Through the early 2000s, CUNY regularly had close to, or above, double-digit numbers of campus presidents who were Jewish. By March 2023, th
by Mathilda Heller
“The chilling expungement of all Jews from City University of New York (CUNY) leadership positions was part of a broader, contemplated, and deliberate plan,” claimed the group Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY (SAFE CUNY) in its new report on Saturday.
In the report, ‘How CUNY Became the Most Systemically Antisemitic US University in Just Two Years,’ SAFE says it uncovered evidence that there was a planned push to “purge” Jews from the CUNY leadership.
This was not always the case; CUNY used to be a popular choice for Jewish students and staff, and the university regularly recruited from Yeshivas.
However, according to the SAFE report, CUNY began to dramatically change in the mid 2010s, sharply reducing recruiting visits to New York City’s Jewish schools, cutting advertising in Jewish media outlets, and seemingly deliberately curtailing recruitment of Jewish employees.
By the late 2010s, CUNY had a near-complete elimination of Jews both among its campus presidents and among its 45 other senior leadership positions. And by March 2023, there was not a single Jew among the 80 campus presidents and senior leadership positions.
"In a city with a 20% Jewish population, it is unfathomable that the largest urban US university located in that city failed to employ any Jewish administrative leaders by happenstance,” the report said.
Anti Zionism and BDS
SAFE reported that CUNY’s leadership on both sides of management and labor are “infected with Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), anti zionism, and support for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).”
The organization obtained private emails in which CUNY chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez “proudly championed” the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), hired a former CAIR director and BDS activist as CUNY’s top discrimination officer (Saly Abd Alla), and worked to include the widely rejected CAIR-endorsed “Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism” into CUNY’s discrimination process.
Additionally, Chancellor Rodriguez refused to attend two City Council hearings probing antisemitism at CUNY in June 2022. This was despite the first hearing being cancelled to accommodate him and rescheduled based on his availability.
Rodriguez has also consistently rejected the widely-accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, preferring the JDA, which is widely rejected. Rodriguez included the JDA on its discrimination portal page, directly undermining the demands of many members of the Jewish community.
As CUNY’s Chief Diversity Officer, Abd Alla oversees discrimination across CUNY’s 25 campuses, which serve over 230,000 students. This includes overseeing investigations, diversity events, and all other discrimination matters related to antisemitism and anti zionism at CUNY.
Furthermore, SAFE found that James Davis, president of CUNY’s 23,000-member faculty union, is a “publicly avowed” BDS activist.
“During the New York City Council’s June 2022 CUNY/antisemitism hearings, Davis not only invoked classically antisemitic Israel dual allegiance tropes, but also repeatedly perjured himself on a variety of topics, including staunch denials of his own public history of supporting BDS.
