speaking out, saying, “I take my hat off to you, because you have not decided to remain silent, and you know what has happened in previous generations when you were silent … you need to continue to lift your voices and build allies with other young people who are being misinformed. Bring them into your fold and educate them.”

Torres, who has been praised by both Democrats and Republicans for condemning antisemitic speech regardless of the speaker’s ideological affiliation, expressed his belief that the student anti-Zionist movement is antisemitic and should be judged as harshly as any white supremacist group.

“If you disagree with politics and practices of the Israeli government, then peacefully protest the Israeli consulate, but if you’re targeting a Jewish institution like Hillel simply for being Jewish, that is antisemitism. And if you’re following Jewish students to a kosher restaurant and blockading the entrance, and slamming the doors, and hurling insults at the Jewish students, that is harassment,” Torres said. “If the KKK were harassing Black students or followers of the Westboro Baptist Church were harassing LGBTQ students, or if white nationalists inspired by the Great Replacement Theory were harassing Latino students, there would be nothing but overwhelming outrage from both the political and the academic establishment. The mayor has spoken out, but there are far too many who are silent. And we should ask why the silence and difference when it comes to the safety of Jewish students.”

Earlier this month, Torres penned a letter to several New York-based universities, asking the higher educational institutions to amend their campus harassment policies to defend Zionist students.

Following the meeting’s conclusion, Jewish students and professors commended Adams’ advocacy of Jewish civil rights.

“I feel that, in the extent of his power, Mayor Adams was very receptive to our concerns and very willing to make change any way that he can,” Liora Gold, a third-year student at The New School, told The Algemeiner. “Since Oct. 7 , antisemitism has risen to the surface, and while it was apparent beforehand, it is now something that’s very public and very accepted. We are both on the board of Hillel, and we’ve had our meetings protested many times. We’ve had many security concerns because of our meetings. Our flyers have been vandalized; we’ve gotten backlash on social media. It’s a very public display of antisemitism masked as anti-Zionism.”

Michael Valdes, a theater major at The New School — where supporters of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement sitting on the student government enacted a spending freeze as an act of protest — said that anti-Zionists were creating a climate of fear and intimidation.

“As someone who is a senator on our student government, it’s been very upsetting to see that they’re supporting divestment,” Valdes said. “Also the SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine chapter] on our campus actually supported Hamas’s logo on their event flyer, and they’re currently on probation for that. The fact that they’re even still allowed to be a club on campus after promoting a US-designated terrorist organization is very upsetting and disheartening to see.”

Many other students in attendance at Monday’s meeting are currently enrolled at the City University of New York (CUNY), which recently settled half a dozen cases of antisemitic discrimination opened by the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). One of the cases, involving Brooklyn College, prompted widespread concern for revealing that Jewish students enrolled in the college’s Mental Health Counseling (MCH) program were repeatedly pressured into saying that Jews are white people who should be excluded from discussions about social justice.

The CUNY system has produced dozens of antisemitic outrages, as The Algemeiner previously reported. In 2023, it hired anti-Israel commentator Marc Lamont Hill as the CUNY Graduate Center’s “presidential professor” of urban education despite his public friendship with Louis Farrakhan. In 2020, administrators allegedly declined to file disciplinary charges against Nerdeen Kiswani, who threatened to set her classmate on fire for wearing an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) hoodie. In 2023, CUNY again came under a shroud of criticism when student Fatima Mohammed alleged that Jewish money influences the university’s Israel policy during a CUNY Law School commencement ceremony. Despite being widely condemned by Jewish groups and local and national lawmakers — including Adams — 40 CUNY Law faculty members issued a statement supporting Mohammed’s remarks, describing them as “heartland First Amendment speech.”

Queens College physics professor Azriel Gunack told The Algemeiner that CUNY chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez is principally responsible for eradicating antisemitism from throughout the university system.

