Editor’s Note: Below is an excerpt of the article “Hochul Report Whitewashes Teachers Union Antisemitism,” originally posted on American Spectator on October 29, 2024. It has been edited to match MTC style guidelines. The full essay can be found here.
When New York Gov. Kathy Hochul commissioned a report on the City University of New York’s rampant antisemitism, I was hopeful that, after my years of warnings about Jew-hatred on campus, its perpetrators were about to be held accountable.
Imagine my disappointment when the report, released in late September, never mentioned one of the biggest proponents of anti-Jewish sentiment at CUNY: the faculty union that claims to represent me.
As an openly Zionist Jew, I’ve attracted my share of hostility from radical faculty members who are leveraging the union’s power over professors like me to advance their warped political agenda.
And the problem starts at the very top.
The Professional Staff Congress (PSC), local 2334 of the American Federation of Teachers, represents about 30,000 CUNY faculty and staff. The union’s president, James Davis, welcomed the toothless, Hochul-commissioned report and its absurd conclusion that “CUNY does not need to formally adopt a definition of antisemitism” in order to address it.
Perhaps Davis fears that defining antisemitism would implicate his own and his union’s actions.
Though he denied it before the New York City Council, Davis elsewhere admitted to voting in favor of a boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) resolution in a previous academic position. And in 2021 — the same year Davis became the PSC’s president and just months after the U.S. declared the BDS movement to be antisemitic — the union passed a resolution that referred to Israel as an “apartheid” state and encouraged support for BDS.
To drive their point home, PSC delegates attended an anti-Israel rally the following year where they chanted and posted on social media “Zionists out of CUNY.”
Somehow, these facts didn’t garner even a footnote in the Hochul administration’s report.
But it gets worse.
Image credits: Background by Lobro on Adobe Stock (Asset ID: 194297269) and photograph of Governor Kathy Hochul by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Wikimedia Commons)
Jared — you left off the best half of this, where he is suing the AFT in a case that SCOTUS might actually take.
It’s interesting to see this brought as a religious freedom case because usually it is brought as racial discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Got you to click, didn’t I? haha