New York Must Not Allow Cornell and Columbia to Jeopardize Jewish Students

At New York’s most elite colleges, Jewish students are under siege.

Columbia and Cornell, the state’s two members of the prestigious Ivy League, have both failed their Jewish students — both before and after the Hamas attack on October 7, which was the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Since the Hamas attack, a rising tide of unconcealed antisemitic harassment has flooded American and Western life, with students on college campuses being particularly targeted.

A rallying tool for the dehumanization of Jews — which also runs afoul of New York state law — is the set of referenda being organized at both schools to delegitimize the world’s only Jewish country, the State of Israel.

It is astonishing and unprecedented that the Jewish community is being targeted this way in New York, the most storied center of Jewish life in America, with the largest Jewish population of any US state: almost 2 million, about a quarter of the total American Jewish community, and at least 7% of the state’s population.

The state, led by Governor Kathy Hochul, must take action to halt the dangerous farce targeting our people.

The issue for these protestors isn’t Israel defending herself. They just have a problem with Jews, even dead ones. It’s as simple as that.

At Columbia, the antisemitic attacks started within hours of Hamas’ horrific invasion of Israel, which killed 1,200 innocent Israelis.

On October 16, one Jewish student was assaulted with a broomstick, fracturing his finger, as he hung posters of the more than 240 hostages abducted by Hamas. Other students were spat on for speaking Hebrew. Another Israeli student’s “phone number was leaked and she received aggressive and explicit text messages and phone calls for weeks.”

Despite this harassment, and at a time of record antisemitism in the US, Columbia is playing host to no fewer than five referenda calling for discriminatory treatment of, economic action against, and, in some cases, the genocidal elimination of the entire country of Israel.

Let’s be clear: calling for the state of Israel to be abolished is not calling for peace. These “protestors” are calling for war to the bitter end of the Jews, and, in fact, studies have demonstrated that campus-wide campaigns calling for the elimination of Israel result directly in an increase of anti-Jewish activity on campus.

Similarly, at Cornell, one student was arrested after he threatened to “bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig jews.” Another Cornell student posted, “Zionists must die!” on social media. A Cornell professor, Russell Rickford, at an October 15 anti-Israel rally, said that he found October 7 — which featured mass rape and genital mutilation — “exhilarating” and “energizing.”

And yet the Cornell Assembly has picked this time to pass a resolution calling for the university to make divestment recommendations to the Board of Trustees, implicitly singling out the State of Israel.

For years after World War II, American and Western leaders pledged they would “never again” allow the Jewish people to be targeted for slaughter; now, the new radicals are calling for the deconstruction of the only Jewish state.

New York law and policy are clear: New York agencies and authorities must divest all state funds invested in entities that engage in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) activity against Israel. BDS is a strategy that the US State Department has recognized as a form of antisemitism.

Federal law prohibits discrimination against groups like Jews or Israelis, and an ongoing Federal lawsuit accuses Columbia of failing to intervene against antisemitism on campus. A similar lawsuit is being organized against Cornell. As if that wasn’t enough, both schools are facing Federal antisemitism inquiries from the US Education Department.

These are beyond challenging times for America’s Jewish community, which is experiencing an all-time high of antisemitic assaults, as global Jewry faces its most dangerous moment since World War II.

On American campuses, an astonishing 73% of Jewish college students say that they have now personally experienced or witnessed antisemitism just since the start of the school year. The level of attacks on our community is now truly pervasive, and civic leaders must not stand aside while our community is reeling.

Under such circumstances, and with the specific assaults and threats that have manifested at Columbia and Cornell, the New York state government and Governor Hochul must act immediately to protect Jewish students by intervening against the proposed ballot propositions delegitimizing Israel.

Noa Tishby is a New York Times best-selling author, and Israel’s former Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and Delegitimization.