To End Campus Antisemitism

As New York awaits Gov. Hochul’s longpromised plan to deal with the antisemitism festering in its public colleges and universities, it’s time to ask: What should the gov’s effort — spearheaded by former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman — actually do and say?

Unlike many other Democrats, Hochul actually understands why Jew-hate is bad, dangerous and morally unacceptable. She responded to a spike in hate crimes against Jews after the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7 with a January push to expand the definition of hate crimes. She’s even suggested that schools where calls for Jewish genocide go unpunished may put their state funding in jeopardy.

And the state has opened a probe into CUNY Law for its faculty-council adoption of a pro-BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) resolution.

All worthwhile moves, but nothing approaching a real solution to what zoomer leftists would call a “systemic” problem. Without a deeply entrenched network of antisemitism-friendly profs and administrators in place, it would be utterly unthinkable for someone like Nerdeen Kiswani — a proud and open admirer of violence against Jews — to ever have given a graduation speech at CUNY Law. Or for CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez to play hooky from City Council probes into Jew-hate at the system he oversees even as Jews are purged from its senior leadership team.

How to combat the Jew-haters, in other words, who have power and status within the institutional structure? One way might be to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism as the school’s official definition for HR and legal purposes.

Another? Copy Florida by banning state spending on “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” initiatives by public colleges — since DEI in practice is simply a race-obsessed system for imposing left-wing authoritarianism that enables academic antisemitism by, for example, labeling Jews as “oppressors.”

Plus: Impose rules around protest that clearly delineate protected speech (which even harsh criticism of Israeli policies certainly is) and what is thuggery (such as last week’s Berkeley riot) that will bring discipline, expulsion and criminal charges.

And just as no one would advocate for a SUNY system whose professors and powerful admins were exclusively male, or Christian, or heterosexual, the state needs some effort to promote actual intellectual honesty by making sure hard-left Dems don’t dominate teaching and policy-setting.

If whatever Lippman comes up with doesn’t address the deep roots of the problem, it does nothing. When you cut off one head of the hydra, two more grow in its place.