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CUNY chancellor denounces anti-Israel law school graduation speech as ‘hate speech’
(New York Jewish Week) — The chancellor and board of trustees of the City University of New York have denounced a May 12 graduation speech at CUNY School of Law in which a student harshly criticized Israel.
Fatima Mousa Mohammed’s speech, in which she praised the law school as, in her view, a rare place where students could “speak out against Israeli settler colonialism,” was “hate speech,” according to a statement released Tuesday by Chancellor Felix Matos Rodríguez and the board of the public university system.
While the system cherishes free speech, the statement said, Mohammed’s remarks “unfortunately fall into the category of hate speech as they were a public expression of hate toward people and communities based on their religion, race or political affiliation.”
The statement went on, “The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York condemns such hate speech.”
The statement comes more than two weeks after the law school graduation ceremony where Mohammed was selected by her classmates to offer a commencement address. The ceremony was widely watched in part because part of the graduating class turned their backs on and booed Mayor Eric Adams, another speaker.
“As Israel continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshippers, murdering the old, the young, attacking even funerals and graveyards, as it encourages lynch mobs to target Palestininan homes and businesses, as it imprisons its children, as it continues its project of settler colonialism… our silence is no longer acceptable,” Mohammed said in her speech.
Later in her speech, she encouraged “the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism and Zionism around the world.”
Pro-Israel advocates have long accused CUNY of tolerating antisemitism in part because of student and faculty expressions of anti-Israel sentiment, and the speech quickly drew criticism. The Jewish Community Relations Council of New York called the speech “incendiary, anti-Israel propaganda” in a statement on May 12.
“Unfortunately, this particular commencement speech cast aside the principle of seeking truth in a shameless attempt to vilify CUNY’s constructive engagement with Israel and the New York Jewish community and to denigrate Israel’s supporters on campus while trading in antisemitic tropes,” the statement said.
On Monday, the New York Post, a right-wing tabloid, put Mohammed on the cover, identifying her as “stark raving grad.”
Ritchie Torres, a pro-Israel Democratic congressman from the Bronx, tweeted about the speech on Sunday, writing that it was “anti-Israel derangement syndrome at work.”
“Imagine being so crazed by hatred for Israel as a Jewish State that you make it the subject of your commencement speech at a law school graduation,” he wrote.
And Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, whose New York congressional district includes the heavily Orthodox city of Monsey, tweeted in response to the video that he is “finalizing legislation to strip universities of their funding if they engage in and promote anti-semitism.”
“CUNY should be ashamed of itself — and should lose any federal funds it currently receives,” Lawler wrote.
CUNY’s law school has been a target of pro-Israel advocates for some time because of student activism against Israel. In December 2021 and May 2022, respectively, student and faculty associations each voted in favor of a resolution to support the Palestinian-led movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel, known as BDS.
The law school enrolls about 700 students at its Queens campus and is known for attracting left-wing students who are interested in public service legal work. Last year’s commencement ceremony ignited a similar controversy after Nerdeen Kiswani, who is part of a group that has called to “globalize the intifada,” was the student-selected speaker. The term “intifada” generally refers to two violent Palestinian uprisings in the late 1980s and early 2000s, and the group’s call is widely seen by pro-Israel advocates as calling for violence.
The law school’s Jewish students’ association has been a vocal supporter of pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus, saying in a May 21 statement backing Mohammed that criticism of her speech had come from “external zionist organizations” that were spreading lies about her.
“The organizations currently attacking Fatima and the rest of CUNY Law’s student body, with absurd and false claims of antisemitism, are doing so against the wishes of the majority of CUNY Law’s Jewish students, who wholeheartedly stand with Fatima and have been grateful to have her as our classmate throughout law school,” the group said in the statement, which was also signed by 18 other student groups.
