Testimonies [Pending title]

Thank you to the committee members for this opportunity to testify. In my remarks, I will explain how a climate of disrespect, derision, and favoritism has altered my experiences of my workplace, producing just the chilling effect intended for me, a Jew working at Brooklyn College, CUNY, as well as for many of my co-workers and students.

I am a Distinguished Professor of Film. I come from a family of Jewish intellectuals, teachers, writers, and artists who have done work similar to mine in the US, and Europe for at least three generations. We are largely secular Jews and have been for one, two, or more generations.

My father is a survivor of the Holocaust. As a boy he hid in the basement of his home in Budapest with his mother while the city was bombed, and he was starved during a siege. While I am tall, he is short. This is because of the rickets he suffered as a boy from malnourishment.

Because of my father’s suffering and also survival during the Holocaust, because of my family’s secular Jewish commitments to justice, democracy, learning, and teaching, we are also pacifists. We do not believe any child should suffer starvation and bombing due to their perceived religion or ethnicity, as did my father and so many Jews in Europe during the Holocaust, as do so many children in Palestine today. Speaking as a Jew, I hope most of you in this room, Jewish and not, also share these deeply human and moral beliefs.

I start with these moral and familial details because I need it to be quite clear that the way that I am a Jew, the way my sisters, and children, parents and grandparents are Jewish, has a history, and at this moment in world history, a politics. But there was a politics for my father’s family as well, who were lucky enough to be able to choose to come to the US, not Israel, after surviving the Holocaust. Their political beliefs led them to the United States, where they became proud citizens.

My Jewish lineage and beliefs lead me to oppose an ethnic state where Jews are granted more rights than other citizens and residents and, especially, Israel’s current policies of war, displacement, occupation, starvation, and genocide carried out in the name of that state and all Jews. Hence, I call myself an anti-Zionist Jew, and speak today as a member of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace. Also, for the last two years, I have organized with Jewish colleagues at Brooklyn College and across CUNY, and with colleagues in our union, the PSC-CUNY, for our right to speak and write about this particular position as well as to protest on behalf of Palestinian freedom, in my case, from a Jewish perspective.

The several incidences of anti-Jewish bias on my campus to which I am about to testify are arranged by an unfounded and in many instances weaponized belief that there is only one way to be Jewish: to support the state of Israel regardless of its policies, to be a Zionist, and ideally to be religious or observant. Each act of anti-Jewish behavior I will soon detail has served to discipline Jews at CUNY who have a political, religious, and cultural belief different from this position. Many people in power in New York state and at CUNY–only a few of whom are Jewish–have aligned with one powerful segment of our diverse, delightful, and distraught community. This one-sided approach has transformed my workplace into a sector organized to favor and protect Zionist Jews, and to monitor, punish, scare, humiliate, and discipline the large number of us with long-held if different beliefs. 

This two-tiered system of support and punishment has changed the tenor of my work life. This unfair support of some but not all Jewish perspectives leads to a climate that is profoundly antisemitic in the ways I will explain shortly.

Brooklyn College is the most diverse place that I have ever worked. I find myself in classrooms with students of many religions and ethnicities, and from all over the world. How we learn together graciously and eagerly, with these differences as fundamental to this education, is a testimony to the power of CUNY, and the diverse people of the great city of New York. I have never felt anti-semitic tension, judgement, or punishment in my work as a teacher, or distinguished professor. Quite the opposite, at Brooklyn College I have enjoyed feeling like one of a very diverse group of Jewish faculty, staff, and students who are very central to the life and history of the college.

However, in the past two years, I have witnessed many instances of unprofessional behavior from a small number of extremist Zionist colleagues: yelling, bullying, and obstruction in departmental meetings, at faculty council, and in union meetings. I have witnessed the disrespectful and enraging slur of “self-hating Jew” or “traitor to our people” lobbed only in one direction in meetings and protests. In the face of these baseless and mean-spirited attacks, I have felt anguish, and a fear of such bullying. This common attack against anti-Zionist Jews is painful, unprofessional, and cruelly leveled with the goal of silencing and humiliating.

