Suit was filed last week in a New York federal district court by Jewish and Israeli students at Columbia University charging the University with widespread antisemitism. The complaint (full text) in Students Against Antisemitism, Inc. v. Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, (SDNY, filed 2/21/2024) alleges violations of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, of New York state and city Human Rights and Civil Rights Laws, breach of contract and deceptive business practices. The 114-page complaint reads in part:
Columbia ... has for decades been one of the worst centers of academic antisemitism in the United States. Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel ...antisemitism at Columbia has been particularly severe and pervasive....
Columbia’s antisemitism manifests itself in a double standard invidious to Jews and Israelis. Columbia selectively enforces its policies to avoid protecting Jewish and Israeli students from harassment, hires professors who support anti-Jewish violence and spread antisemitic propaganda, and ignores Jewish and Israeli students’ pleas for protection. Those professors teach and advocate through a binary oppressor-oppressed lens, through which Jews, one of history’s most persecuted peoples, are typically designated “oppressor,” and therefore unworthy of support or sympathy. Columbia permits students and faculty to advocate, without consequence, for the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel, the only Jewish country in the world....
... Columbia has permitted endemic antisemitism to exclude Jewish and Israeli students from full and equal participation in, and to deprive them of the full and equal benefits of, their educational experience at Columbia, and has invidiously discriminated against them by, among other things, failing to protect them in the same way Columbia has protected other groups.... [I]t has responded to antisemitism with at best deliberate indifference....