CUNY, which operates 25 undergraduate and 15 graduate schools, has recently signaled that it is committed to fighting antisemitism on its campuses. In September 2022, the system allocated $750,000 for initiatives to “counter antisemitism” with the JCRC-NY and in May, launched a social media campaign in partnership with the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, an organization launched by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft in 2019.
In their statement condemning Mohammed’s speech, the system’s chancellor and trustees noted that CUNY is and always has been a diverse institution.
“This speech is particularly unacceptable at a ceremony celebrating the achievements of a wide diversity of graduates, and hurtful to the entire CUNY community, which was founded on the principle of equal access and opportunity,” the chancellor and trustees’ statement said.
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Antisemitic AI Videos Target Children With Disney-Pixar Style to Push Holocaust Denial, Report Shows
AI-generated videos found on TikTok, Meta, YouTube, and X imitated popular animation styles from Disney-Pixar movies to present Holocaust denial and antisemitic tropes to children. The image of a child second from the left is from a trailer depicting Jewish children in a concentration camp during World War II. Photos: Screenshot collage from CyberWell report.
A pathbreaking report released this week reveals that online users have started exploiting AI video generators to weaponize the nostalgia of Disney-Pixar styles, wrapping venomous hate in a candy-coated shell to reach youth.
On Sunday, CyberWell, a Tel Aviv-based nonprofit focused on monitoring antisemitism on social media, published research tracking 307 identified pieces of AI-generated content targeting Jews on social media between January 2025 and February 2026. The group found that the images and videos received 30 million views and more than 2.8 million user interactions such as likes or reshares. They observed animations created with OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Veo, X’s Grok, and Suno.
While TikTok accounted for the biggest chunk of the content at almost 36 percent, the popular video-sharing service also came through with the highest level of enforcement at more than 88 percent. Instagram drove the top rates of engagement, accounting for almost 65 percent while its total antisemitic posts reached nearly 25 percent.
The Meta platform saw a removal rate of 67 percent, notably higher than Alphabet’s YouTube (28 percent) and billionaire Elon Musk’s X platform (20 percent). Musk recently incorporated X, xAI, and its Grok chatbot into his rocket company SpaceX before an anticipated IPO in June.
CyberWell found three primary narratives across the videos: 33.2 percent portrayed Jews as greedy or money-obsessed, 21.5 percent involved the Holocaust, and 21.2 percent presented violent rhetoric against Jews inspired by a specific event, in this case the June 2025 Israel-Iran conflict and the viral video “Boom, Boom, Tel Aviv.” The video features such lyrics as “Boom, boom, Tel Aviv. This is what you get for all your evil deeds […] You brought this upon yourself, it’s your time to bleed […] Humanity never expected good behavior from you Jews.”
The researchers called mid-2025 a turning point in the rise of AI-driven antisemitic videos, with 98.4 percent of identified content originating from that point forward.
The report describes “a recurring pattern in which users package AI-generated antisemitic content in formats designed to appeal to younger audiences. The most common examples include fabricated Disney-Pixar-style movie trailers and gaming-related audio clips that promote Holocaust-related mockery, antisemitic conspiracy theories, and hate speech targeting Jews.”
One of the techniques users attempt to evade moderation is to label such videos with tags claiming “satire” and “dark humor.” Others will use the term “Caust” instead of “Holocaust.”
One example presented features a fabricated trailer for a “Caust” movie created with Sora in the Pixar style. Researchers described how “set in a concentration camp, the trailer portrays Adolf Hitler in a lighthearted manner while following a group of Jewish child prisoners attempting a dramatic escape. By presenting the Holocaust in a playful, animated format, the video turns atrocity into entertainment and diminishes the gravity of Jewish suffering.”
The AI videos also exploit kids’ love for video games.
One TikTok video created with Sora and titled “CAUST COMMANDER” received 66,500 views, 4,623 likes, and 3,619 reposts. According to the report, “the post portrays Adolf Hitler in a playful, stylized manner while depicting him killing those around him. The video makes light of the Holocaust and the mechanisms used to exterminate Jews by presenting them in a gamified, commercialized format, including the promotion of fake merchandise such as Zyklon B gas, themed outfits, and ‘back bling.’”
