NEW YORK – "This is life for Jewish college kids in America 2022," nonprofit watchdog group StopAntisemitism tweeted on Wednesday, accompanied by a video showing Jews and other college students being harassed by a virulent antisemitic man at New York City's Queens College.
The man can be seen yelling loudly into a megaphone, spewing hateful words as students pass by.
In the recordings, which span two days, the man can be heard saying: “They infiltrated law and politics to overturn Roe v. Wade, they have infiltrated clinical psychology…”
He continued: “They have their own banks, their own grocery stores, they were siphoning the wealth of Germany…this campus is named after a **** Jew and all these retarded colored folks walk in here.”
CUNY Queens - this vile bigot has been yelling into a megaphone the most vile, antisemitic conspiracy theories and lies one can imagine over the last few days (videos in thread) This is life for Jewish college kids in America 2022. pic.twitter.com/lax8sYVL0u
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) September 1, 2022
A campus thriving with Jewish life
Queens College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY), is located in Kew Gardens Hills, a large and thriving Jewish community, with an estimated 4,000 Jewish students, a quarter of whom are Orthodox.
The school has the eighth largest Jewish campus population in the United States.
"Disgusted to learn of the awful incident at Queens College yesterday, where a student was yelling antisemitic and repulsive racist messages over a megaphone," tweeted NY Representative Grace Meng. "This kind of language and ideology has no place in our #Queens community nor in the rest of our diverse nation."
CUNY sued over failure to deal with antisemitic instances on campuses
Last month, The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) filed a Title VI complaint against CUNY, which has 25 college campuses across the five boroughs. It alleges that CUNY has ignored a sustained pattern of antisemitic activity.
Numerous antisemitic incidents dating as far back as 2013 are listed in the complaint. Among them are several instances of students carving swastikas on school property.
Moreover, it notes that the head of the Organizational Management and Leadership program at the Silberman School of Social Work stated that mandatory classes took place on Saturdays so as to make the program inaccessible to observant Jewish students.
Other examples include nails being found in the tires of a Jewish professor’s car, students using class time to accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and a Jewish professor finding swastikas carved in her office and her keyboard drenched in urine.
In all of these cases, CUNY was aware of the incidents and did nothing to stop them nor the situation, the complaint claims. New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, who is Jewish, pulled $50,000 in funding from the law school after its faculty voted to endorse the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In addition, the New York City Council probed claims of antisemitism at CUNY.
Alden Tabac contributed to this report.