While this yelling and name-calling can be ignored, even as it is painful, I am aware of two acts on my campus since October 7, 2023 that cross the threshold into violence. The first instance occurred early in this conflagration when a member of the NY City Council came to a protest being held outside the gates of our campus with a gun clearly visible tucked into her jeans. For reasons that are complex, and politicized, this pro-Palestinian protest did not occur on campus grounds. And so a gun-carrying zealot from outside our community could and did engage with college protesters on city streets. In the name of some Jews’ request for “Jewish safety,” other Jews are put at risk. This makes me feel like a second class Jew at CUNY.

The other occasion of anti-Jewish violence on my campus occurred when my President, perhaps on behalf of those above her who also have one-sided political allegiances in regards to protest and this war, called in a strategic response squad of the NYPD onto campus in response to a pro-Palestinian student protest. The police presence disrupted classes and regular business for much of that and the following day and endangered the well-being of our students and faculty–including Jews– who were protesting peacefully or witnessing the protest. My campus does not feel like a place where I can engage in lawful dissent without fear of police violence. 

I am happy to answer any questions about these two sordid and sad moments in our campus history, but both have been widely covered by the press.

Following this protest, in July of 2025 at a similar hearing to this one, held by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez testified as to how he was handling antisemitism on our campuses. One response that he arranged in advance of the hearing was to set into motion for four part-time faculty at Brooklyn College to be non-reappointed — in effect, fired — a move that arbitrarily overruled faculty governance without any justification. Some of these capable professors participated in protecting students at the aforementioned protest, and others were signalled out for acts of pro-Palestinian speech or organizing outside of the classroom. The Fired Four have also been widely covered in the press, and I won’t go into detail here. However, this capricious kowtowing to political dictates trouncing the clear rules of academic governance made sure that every professor at Brooklyn College understands that CUNY administration will capitulate to outside forces around matters of our freedom of expression and academic freedom. Any one of us who is interested in speaking about anything political (even outside of class) now knows we are at real risk for our very employment. And worse, this seems dependent on where the political winds blow. Palestine today? What tomorrow? 

Finally, let me mention the hapless, extra-legal investigation of six of our college’s esteemed full-time colleagues, two of whom are Jewish, disciplined for protecting students on our campus quad during the same protest when police were called. After a seriously flawed “investigation” process based on little to no evidence, this resource-wasting process took up most of the academic year, creating huge stress and anxiety for them, as well as for the rest of us who were following these opaque punitive processes. The Singed Six, as we called them, were selected from a set of many more faculty and staff on the quad that day, but what they had in common, it seems, was either their history of union activism or a pro-Palestinian perspective. The message is clear. You cannot speak, protest, or protect our students without fear of reprisal if you are a member of one class at Brooklyn College, Jews and others who speak against the unlawful and ongoing murdering of Palestinians and destruction of Palestine. Hence, I feel discriminated against for my Jewish beliefs.

At Brooklyn College, and at CUNY, I can be targeted for my political, religious, and cultural beliefs as an anti-Zionist Jew. I can be called names, endangered by guns and police, surveilled, investigated, punished, or fired. In fact, I am well aware that the expression of this very testimony today can imperil me, and the other Jewish witnesses here who express similar beliefs. But I will not be silenced or intimidated. My own family history has educated and emboldened me to act in accordance with the very fine Jewish values I have learned from my family and Jewish peers at CUNY and elsewhere: a fundamental commitment to life, human dignity, freedom of expression, and the power of academic freedom, which gives me the courage to stand up for what I believe in.

I am Emmaia Gelman, director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which is a
research and education organization that looks at Zionism as part of the political structure of the
United States as well in Palestine. I am also an American Studies scholar. My area of research is
on Zionist institutions and their role in determining how we think about race and rights in the
United States. (See Emmaia Gelman, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State,
University of California Press, 2026.)
This hearing responds to the claim that there is a crisis of antisemitism on campus – and we have
to begin by acknowledging that this is not an objective or neutral claim. Rather, it is a
manufactured emergency, an “antisemitism scare” that is a vehicle for other politics that are not
concerned with the protection of rights. While we can acknowledge the real fears and feelings of
a subset of Jewish faculty and staff on campus, in much larger part the antisemitism scare is

driven by the work of Israel advocacy organizations who have propagated the claim that anti-
genocide protest is dangerous to Jews – quite deliberately ignoring that fact that a great many

