Benjamin Kerstein
JNS, June 5, 2023
“CUNY’s systemic antisemitism has been a problem for the better part of a decade, and up to now, no one did a thing about it.”
It was the devout hope of many of us in the trenches that, sooner or later, the City University of New York (CUNY) and especially its School of Law would detonate itself. That is, the systemically antisemitic institution would finally do something so heinous that even the most blinkered and cowardly would be unable to look away.
The reaction to a May 12 CUNY School of Law graduation speech by a petulant racist and antisemite named Fatima Mousa Mohammed may mean that the moment of reckoning has arrived.
Mohammed’s rant was no surprise to anyone who has been following antisemitism in higher education and especially at CUNY. Among the institution’s more egregious crimes was another Jew-hating graduation speech last year and the vicious persecution of Jewish student Rafaella Gunz, who was pushed out of the school in 2020 by a campaign of racist harassment and intimidation.
In her Nuremberg-style screed, cheered by students and faculty, Mohammed demonstrated that this tradition is alive and well.
“Israel continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshippers, murdering the old, the young and even attacking funerals and graveyards, as it encourages lynch mobs to Target Palestinians’ homes and businesses,” she claimed without evidence. “As it imprisons its children, as it continues its project of settler colonialism, expelling Palestinians from their homes. Silence is no longer acceptable.”
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