On March 24, OpenAI announced the decision to shut down Sora following months of reporting on antisemitic content proliferating across the platform. Analysts judged that the decision was reportedly motivated by a need to free up computational power for the training of new models so OpenAI could remain competitive as Anthropic’s Claude surges in popularity among coders and Alphabet’s Gemini draws away users.
The report emphasizes the deep extent to which antisemitism has penetrated AI systems.
“Many of the websites used in AI training datasets function as active hubs for antisemitic discourse, raising concerns about their inclusion in model development,” the report says. “For example, Reddit ranks among the most cited domains across major AI systems, while analyses of ChatGPT outputs indicate that Wikipedia alone contributes to roughly half of generated responses. The reliance of AI companies on these websites underscores the risk that antisemitic narratives circulating online may become embedded in model inputs and later disseminated at scale.”
CyberWell CEO and founder Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor warned that AI had turbo-charged both the speed and intensity of online antisemitism.
“Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the scale and speed at which antisemitism can be produced and distributed online,” Cohen Montemayor said. “Generative AI now allows bad actors to industrialize hate, producing high-impact content that can reach millions, with enforcement often coming only after it has already been widely amplified.”
Cohen Montemayor added that CyberWell’s latest report “examining the circulation of antisemitic AI-generated content on major platforms provides critical insights for how social media platforms can take on the abuse of generative AI tools to spread antisemitism in the digital universe.”
CyberWell found that while the Pixar-fied, disarming aesthetics targeted children, it was the videos openly glorifying violence that provoked the highest level of shares reaching 33 percent of content but 41 percent of engagement.
Cohen Montemayor called for the platforms to “move beyond disclosure and invest in systems that identify harmful narratives at scale, including those embedded in audio, visuals and coded formats that evade traditional detection.”
Warning that AI was “being weaponized at scale,” Cohen Montemayor explained that “by strengthening automated detection, investing in competent and transparent human moderation, auditing training data and partnering with specialized external stakeholders, platforms and AI developers can address the complex and fast-evolving forms of online hate through sustained collaboration between technology companies, policymakers and expert partners.”
In one of the most closely watched legal battles in artificial intelligence, a jury on Monday ruled against Musk in a lawsuit the billionaire filed to force OpenAI to revert fully to its original nonprofit mission. Jurors decided that Musk had filed his suit too late.
The world’s wealthiest man faces potentially more severe legal challenges in response to his AI business in France, where prosecutors said they intended to pursue criminal charges due to the Grok chatbot’s promotion of Holocaust denial and generation of child sexual abuse images.
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Yeshiva University Holds Conference Calling for ‘Social Science’ Study of Rising Antisemitism
A graduate wears a Star of David on her graduation mortarboard during the commencement ceremony for Yeshiva University in New York City, US, May 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
Vital new data, scholarship, and moral encouragement were exchanged during a national conference Yeshiva University held earlier this month to promote the study of antisemitism as a “social science problem,” several academics who attended the event told The Algemeiner in exclusive interviews.
The “Antisemitism Conference” brought some 200 academics to the institution’s campus in Manhattan, New York amid a moment many Jewish community advocates have described as a “crisis” of antisemitism. Across the US, Jews have faced discrimination, battery, and even death over their Jewish identity and for being Zionists. Having seen the situation plunge to unprecedented lows, Yeshiva University called on scholars from a range of fields to use their expertise to explore and report on the matter.
Following the conference, Raeefa Shams of the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) told The Algemeiner that the academic community was responsive and arrived at the event with a harvest of findings and insight.
“They presented research they are in the process of conducting or in the process of publishing,” Shams said. “For example, we had one faculty member who presented on the correlation between anti-Israel attitudes and conspiratorial, antisemitic thinking. There was another scholar who presented on the experience of Jewish students with antisemitism post-Oct. 7. We had somebody else present about antisemitism within the American Psychological Association. We had a clinical psychologist talk about antisemitism and traumatic invalidation.”
