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More Universities Refuse to Adopt Boycott Movement Against Israel
Pro-Hamas activists gather in Washington Square Park for a rally following a protest march held in response to an NYPD sweep of an anti-Israel encampment at New York University in Manhattan, May 3, 2024. Photo: Matthew Rodier/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
A growing number of US colleges and universities have stated their opposition to the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which pro-Hamas protesters pressured administrators to adopt during an explosion of riotous demonstrations in which they occupied school property and refused to leave unless their demands were met.
Formally launched in 2005, the BDS campaign opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country comprehensively with economic, political, and cultural boycotts as the first step towards its eventual elimination.
Official guidelines issued for the campaign’s academic boycott state that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end,” and delineate specific restrictions that adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students who seek to study in Israel. Others propose divesting university endowments of companies linked to Israel, a demand for which protesters have clamored recently as a way of undermining Israel’s prosecution of its war against Hamas, a terrorist organization which murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped over 250 others during its Oct. 7 onslaught across southern Israeli communities.
The campaign has been widely condemned by Jewish leaders worldwide, including major American Jewish organizations, for rejecting Jewish rights and trafficking in antisemitic tropes, while it has been advanced by anti-Zionist activists purportedly as a vehicle for advancing Palestinian statehood.
“We do not espouse a foreign policy,” outgoing Cornell University president Martha Pollack said in a statement issued at the end of May, explaining why she decided not to recommend a divestment proposal put forth by anti-Zionist students. “Cornell’s endowment consists of gifts to the university that are invested to generate money that supports the university’s work in perpetuity, funding mission-directed priorities including financial aid and other student support, faculty salaries and stipends, facilities maintenance and upgrades, academic programs, and research activities.”
Pollack, who will leave office to retire from working in higher education at the end of this month, added, “I am also troubled by the fact that this referendum singles out companies for providing arms to Israel when there have not been calls for divestment or sanctions from a host of other countries involved in similar conflicts. Finally, the divestment called for risk, being in violation of New York state’s executive order 157, which prohibits investment activity intended to penalize Israel.”
The statement followed Pollack’s receiving a deluge of criticism by academics and activists, who lambasted her alleged fostering of left-wing extremism while commenting on her retirement announcement.
“Martha Pollack was the architect of Cornell’s disastrous race-focused [diversity, equity, and inclusion] initiative that balkanized the campus and inevitably led to targeting of Jewish and pro-Israel students,” Legal Insurrection writer and Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson tweeted. “While I wish her well in her personal life, it is time for the Cornell Trustees to turn the ship around, to eliminate DEI programming as is taking place elsewhere, and to refocus the campus on the inherent dignity of each individual without regard to group identity.”
Pollack further antagonized her critics just over a week later by issuing an open letter which portrayed the detractors of pro-Hamas protests as bigots. In the missive, she launched a volley of seemingly underhanded comments at Jews and pro-Israel activists, saying, “The participants in the encampment shared that members of our Jewish community who have criticized Israel have been targeted with the slur ‘kapo,’ which not only is deeply offensive but also trivializes the memory of the Holocaust.”
She continued, “Other students involved in the encampment shared experiences of being called ‘terrorists’’over the past few months in an expression of anti-Arab discrimination and hatred. No matter one’s political beliefs, using such rhetoric, which questions the basis of someone’s religious, cultural, ancestral, or any form of identity is unacceptable, and I implore everyone in our community to think carefully about their words.”
This month, Purdue University stated its commitment to “institutional neutrality,” a policy which forswears weighing in on contentious political issues. In a statement, Purdue cited its embrace of the 1967 University of Chicago Kalven Committee Report, which proclaimed that the university best fulfills its mission when it is distanced from politics and the capricious “political fashions, passions, and pressures” of the times.
