Brooklyn College Students Accused of Chanting 'Zionists Off Campus'

Editor’s note: To clarify, the student demonstration at Brooklyn College’s Feb. 16 Faculty Council meeting was organized by the Brooklyn College Student Coalition, not Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), although some SJP members were in attendance. The article below has been updated to reflect this clarification.

FLATBUSH, BROOKLYN — A run-of-the-mill Faculty Council meeting at Brooklyn College earlier this week erupted into lawlessness when a dozen or so student activists stood up from their seats and began rattling off a list of demands.

On paper, those demands included “a public university that does not exclude marginalized people” and “an end to the use of undercover agents at Brooklyn College.”

However, a growing number of faculty members who attended the meeting are going to the press and their local politicians with claims they heard something else that day: chants of “Zionists off campus.”

Ryan Haas, spokesman for New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a representative for the largely Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of Borough Park and Midwood, said “dozens” of Brooklyn College faculty members called the assemblyman with these claims.

“He was still getting phone calls this morning,” Haas said.

And in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, one of these faculty members, who refused to be named, said he heard a student call Faculty Council Chair Yedidyah Langsam a “Zionist pig.”

Langsam, who wears a yarmulke and a short beard, told Patch he couldn’t be sure about the word “pig.”

“I was very busy trying to maintain order,” Langsam said. But he said he did remember that “a female student turned to me and said to me, ‘You Zionist blank.’”

“Once she made that remark to me,” Langsam said, “I adjourned the meeting.”

Langsam said another faculty member emailed him to say she had been “trembling” as she left the meeting Tuesday. She was especially disturbed, Langsam said, by the enthusiasm of some of the younger faculty members in response to the student demonstration. Langsam said his colleague wrote to him: “They would throw you and me into the oven.”

Sarah Aly, president of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Brooklyn College and a member of the Brooklyn College Student Coalition, was also present at Tuesday’s meeting. She denied hearing any derogatory use of the word “Zionist” among her peers.

“There were no chants,” Aly told Patch via email.

“One student in the group one time said ‘Zionism out of CUNY,’” she said. “So there was one single comment from one student, not the entire group, that was directed at Zionism. I think its also an important distinction and I asked the student who said it repeatedly whether she said Zionists or Zionism. And she said she said ‘Zionism out of CUNY.’”

Brooklyn College President Karen Gould sent an all-campus email late Wednesday afternoon claiming the students had “directed hateful anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish comments to members of our community.”

Gould called their behavior “unacceptable” and their alleged comments “especially abhorrent.”

In response, the Brooklyn College Student Coalition released a strong statement of denial.

“Anti-Jewish sentiments should not be taken lightly. However, no comment of such a nature was made,” the statement said.

The coalition went on to call the Brooklyn College president’s “conflation of an anti-Zionist demand with anti-Jewish hate speech” a common tactic used by the pro-Israel crowd to “disparage any opposition to Zionism and seriously minimizes the reality and severity of actual anti-Jewish sentiment.”

Langsman, council chair, countered that the Z word has become more than just a political movement.

“In today’s climate,“ he said, “using the word Zionism is a politically correct way of being anti-Semitic.”

Assemblyman Hikind has called for the college to punish the students who disrupted Tuesday’s meeting.

“Without enforcing any sort of disciplinary action, what kind of message does a simple apology send to everyone at Brooklyn College?” Hikind said. “Reprimanding the students involved will send a clear message that hatred won’t be tolerated.”

And indeed: A spokesman for the college said that by Thursday afternoon, President Gould had instructed the Office of Judicial Affairs and the college’s legal counsel to “initiate an investigation of student conduct at the Faculty Council meeting, and to take appropriate actions based on their findings.”

Langsman agreed that the students should be disciplined for interrupting his meeting.

But more importantly, he said, “We need a very strong education campaign across campus.”

“These are young students,” he said. “They did not come up with these ideas on their own. They’re getting them from other people.”

“We give lip service to freedom of speech, but we don’t talk about hate speech,” Langsman said.

For the past few years, aside from perhaps the Park Slope Food Coop, Brooklyn College has been the borough’s main stage for the international Israel vs. Palestine debate. Hikind and the pro-Israel crowd were similarly outraged in 2013, when Brooklyn College hosted Omar Barghouti, founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, to speak on campus. “We’re talking about the potential for a second Holocaust here,” Alan Maisel, another Brooklyn politician, said at the time.