“This is going to have to be a conversation with the chancellor. Mayor Adams can’t come in and run the university. There’s some point to having a hands-off attitude, but things really can spiral out of control,” he said. “CUNY has a chance to be a leader in the country if he takes a stand on things. It’ll take real courage. There would be a lot of backlash, but CUNY could be a great school. We could really bring in students and teach them how to deal with difficult issues. We don’t do that now. We should have some program part of the freshmen year initiative where you have people from both sides and learn to talk and understand where someone’s coming from and try to express yourself in that context. There’s a lot we could be doing to make a difference. That is what democracy is, the exchange of ideas, but that’s not really happening.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post ‘Lift Your Voices’: New York City Mayor Meets With Jewish Students to Discuss Campus Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Continue Reading

RSS

‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’

Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz for the annual March of the Living on April 24, 2025. Photo: Chen Schimmel

Oswiecim, Poland — Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz, the infamous former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, for the first time on Thursday, joining Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the annual March of the Living.

The march from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II-Birkenau — the Nazis’ largest death camp where 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II — took place on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day and included 80 Holocaust survivors, many of whom were also death march survivors, to mark 80 years since the liberation of the camps. 

March of the Living president Phyllis Greenberg Heideman addressed the survivors, who were seated next to the gate bearing the notorious inscription, “Work sets you free.”

“It’s a strange thing to say, but we welcome you to Auschwitz,” she said. “You are the true heroes. We will treasure your legacy forever.”

Almog Meir Jan and his mother Orit. Almog was rescued by the IDF on June 5 during the Arnon Mission. Photo: Chen Schimmel

Standing outside the crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz I, recently released hostage Eli Sharabi said, “The Holocaust was unlike anything else — we will never forget and never forgive.”

“But our presence here is the triumph of the Jewish spirit. The Jewish people sanctify life, not death. I endured horrors in enemy captivity, but I chose life. That gives me hope to get up each morning and begin rebuilding,” he added. 

Sharabi, whose wife and daughters were murdered during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, was released in February after nearly 500 days in captivity. His emaciated appearance as he was paraded through Gaza on his release led to comparisons with concentration camp survivors. 

Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran broke down after seeing Sharabi. The two embraced for several minutes. “Seeing him in real life, in this place, just made it all suddenly seem very close. This is no longer something that happened 80 years ago; it’s continuing until this day,” Shukran told The Algemeiner.

Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran embracing former hostage Eli Sharabi. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner

In remarks to reporters prior to the march, Herzog called the return of the hostages a “universal human imperative.”

“With a broken heart, I remind us all that although after the Holocaust we vowed, ‘Never again,’ today, even as we stand here, the souls of dozens of Jews again ‘yearn within a cage,’ ‘thirsting for water and for freedom,’ as 59 of our brothers and sisters are held by terrorist murderers in Gaza, in a horrific crime against humanity,” Herzog said, referring to the hostages kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion who remain in captivity.

His Polish counterpart, President Andrzej Duda, said the march was “a dramatic call of ‘never again.’ No more hatred, no more discrimination, no more antisemitism.”

He called for “all wars in the Middle East to end,” and for a two-state solution, which he said was the “most rational solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] that gives hope for achieving stable and lasting peace.”

The two leaders signed the visitors’ book and laid a wreath at Auschwitz’s Black Wall, where the Nazis executed prisoners.

At the march’s opening ceremony, the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, lit one of six candles — representing the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis — and addressed rising antisemitism in the world.  

“Jews all over the world fear walking streets with a kippah and it’s unacceptable. College students are being attacked verbally and physically,” he told The Algemeiner. 

He praised US President Donald Trump for “combating this scourge.”

“There’s a new sheriff in town. It’s my hope the rest of the world can look to him to see how to support and defend the Jewish community against these vile attacks,” he said.

Matt Brooks, chief executive officer of the Republican Jewish Coalition, with Malcolm Hoenlein, vice chairman emeritus of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner

In Block 5, where thousands of victims’ eyeglasses are displayed behind glass, Laly Dery told a delegation of Israeli teenagers from the national civil service about her son, Sgt. First Class (res.) Saadia, who fell in battle in Gaza in June.  

“Just like my son, who served the country with every fiber of his being, you have earned the enormous privilege of serving the state of Israel,” Dery said. 

Derai’s words resonated with Sara Bisan, the only member of the national service delegation not wearing an Israeli flag. Instead, Bisan wore the distinctive multi-colored flag of the Druze community to which she belongs.

“I feel her pain, and it hurts,” Bisan said, reflecting on the death of her own friend from the northern Druze village of Kfar Yarka, who was also killed in Gaza.  

“But our people, the Druze and the Jews, share a lot, including a love of Israel. I also feel that serving the state of Israel is a privilege,” she added.