The Algemeiner has covered a wide range of antisemitic incidents which transpired on the streets and campuses of the US since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel unleashed a spike in global antisemitism. These included, among many other examples, a public-school principal inveighing against “Jew money,” an attempted arson at the Hillel International chapter in San Francisco, California, and the movement of some conservative students into the far-right ecosystem of antisemitism. In New York City, home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel, Jews have been targeted in the majority of all hate crimes this year despite comprising a small fraction of the total population.
The wave of hatred has changed how American Jews perceive their status in the US. According to the results of a previous survey commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Jewish Federations of North America, a striking 57 percent of American Jews believe “that antisemitism is now a normal Jewish experience.”
Higher education can lead the way in reversing this trend if it promotes the adoption of “trauma informed” policies, clinical psychologist Dr. Mari Bal-Halpern, told The Algemeiner.
“There needs to be a safe environment. That does not mean that we’re silencing voices, but it needs to be safe for everybody,” Bal-Halpern said, “We know how to do that; there are guidelines for how. Most universities say they are, but are they really following those guidelines? I doubt it.”
Antisemitic incidents in the US decreased overall in 2025, but violent attacks targeting American Jews remained at alarmingly high levels, according to the ADL’s latest Annual audit report. While antisemitic assaults increased by just 4 percent, from 196 in 2024 to 203 in 2025, perpetrators increased their use of “deadly” weapons by nearly 40 percent, the ADL said. Incidents of assault involving a deadly weapon increased to 32 in 2025 from 23 in 2024.
The advocacy group noted that the upward shift was reflected in the shocking murders of Jews in antisemitic attacks in the US for the first time since 2019. Two Israeli embassy staffers — a young couple set be engaged — were shot dead in Washington, DC last May, and weeks later a firebombing in Colorado claimed the life of an octogenarian. In both crimes, the alleged killers cited anti-Zionism as their motivating ideology.
Yeshiva University’s “Antisemitism Conference” was the first step toward amassing even more empirical data on this subject, another conference participant said.
“For all of us who are embarking on this area of research and investigation, we’re all dealing with this very large, amorphous, difficult to fully understand but very disturbing phenomena of rising antisemitism or rising anti-Israelism to the extent that there is a connection between them,” said Rutgers University psychology professor Dr. Kent Harber. “We’re trying to get some sense of the dimension and facets of it for our individual work.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Thomas Massie, Leading Anti-Israel Republican, Faces Trump-Backed Challenger on Primary Day in Kentucky
US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) leaves a meeting of the House Republican Conference in the US Capitol on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The heated Republican primary battle in Kentucky between incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie and Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein is set to come to a close on Tuesday in what has become one of the most closely watched congressional fights in the US, one which could have seismic ramifications for the future of the Republican Party’s relationship with Israel.
The race, now considered the most expensive House primary in US history, has evolved far beyond a local Kentucky contest. Instead, it has become a national referendum on the direction of the Republican Party under US President Donald Trump, the limits of ideological dissent within the GOP, and the growing divide between traditional pro-Israel conservatives and a rising faction of right-wing isolationists skeptical of American support for the Jewish state, Washington’s closest ally in the Middle East.
Though Massie was expected to cruise to reelection in the ruby-red Kentucky district, his quest to secure his seat has been made far more daunting after Trump made defeating Massie a personal political mission. Trump, accusing Massie of siding with Democrats to block his agenda and demoralizing the Republican base, has endorsed Gallrein, a retired Navy SEAL officer and spent months pummeling the incumbent with a barrage of public insults.
In a May 18 social media post, Trump lambasted Massie as “the worst congressman in the history of our country.”