“Purdue University fully subscribes to this view,” the school said in a statement. “Of course, recognizing Purdue University’s commitment to freedom of expression and its role as ‘the home and sponsor of critics,’ individual members of the campus community will always be free to express their views on a particular policy proposal or in a debate over a particular political or social issue, provided that such views or concerns are expressed in a personal capacity and do not purport to be official statements of Purdue University.”
According to unverified social media reports, the board of trustees of Occidental College in Los Angeles rejected a divestment proposal it was sent as part of a deal to end a pro-Hamas encampment on campus.
The Algemeiner has asked the school to confirm whether the reports are accurate.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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New York City Jews Targeted for Most Hate Crimes in March, NYPD Stats Show
Orthodox Jewish man waiting for the train in the New York City subway. Photo: Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect.
Jews in New York City were victims of more hate crimes in March than any other group even as crime across the Five Boroughs fell to “historic” lows, according to statistics issued by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) on Thursday.
39 hate crimes targeted Jews last month, the Algemeiner reviewed data shows, outstripping the combined total of all other groups combined — 28 — and constituting 58 percent of all hate crimes reported to authorities. So far, there have born 85 antisemitic hate crimes in New York City through the first three months of 2025, with the month of February seeing a 100 percent increase in them over the previous year and March seeing no improvement at all.
The data continues a trend that has persisted for several years and concurred with a rise in antisemitic incidents across the US.
Jews represented a disproportionate share of hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024 as well. Of the 641 total hate crimes tallied by the NYPD that year, Jews were victims of 345, which, in addition to being a 7 percent increase over the previous year, amounted to 54 percent of all hate crimes in the city.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, antisemitic hate crimes have posed a major threat to the quality of life of New York City’s Orthodox Jewish community, which was the target in many of the incidents. In just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery.
In another incident, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn. Days after the week-long antisemitic hate crime spree, three men attempted to rob a Hasidic man after stalking him through the Crown Heights neighborhood.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post New York City Jews Targeted for Most Hate Crimes in March, NYPD Stats Show first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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NYC ‘Dyke March’ Bans Zionists From Participating in Annual Demonstration
(Source: Reuters)
NYC Dyke March, a public demonstration held by members of the lesbian community in New York City, has banned self-proclaimed “Zionists” from its annual event, citing a desire to stand against the so-called “genocide” occuring in Gaza.
The group revealed in a statement that their decision to ban Israel supporters from their ranks came after multiple members dropped out of the organization due to differences in “political beliefs and values.” After engaging in discussions with frustrated members, the NYC Dyke March committee agreed to adopt “an explicitly anti-Zionist position.” The organization claims that it will “strengthen our commitment” to fighting against Israel and advocating on behalf of Palestinians.
Last year, the NYC Dyke March previously came under scrutiny after organizers settled on “genocide” as the theme of its 2024 event. In a statement, decrying “ethnic cleansing, violence, and dehumanization,” the organization compared the ongoing war in Gaza, to the mass slaughters occurring in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Sudan.
The organization plans on recycling the same theme for this year’s march, titling it “Dykes Against Genocide.” The group released a statement clarifying that Jews are allowed to attend and condemned the Oct. 7 slaughters as a “senseless loss of life.” After an apparent uproar from its members, the organization deleted the post and wrote that the group “unapologetically stands in support of Palestinian liberation.” In addition, the group affirmed that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism and any language we put out which is not clearly opposed to a Zionist, imperialist agenda is harmful to us all.”
In the 17 months following the Hamas-led massacre of roughly 1200 people throughout Israel, the NYC Dyke March has produced numerous statements lambasting Israel and declaring “solidarity” with Palestinians amid their so-called “ongoing genocide.” The organization also accused Israel of engaging in supposed “pinkwashing” and “manipulative use of Jewish and queer identities,” with the aim of justifying its war efforts in Gaza.
Israel offers an expansive set of rights for members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transngender (LGBT) community, including recognition of same-sex marriages. Every year in June, Tel Aviv holds one of the largest LGBT Pride celebrations in the world. Meanwhile, members of the LGBT community are routinely imprisoned or murdered in other parts of the Middle East, including the Palestinian territories.