Jews are involved in it, and inviting us to feel unsafe because of it, and then report being unsafe.
(See Gelman, Astroturf Antisemitism Watchdogs, Jadaliyya, April 13, 2024)
We should also acknowledge that the notion of an antisemitism crisis on campus is driven by
demonstrably false claims – for instance, today’s testimony by Tal Fortgang of the Manhattan
Institute cited an alleged incident at Cooper Union college in which Jewish students were
supposedly barricaded into the library to protect them from an antisemitic protest. The incident
was initially reported that way by Zionist organizations, but it was also immediately refuted by
both police and journalists who looked into it. Police had simply closed the library to keep
protesters from reaching administrators’ offices. But groups that aimed to portray anti-Zionist
protest as “a crisis of antisemitism” (including The Lawfare Project, the American Jewish
Committee, and StopAntisemitism.org, among others) continued to claim that Jewish students
had been endangered, and doxxed the student protesters. (Israel-Hamas War Protest Leads to
Tense Scene at Cooper Union Library, New York Times, Oct. 26, 2023; ”Meet the student who
orchestrated the mob attack against Jews yesterday at Cooper Union”, @StopAntisemites on
X.com; “Jewish @CooperUnion students were trapped in the school library as an anti-Israel mob
barricaded the exits”, @AJCGlobal on X.com)
The “antisemitism crisis” claim is also driven by right-wing organizations, including the
Manhattan Institute whose associates make up one-third of this committee, that have a much
longer project of trying to repress political movements and scholarship on campuses that that
they disagree. Their targets include scholarship on critical race theory and settler colonial
studies. (See Gelman, The World Upside Down: Zionist Institutions, Civil Rights Talk, and the
New Cold War on Ethnic Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Fall 2023.)
Further, in the campus environment, there is another thumb on the scale. Centers for Jewish
Studies and Israel Studies — which are producing ostensible expertise on antisemitism – have
been established and funded heavily by conservative outside donors. This creates conditions on

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campuses that are already exclusionary to Jewish students and faculty who are not conservative
and are not Zionist. (Hil Aked, Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity,
Verso Books, 2023.)
The result is a vast exaggeration of anti-Jewish antagonism – which very directly conflates
political protest with antisemitism, including protest by Jews against Israeli and US violence –
and a huge overfocus of university resources and restrictive policies that respond to this
fabricated claim of crisis. One egregious example of this fabrication was in April 2024, when
Congressmembers held two press conferences outside the Columbia University alleging horrible
antisemitism at the encampment. To get to the edge of campus, these officials had literally had to
walk by a Passover seder held by Jewish students within the encampment and supported by the
Palestinian students and other students there. (In Focus: Pressure mounts on day six of the
encampment, Columbia Spectator, April 24, 2024.)
Notably, the Manhattan Institute is one such organization that is attacking Jewish students and
faculty even as it claims to advocate for Jewish rights. (See for instance Joel Kotkin, The Rise of
the UnJews, City Journal, June 2026.)
The deliberate misconstruction of a “crisis of campus antisemitism” severely troubles this

hearing. Additionally, it is disingenuous and unfair for panel members to demand details on anti-
Palestinian racism from panelists at a hearing that has been framed entirely around antisemitism.

These kinds of claims of “campus antisemitism” are deeply disingenuous and instrumentalized,
and must not be the basis for policymaking, whether by government bodies or universities. As
multiple amicus briefs have laid out, these claims, which treat anti-Zionist and anti-genocide
views and protest as if they constituted antisemitism, violate Jews’ own rights to belief and
identity. They ignore Jewish students’ and faculty’s opposition to the campaigns that are
claiming antisemitism. They ignore the ways that the organizations that are pushing them have
themselves attacked anti-Zionist Jewish students and faculty. (See Amici Curiae Brief of 13
Jewish Studies Scholars, Awad v. Fordham, 2019 NY Slip Op 51418 (U); Amici Curiae Brief of
27 Jewish Scholars of Jewish Studies and Brief of Amicus Curiae on Behalf of A Jewish Voice
for Peace, President and Fellows of Harvard College v. US Department of Health and Human
Services et al, 1:2025cv11048.