Sara Bisan. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner

Twelve thousand participants marched the 1.7 miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau for the main ceremony, which was cut short this year due to heavy rain.

As thunder echoed overhead, released hostage Agam Berger played the theme from “Schindler’s List” on a 150-year-old violin rescued during the Holocaust. Daniel Weiss, a survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri whose father was murdered on Oct. 7 and whose mother was abducted and later killed in Gaza, performed a musical rendition of the psalm Shir Lamaalot alongside her.

The Lord will guard you from all evil; He will guard your soul,” Weiss sang, his voice quavering.

The post ‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Continue Reading

RSS

French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert

Eyal Golan. Photo: Screenshot

France’s leading far-left party has called for the cancellation of Israeli pop star Eyal Golan’s upcoming concert in Paris, describing him as “a true mouthpiece for supporters of genocide” in Gaza.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the La France Insoumise party (LFI — “France Unbowed”), led by leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, urged the National Assembly — the lower house of the French Parliament — to ban Golan’s upcoming concert, claiming that he “should not come to sing the praises of genocide in Paris.”

“We call for a broad mobilization to prevent this event from taking place,” LFI lawmakers wrote in the statement, referring to Golan’s concert scheduled for May 20. “We ask the prefect to ban it immediately.”

“No one should come to Paris to sing hymns to the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the statement continued.

According to the party, the 54-year-old singer called for “the extermination of the Palestinian people” in a social media post the day after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which he wrote, “Leave no soul alive.”

LFI also said that Golan “repeated the statement a week later, before receiving support from far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir,” who serves as Israel’s national security minister.

In their statement, LFI lawmakers claimed that Golan’s concert, expected to gather more than 4,500 people, “constitutes a real voice for genocide supporters.”

“France cannot tolerate such an unnecessary insult to the thousands of Gaza victims and their loved ones,” the statement read.

In response to these accusations, Liam Productions, the event organizer, denounced the push to cancel Golan’s concert as antisemitic and expressed their eagerness to meet the Jewish community in France, promising a “unifying and special evening.”

“On Holocaust Remembrance Day, as we remember the consequences of staying silent in the face of hate, far-left parties in France seek to boycott an Israeli artist simply because he is Israeli,” the statement read.

“This is not freedom of expression — it is antisemitism disguised as morality. The people of Israel will not be silent, will not apologize, and will not stop singing.”

Mélenchon and his party have a long history of pushing anti-Israel policies and, according to Jewish leaders, of making antisemitic comments — such as suggesting that Jews killed Jesus, echoing a false claim that was used to justify antisemitic violence and discrimination throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.

The French diplomat has been criticized by French Jews as a threat to their community, as well as to those who support Israel.

Mélenchon has previously described the French Jewish community as “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest.” He has also urged the French government to recognize a “Palestinian state.”

In the wake of the Hamas onslaught on Israel, Mélenchon and his party issued a statement calling the attacks “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” in response to the ongoing Israeli “occupation.”

Last year, Mélenchon openly expressed support for Hezbollah on social media, as the Iran-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon continued to clash with Israel.

“Mass killing in Lebanon by Netanyahu’s invading army,” Melenchon wrote in a post on X, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The toll is getting worse by the hour. Full support for the national resistance of the Lebanese.”

France has experienced a disturbing surge in antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7 atrocities, with 1,570 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded last year.

The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews.

“LFI has given antisemitism a political endorsement,” CRIF president Yonathan Arfi told the French publication Le Point last year. “We observe this toxic porosity between criticism of Israel and the ostracization of French Jews. The Palestinian cause becomes a license to hate.”

In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent in France, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.

The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.

The post French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Continue Reading

RSS

Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education

US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon shakes hands with Annette Albright next to US President Donald Trump during an event to sign executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US, April 23, 2025. Photo: Leah Millis via Reuters Connect.

US President Donald Trump has signed a seismic executive order to strengthen federal law which colleges and universities have long circumvented to avoid reporting donations they receive from illiberal foreign governments and individuals.

“Protecting American educational, cultural, and national security interests requires transparency regarding foreign funds flowing to American higher education and research institutions,” Trump said in the order, which was signed in the Oval Office in the presence of the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on Wednesday. “It is the policy of my administration to end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions, protect the marketplace of ideas from propaganda sponsored by foreign governments, and safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation.”