The NYC Dyke March’s announcement was met with widespread condemnation.
“You cannot exclude the majority of Jews and call yourself inclusive,” said the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in a post on X/Twitter, adding that the group “essentially equates Zionism with racism” in their announcement.
The post NYC ‘Dyke March’ Bans Zionists From Participating in Annual Demonstration first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Administration Planning $510 Million Cut to Brown University Budget, Report Says
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with journalists onboard Air Force One en route to Miami, Florida, U.S., April 3, 2025. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura
The Trump administration reportedly plans to terminate $510 million worth of federal contracts and grants awarded to Brown University, according to media reports.
Brown University’s failure to mount a satisfactory response to the campus antisemitism crisis, as well as its embrace of the diversity, equity, and, inclusion (DEI) movement — perceived by many across the political spectrum as an assault on merit-based upward mobility and causing incidents of anti-White and anti-Asian discrimination — prompted the alleged pending action by the federal government, according to the right-leaning outlet The Daily Caller.
The announcement comes as Brown scrambles to cover a $46 million budget shortfall and other universities across the country have faced similar funding cuts.
Brown University officials, however, denied that the university had received any directives from the Trump Administration.
“We have no information to substantiate these rumors,” Brown University provost Francis Doyle issued a statement. “We are closely monitoring notifications related to grants, but have nothing more we can share as of now.”
Meanwhile, Brown’s Jewish community rushed to the university’s defense, issuing a joint statement with the Brown Corporation which said that the campus is “peaceful and supportive campus for its Jewish community.”
The letter, signed by members of the local Hillel International chapter and Chabad on College Hill, continued: “Brown University is a place where Jewish life not only exists but thrives. While there is more work to be done, Brown, through the dedicated efforts of its administration, leadership, and resilient spirit of its Jewish community, continues to uphold the principles of inclusion, tolerance, and intellectual freedom that have been central to its identity since 1764.”
Brown Divest Coalition — an anti-Zionist group which recently saw its campaign for the university to adopt the boycott, divest, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel defeated by the Brown Corporation — weighed in too, denouncing the reported cut as “a means of suppressing all forms of popular dissent to the renewed violence of the US war machine abroad.” US Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) also criticized the move, accusing the administration “of a broader pattern of behavior…that will negatively impact communities across the country and lead to layoffs, restrict research, and more.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the Trump administration is following through on its threats to inflict potentially catastrophic financial injuries on colleges and universities deemed as soft on antisemitism or excessively “woke.” The past six weeks has seen the policy imposed on elite universities including Harvard and Columbia, rattling a higher education establishment that has for better and worse operated for decades with little interference from the federal government even as it polarized the public and contributed to a growing sense that elites are contemptuous of Americans who live outside of their cultural enclaves.
In March, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon announced the cancellation of $400 million in federal contracts and grants for Columbia University, a measure that secured the school’s acceding to a slew of demands the administration put forth as preconditions for restoring the money. Later, the Trump administration disclosed its reviewing $9 billion worth of federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard University, jeopardizing a substantial source of the school’s income over its alleged failure to quell antisemitic and pro-Hamas activity on campus following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. Princeton University saw $210 million of its federal grants and funding suspended too, prompting its president, Christopher Eisgruber to say the institution is “committed to fighting antisemitism and all forms of discrimination.”
Additionally, 60 universities are being investigated by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights over their handling of campus antisemitism, a project that will serve as an early test of the administration’s ability to perform the essential functions of the agency after downsizing its workforce to increase its efficiency.
One of those universities, Northwestern University, on Monday touted its progress in addressing campus antisemitism, noting that it has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, a reference tool which aids officials in determining what constitutes antisemitism, and begun holding “mandatory antisemitism training” sessions which “all students, faculty, and staff” must attend.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Trump Administration Planning $510 Million Cut to Brown University Budget, Report Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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