We should note also that at present it appears that no Title VI complaints submitted to the US Department of Education are being processed at all except those alleging antisemitism as defined by Zionist and right-wing advocates. No complaints about anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Black racism are moving, although many are filed. Neither are complaints about antisemitism directed at Jewish students who protest Zionism and genocide – indeed, antisemitism emanating from Zionist and/or conservative sources. (See U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, “Justice Denied: How Trump’s Office for Civil Rights Reached a 12- Year Low in Protecting Students from Discrimination”, April 28, 2026; and American Association of University Professors, “On Title VI, Discrimination, and Academic Freedom”, September 2025 and “Discriminating Against Dissent: The Weaponization of Civil Rights Law to Repress Campus Speech on Palestine”, November 2025)

Our organization, along with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, filed two detailed complaints about such antisemitism at The New School against students and faculty. As the complaint details, the outside organization Hillel worked with campus administrators to attack student life, punished Jewish ethnoreligious practice, and deny Jewish anti-Zionists access to university resources while suppressing protests against the genocide in Gaza and demands for divestment from weapons manufacturers. In this case, as in so many others, those violations of Jewish students’ civil rights were coupled with violations of the civil rights of other. The university also targeted and surveilled joint Palestinian, Jewish, and BIPOC gatherings protesting the genocide in Gaza, often spaces of shared Muslim and Jewish prayer, violating participants’ religious freedom. An overview of this complaint is available at https://tnszionistracism.net. This committee must refuse this manufactured crisis of antisemitism, and defend the civil rights that are under attack here: the rights of Jews to self-define, the rights of Palestinians and all people to oppose genocide, and the rights of all to academic freedom, speech, and political self-organizing.

Hello! My name is Jean Halley, and I am a Professor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). I am an active scholar and have authored and coauthored six books and coedited a seventh. I study race, gender and sexuality, including the impact of colonization on the lives of the colonized.

Thank you all very much for inviting and for attending this panel! I am very grateful for this opportunity to speak. 

We are here on this panel to discuss antisemitism at New York State colleges and universities. 

As a Jewish faculty member, I have not experienced antisemitism, nor have I been told by students, faculty or staff about other people’s experiences of antisemitism or of feeling unsafe as Jewish members of our campus community. 

However, I would like to address the ways that the weaponization of false charges of antisemitism – by the federal government and through the acquiescence of leadership at CUNY – has had a profoundly chilling effect on my speech and others on our campus both Jewish and non-Jewish. And this weaponization of false charges of antisemitism has been used to justify the genocide in Gaza.

Of course, I am just one member of the CUNY community. But my experiences have been confirmed by an independent report commissioned by Governor Hochul. Hochul found that and I quote, “the vast majority of students and members of the CUNY community do not engage in antisemitism or discrimination of any kind and instead want only to access the quality education CUNY affords.”

1. I have experienced false charges of antisemitism used to attack myself and my colleagues including Palestinian, Muslim and/or Arab faculty, students and staff, and to chill free speech on my campus. Numerous faculty have been doxed after taking part in a pro-Palestine rally on campus, including a friend who received death threats and has completely stopped going to protests. Before this panel, I asked a couple of people who had been doxed if I could speak about their experiences. And people were really scared to even have me describe what happened without using their name. One person was worried that identifying where they teach would put them in more danger. It is terrifying to be doxed; even the possibly of getting doxed makes people afraid to sign petitions, or take part in public protests.

And I should mention that of course many immigrant students, who are at risk of assault from ICE, have told me that they feel unsafe every single day. But that is not the subject of this panel; nor are we focused on racism and police brutality. Gender based violence is also not our subject. It makes one wonder, right? Why? Why this focus on only antisemitism without looking at any other form of prejudice? Indeed at that same time as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts are being shut down.