The executive order noted that during Trump’s first term in office, the Education Department launched investigations of 19 higher education institutions suspected of concealing foreign donations and any undue influence the immense sums may have gained the country from which they originated — inquiries that led to the disclosure of $6.5 billion worth of unreported gifts. The Biden administration, he said, “undid” that work, “hindering public access to information on foreign gifts and contracts.”

The remainder of the order enumerates enforcement duties delegated to McMahon, which include reversing Biden-era policies which countenanced lax observance of the law — Section 117 of the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 — updating the public on the department’s findings, and impounding federal funds appropriated to institutions that continue to shroud their foreign donations behind a veil of secrecy and corporate spin.

“Unfortunately, in the last four years, the Biden administration undermined the structures the president built to do this critical work, allowing nations like China and Qatar to funnel billions of dollars to US universities with little to no oversight,” McMahon said in a statement. “This financial infiltration enabled foreign governments to steal taxpayer-funded intellectual property and reshape how our elite campuses teach about Israel and the Middle East.”

Foreign money in higher education is an issue to which scholars and nonprofit groups have called attention for years, arguing that it is an instrument of hostile powers that aim to distort US foreign policy by exposing students to propaganda or other ideas which undermine faith in liberal values such as free markets, limited government, and freedom of the press. Some of it is used to rehabilitate the reputations of authoritarian governments, a tactic which, experts argue, effectively converts the openness of American society into a force of its own self-subversion.

For example, according to the 2017 National Association of Scholars (NAS) report “Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for years planted “Confucius Institutes” at universities across the US, teaching students that Taiwan is Chinese territory while censoring darker moments in the regime’s history, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre that killed thousands of Chinese citizens. The institutes, the report added, came with substantial financial benefits, such as extra funds for the University at Buffalo’s Asian studies department and “opera costumes and materials in the lobby of Binghamton University.”

At other times, the Confucius Institutes were allegedly used as bases from which to conduct espionage and theft of American research and intellectual property.

NAS president Peter Wood told The Algemeiner on Thursday that Trump’s executive order is the right move, but that higher education will “resist” complying with it.

“What is at stake here is not just compliance with a good accounting principle. What is really at stake is the contempt with which many college and university presidents regard America’s national interest,” Wood said. “Allowing our universities to become beholden to the Chinese Community Party endangers Americans. The National Association of Scholars has helped to track the theft of intellectual property, the duplicity of American researchers, and the diversion research programs all under the influence of Chinese funding. China is far from the only source of such subversive funding, but it is by far the largest source.”

He added, “President Trump’s forceful executive order will go a long way towards curing this problem. We can be under no illusion, however, that America’s colleges and universities will cheerfully comply. They have a long record of ignoring lawful requirements for such disclosure and they are now more eager than ever to demonstrate their defiance of America’s laws. In light of other executive orders against [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and other forms of academic malfeasance, dozens of prominent research universities are openly declaring that they intend to resist.”

NAS has recorded copious data on foreign funding of higher education, notably in the Foreign Donor Database it created in 2024 that led to the uncovering of vast sums the Qatari government had pumped into American universities — Cornell University received over $322 million, for example, from the Qatar National Research Fund between 2015 and 2018 — to promote pro-Hamas propaganda.

Alex Joffe, anthropologist and editor of BDS Monitor for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), told The Algemeiner that Qatar has “given billions to universities, including to share their Middle East studies program which then in turn develop and disseminate K-12 curriculums which are dramatically anti-Israel, antisemitic, and pro-Islamist.”

The donation of billions of unreported dollars to US institutions of higher education is strongly correlated with an erosion of liberal democratic norms and increased antisemitism on college campuses, according to a 2023 report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) titled, “The Corruption of the American Mind.”

From 2015-2020, the report noted, schools that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than schools that did not accept such donations. The largest donor it named is Qatar, which former US President Joe Biden described in 2022 as a “major non-NATO ally.” From 2014-2019, Qatar gave American universities a striking $2.7 billion in undocumented funds.

Additionally, students attending universities that received foreign funding witnessed antisemitism “significantly more often” than those attending schools that did not.

“A lack of transparency in funding reporting occurred in tandem with antidemocratic norms and antisemitism across American institutions of higher education,” the report said. “A massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Continue Reading

Copyright © 2017 - 2023 Jewish Post & News