NYU Sued By Jewish Students Feeling 'Under Siege:' Report

GREENWICH VILLAGE, NY — A group of Jewish students at NYU have sued the private university, claiming that administrators have "ignored" their complaints of antisemitism on campus, according to reports.

The suit, filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court, claims that complaints about antisemitic instances on campus — sharply on the rise since the brutal Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants left 1,200 killed in Israel, and the subsequent response which has left over 11,000 killed in Gaza so far — have been met with "inaction," reports the New York Post.

Administrators, the suit claims, according to the Post, “ignored, slow-walked, or met with gaslighting" various complaints from Jewish students, leaving the three students who filed the suit feeling "traumatized" and feeling like "second-class citizens."

“The effect of NYU’s inaction and, indeed, complicity in the torrent of anti-Jewish hatred that has engulfed its campus has been the normalization of antisemitism in the NYU community,” the Post reports the suit as saying.

Three students filed the lawsuit, aiming to have the court force NYU to enact better measures to fight antisemitism — including taking stronger actions against students as well as staff, according to the Post.

“NYU’s deliberate indifference toward the plight of its Jewish students under siege by egregious antisemitism has been outrageous,”an attorney for the students, Marc Kasowitz, said in a statement to the Post.

“We are asking the Court to compel NYU to comply with the Civil Rights Act, its own purported policies, and elementary human decency, which to date the University has failed and refused to do on its own.”

In a statement to the Post, a NYU spokesperson said that they are looking forward to “challenging this lawsuit’s one-sided narrative.”

Noting that NYU was one of the first universities to condemn the Hamas attack — and has a campus in Tel Aviv — spokesperson John Beckman wrote to the Post that “the assertions in this suit do not accurately describe conditions on our campus or the many steps NYU has been taking to fight antisemitism and keep the campus safe."

“NYU looks forward to setting the record straight, to challenging this lawsuit’s one-sided narrative, to making clear the many efforts NYU has made to combat antisemitism and provide a safe environment for Jewish students and non-Jewish students, and to prevailing in court,” Beckman said, according to the Post.