2. The chilling atmosphere has diminished the educational experience for all students and faculty on campus. On my campus at the College of Staten Island, this chilling of free speech and academic freedom has taken many forms including at our graduation. Indeed for the last two years, both the CUNY Law School and the CUNY College of Staten Island (CSI) have refused to allow the democratically elected student commencement speakers to speak freely at their graduation out of fear that the speakers might affirm the value of Palestinian lives and liberation. In the CUNY law school case, the administration is not allowing a student speaker at all; in the CSI case, they are pre-recording the speaker, to ensure that the student says nothing about the Gaza genocide and this of course censors free speech. The student speaker stood on the stage silently while their pre-recorded speech was played. In this final teaching moment in order to limit free speech the college is undermining the beauty, spontaneity and joy of this important time; a live speech is inherently better. It is deeply perverse that an institution that prides itself on being the people’s university and loudly proclaims its commitment to student-centered learning would take steps to silence students at what should be a celebration of their achievements and future promise. 

I am particularly struck by the disparate ways that my administrators reacted to students complaints of feeling silenced when they came from Palestinians versus supporters of the Israeli state. Student speakers in 2022 and 2023 at the CUNY law school received threats for speaking out about Palestinian oppression. Despite this, CUNY provided neither a single statement nor any kind of support for those students. Indeed, the New York Bar Association criticized CUNY for failing to protect our students’ right to free speech.

The CUNY administration thus demonstrated that they will bow down to the authoritarian power of our current president Trump with anticipatory compliance. The decisions to censor graduation speakers stifles honest, impassioned debate on topics of pressing social concern that should be at the heart of college and law school education. Combined with the CUNY Board of Trustees’ false accusation against one of the speakers, the refusal to allow any speakers or to pre-record them not only suppresses the free exchange of ideas but also stifles intellectual growth and undermines the principles of academic freedom that are integral to the pursuit of knowledge and understanding.

3. I offer another example of the chilling of free speech and academic freedom due to the weaponization of false charges of antisemitism. In 2025 CUNY Chancellor Félix V Matos Rodriguez was called to testify in front of a Congressional Committee about antisemitism in higher education. This was likely the trigger for the unjust firings of faculty at Brooklyn College. In the spring of 2025, in the context of far-right attacks by the Trump administration on universities, academic freedom, and Palestine solidarity activists, four Brooklyn College faculty members were non-reappointed – effectively fired – for the fall semester at multiple campuses, losing the classes to which they had already been assigned. All four had attended a rally for Palestine. These non-reappointments overturned the decisions of departmental appointments committees, yet the college administrations provided no reason for this procedural breach. After having lost significant income, three were eventually rehired in the spring of 2026. Yet the fourth who also lost fall 2025 classes, which she was assigned in the spring of 2025, was fired for “conduct unbecoming,” a term used during the McCarthyite witch-hunts to fire and blacklist leftist faculty. This fourth faculty member, whose eligibility to teach has not yet been restored, has been put on the “do not rehire” list that applies to every single CUNY campus, despite stellar observations and student evaluations. She has lost her health insurance and her ability to work at CUNY, where she had been employed for nine years with no previous disciplinary history of any kind.

There has been profound damage done by CUNY management’s actions towards these Fired Four faculty members. While these attempts to discredit the targeted faculty and undermine their integrity have failed, they have created a climate of anxiety that has eroded academic freedom chilled free speech. These firings, along with the suspensions and punishments of students who advocate for Palestinian rights, are in line with the Trump administration’s broad, unrelenting assault on universities and civil rights.

Given the use of alleged antisemitism to shut down free speech on my campus, as an antizionist Jewish faculty member at CUNY, I do feel anxious to speak up or engage in conversations about Palestine and the genocide in Gaza. I do feel afraid to study colonialism and apartheid in Palestine, even though I speak freely about these same topics in regard to South Africa about which I have coauthored one published book and am working on another. My recently deceased mother-in-law – who was a mother to me, the author Lore Segal – was a Jewish Holocaust survivor and refugee from Nazi occupied Austria. She almost did not survive, much of her/my family did not survive that genocide, and people the world around were silent has it happened. I feel profound shame when I hesitate to speak about the genocide in Gaza. I should not, I cannot allow myself to be silent about Gaza and yet given what is happening with the weaponization of false charges of antisemitism, I am, too often, afraid to speak. And if this is what I – a tenured, full professor in this system feels. I can only imagine what my colleagues who are more junior or in adjunct positions, or my students who have no protections at all, feel when some of the most powerful politicians in the world try to say that their opposition to genocide and their support for basic human rights somehow makes them antisemitic.