Lehman College Cancels Anti-Israel ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Event

By Matis Glenn

An anti-Israel event at Lehman College which contained a call for “intifada” was cancelled Monday, amid outrage from elected officials and others.

The event, scheduled for February 16 at the Bronx City University of New York school, was originally entitled “Globalize the Intifada! Mapping Struggles for Palestine between the Streets and our Classrooms.” After reports circulated accusing the organizers and the school of antisemitism, the first three words were removed from the event’s description.

CUNY is currently under state investigation for not addressing antisemitism, and four of its schools, including Brooklyn College and CUNY Law, are under federal investigation for possible Title IV civil rights violations in relation to antisemitism.

The term “intifada” in the context of Israeli-Palestinian history is associated with acts of terrorism. Palestinian organizations and historians refer to the waves of terrorism, in which civilians were targeted, in 1987 until 1993, and again in 2000, as the First and Second Intifada respectively. The term was also used by Hamas and other Palestinian groups to describe their actions during a series of over 500 stabbings of Israelis between the years of 2015 and 2016, which they called the “intifada of the knives.”

The event, set to be moderated by Britt Munro, a teacher at the college, was part of the school’s “Engagement, Equity and Antiracism” conference, itself part of a “Writing Across the Curriculum” program, which describes itself as taking an “antiracist and decolonial approach to writing pedagogy.”

Jane Kehoe Higgins, Director of the Lehman College Institute for Literacy Studies and sponsor of the conference, told Campus Reform that the panel had been canceled, and subsequently released a statement saying that the goal of the program is “to bring people together, not to cause harm or make students feel unsafe.”

“It is not a podium for protest,” she continued. “After discussion with the panelists, I do not believe we share the same goal. There are appropriate venues for them to share their views, but this conference is not one of them and the panel has been cancelled.”

City Councilman Eric Dinowitz slammed the event. “Antisemitism is a malignant cancer in our universities,” he wrote on social media. “This class and these professors further institutionalize antisemitism – it is unacceptable.”

Addressing CUNY and Gov. Kathy Hochul, Dinowitz wrote: “Is this how you pledged to fight antisemitism on campus? By sanctioning it?”

Dinowitz wrote on social media Monday that he “just had a very productive conversation with Lehman College leadership. I believe we are on a good path to resolving this issue, and will keep you updated as this issue progresses.”

CUNY has been embroiled in allegations in recent years that it has not addressed growing antisemitism among students and faculty. At CUNY Law, last year’s commencement speech was given by a woman who accused Israel of “murdering the old and the young” and called for an end to Israel, and capitalism, “by any means necessary.” The student who gave the speech in the previous year was Nirdeen Kiswani, who threatened to murder a Jewish student who was wearing an IDF sweatshirt, and who is in a leadership position in New York’s Al-Awda and “Within Our Lifetime” organizations, both of which have voiced support for Hamas.

Dinowitz, along with Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, chaired a seven-hour-long hearing in June of 2022 to address antisemitism in CUNY, in which students and faculty shared harrowing accounts of antisemitism at college campuses, including cases of assault, and threats on students by teachers of being failed if they didn’t espouse anti-Zionism. CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez did not attend that meeting, despite it having been rescheduled to accommodate him.

Adding to the outrage was Matos Rodriguez’s decision in September 2022 to hire Saly Abd Alla, a former employee of the BDS-backing CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations), to oversee an investigation into allegations made by Kingsborough Community College Professor Jeffrey Lax that CUNY faculty had discriminated against him for being Jewish. Lax filed a complaint saying that his fellow faculty members arranged a meeting on Shabbos in an effort to exclude him from attending.

In October of 2023, amid a drastic rise in antisemitic incidents, Hochul announced an independent review of CUNY’s response to antisemitism, to be conducted by Hon. Jonathan Lippman, former chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals and currently of counsel at Latham & Watkins.