“I’m in the Oval Office, and we’re in a fight with the worst congressman in the history of our country,” Trump said on Truth Social. “His name is Thomas Massie, he’s from Kentucky and I hope you’re going to put him out of business tomorrow, he is so bad.”
The Kentucky congressman, a libertarian-leaning conservative long known for opposing federal spending and challenging Republican leadership, broke sharply with Trump over several major issues in recent months, including Iran policy, foreign aid, and the administration’s posture toward Israel during escalating regional tensions in the Middle East.
Though Massie maintains an extensive history of voting down foreign aid to virtually every country, not just Israel, his sharp criticisms toward the Jewish state and its supporters have drawn the ire of many GOP voters. Massie has accused the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the premier pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, of deploying “babysitters” to monitor and police the votes of lawmakers and prevent dissent around issues regarding Israel and the Middle East. He has also accused Israel of targeting civilian infrastructure in its military campaigns, omitting that terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah repurpose these locations to store munitions or launch missiles.
Recently, Massie drew backlash from Jewish groups after he posed for a photo with an individual wearing a shirt emblazoned with the phrase “American Reich,” a direct reference to the Nazi regime. Massie has not commented on the incident or distanced himself from the individual.
Massie has also come under fire over an advertisement released by a pro-Massie super PAC targeting billionaire Republican donor Paul Singer, a prominent Jewish supporter of pro-Israel causes who has backed efforts to defeat the incumbent.
The ad characterizes Singer as a “pro-trans billionaire” and features a rainbow-colored Star of David behind his image while attacking Gallrein’s allies.
Massie’s criticism of US support for Israel and his resistance to interventionist foreign policy drew fierce backlash from pro-Israel organizations and Republican donors, many of whom quickly consolidated behind Gallrein, a relatively unknown Kentucky Republican who has embraced Trump’s America First movement while simultaneously affirming strong support for Israel and the US-Israel alliance. The attempt to unseat Massie has attracted roughly $19 million in outside spending, with pro-Israel advocacy groups, MAGA-aligned organizations, and conservative super PACs flooding Kentucky airwaves with ads portraying the Kentucky firebrand as increasingly out of step with Republican voters.
For many pro-Israel Republicans, the race represents an early test of whether the GOP will tolerate lawmakers who oppose robust American backing for Israel during a period of heightened regional instability. The race also comes at a time in which antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment have become points of contention within the GOP. Though older Republican voters continue to support Israel in substantial numbers, a growing number of polls indicate that younger Republican voters are far more skeptical of the US-Israel alliance, with many wanting to end aid to Israel and cease foreign military campaigns.
Massie has argued that his foreign policy views reflect constitutional conservatism and opposition to “forever wars.” But critics inside the Republican Party say his approach increasingly mirrors the isolationist wing of the American right that seeks to reduce US commitments abroad, including support for Israel.
Gallrein, by contrast, has framed the election as a battle for peace through strength, aligning himself closely with Trump’s aggressive posture toward Iran and emphasizing unwavering support for Israel’s security.
The primary also carries broader implications for Trump’s continued dominance over the Republican Party. Unlike many previous Trump critics who came from the GOP’s moderate wing, Massie is a staunch conservative with strong grassroots credibility among libertarians and Tea Party voters.
Though the race is expected to be very close, Gallrein has amassed substantial momentum in the closing stretch of the competition. A recent poll showed Gallrein leading Massie 53 percent to 45 percent among likely GOP voters in the state’s 4th Congressional District.
A Massie defeat would likely send a powerful message to Republicans nationwide that opposition to Trump — particularly on foreign policy and Israel — carries enormous political risk, even for deeply conservative incumbents.
A victory for Massie, however, could embolden a small but growing bloc of right-wing lawmakers skeptical of foreign intervention and willing to publicly challenge both Trump and the GOP’s traditionally hawkish pro-Israel establishment.
With polling tightening in recent days and turnout expected to be high, political observers across Washington, Jerusalem, and conservative media circles are watching Kentucky closely.