New York’s Division of Human Rights (DHR) has launched an investigation with far reaching implications into whether the CUNY law faculty is guilty of discrimination against Jews for passing a pro-BDS resolution in 2022.
The probe, which was described by the agency as an “active investigation,” was confirmed to Kingsborough Community College professor Jeffrey Lax, a co-founder of Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY (S.A.F.E. CUNY), the New York Post reported.
S.A.F.E CUNY sent a complaint to DHR on July 5, 2022, accusing the CUNY Law School Faculty Council of a “discriminatory boycott” against Jewish students and faculty by passing the BDS resolution, in contravention of New York’s human rights law.
The complain said in part: “The faculty of CUNY School of Law sets policy for the institution and is involved in nearly all facets of the school’s operation: grading, admissions, faculty hiring, and more,” the complaint read. “Its discriminatory boycott not only targets Zionist Jews and Israeli CUNY students and faculty members, but provided identifying personal information with links to names of suspected Israeli and Zionist Jews.”
The CUY resolution referred to the “unceasing military occupation and colonization of Palestine by the Israeli state,” calling it “both settler colonialism and structural racism, supported politically, financially, and militarily by the US.”
It demanded CUNY cut ties with Israel, end its student exchange program with Israeli schools, adopt BDS, and claimed the school was “directly complicit in the ongoing apartheid, genocide, and war crimes perpetrated by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people through its investments in and contracts with companies profiting off of Israeli war crimes.”
“You will be contacted by the Human Rights specialist assigned to your case when the active investigation of your complaint begins,” DHR regional director Joyce Yearwood-Drury wrote to Lax, who is the chair of Kingsborough’s business department.
Lax praised the agency’s probe.
“We are pleased to learn that NYSDHR will be conducting an investigation into CUNY for implementing BDS policy at its law school, in blatant violation of New York State’s Discriminatory Boycott Law,” Lax told the Post on behalf of S.A.F.E. CUNY. “A significant part of the BDS movement operates as a coordinated and sophisticated effort to directly harm not only Israel, but also the economic interests of persons conducting business in and with Israel, or with people deemed too closely affiliated with the country.”
He added: “We believe that the new BDS policies implemented at CUNY Law School discriminate on the basis of real or perceived creed, ethnicity, and nationality. It is our hope that the DHR will recognize and expose the policy for what it is: discrimination against protected classes of Jewish people.”
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)