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BY ISHA BANERJEE AND APURVA CHAKRAVARTHY 
#EndJewHatred hosted a protest in support of Business School assistant professor Shai Davidai on Wednesday, calling on University President Minouche Shafik to resign for allegedly not doing enough to protect Jewish students.
The protest came hours after Shafik testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in a hearing titled “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism.”
The protesters gathered at 5:30 p.m. at 116th Street and Broadway with Davidai and members of #EndJewHatred, a movement “centering on Jewish liberation from all forms of oppression and discrimination.” The protest drew over 200 Columbia and non-Columbia affiliates.
Davidai decided to host the protest with #EndJewHatred after it “became clear to us that the University is not going to allow us to organize a protest for the community,” he said in a speech at the protest.
He called for Shafik to “do the decent thing and step down” after repeatedly saying that Shafik had lied in her congressional testimony. He also stated that he would work with whomever came after Shafik to “make sure that the Jewish community, the Israeli community, and the non-Jewish community that believes that Hamas is bad will be safe.”
Gabi Schiller, one of the speakers at the protest, also condemned Shafik’s testimony, saying that she threw Davidai “under the bus.”
“Now we finally see the tip of the iceberg of this institutional rot of antisemitism thanks to these congressional hearings which Columbia President Shafik showed with absolute clarity that she is a moral failure to this institution,” Schiller said. “President Shafik, we will not allow Shai Davidai to be your sacrificial lamb.”
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Photo by Judy Goldstein / Senior Staff Photographer
Protesters hold signs that read #EndJewHatred.
In regard to a recent petition to fire Davidai, which has garnered almost 9,000 signatures as of Thursday night, as well as other complaints posted on social media and sent to Columbia, Davidai said that he is not concerned for himself but rather for the Jewish and Israeli community. He emphasized that the protest was not about him but instead in support of the “Jewish fight” and “the decent American fight against terrorism.”
“Columbia thinks that it can take these complete lies, turn them into investigation, and silence me or fire me and then I go away. Like no, I don’t go away,” Davidai said. “You can fire me, but you can’t silence me.”
Davidai outlined the outcomes he hoped would result from the protest, implying the first to be the resignation of Shafik. He said he wants the Columbia chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace to be expelled and removed from campus. Davidai also stated that “all these indoctrinators,” referring to certain professors and faculty advisors, needed to be “sanctioned.”
Davidai ended his list of demands by saying that every organization that has signed on to Columbia University Apartheid Divest should have 24 hours to denounce CUAD, and if they do not, they should be disbanded and removed from campus.
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By 
Joe Marino , Chris Harris , Isabel Vincent, Chris Nesi and Emily Crane
It takes privilege to protest at Columbia.
The 114 anti-Israel protesters who were busted at Columbia on Thursday include members of the upper crust: an intern for New York State Attorney General Letitia James — and the daughter of a prominent UPS executive who killed an elderly couple with her truck as a teenager and got off with a slap on the wrist.
A Post deep-dive into the backgrounds of the protesters shows many list multimillion-dollar mansions as their home addresses, according to sources, and come from wealthy and powerful families.
5The 114 anti-Israel protesters who were busted at Columbia on Thursday include an intern for New York state AG Letitia James — and the daughter of a prominent UPS executive who killed an elderly couple with her truck as a teenager.
In 2020, at the age of 16, Isabel veered her Toyota Tacoma pickup truck across a double yellow line on US Route 7 in Charlotte, Vermont, killing Chet and Connie Hawkins, a married couple in their 70s, according to a report by the Barre Montpelier Times Argus.
She pleaded no contest to a civil traffic ticket for “driving on roadways laned for traffic” and was issued a $220 fine — which her mother paid, according to the Rutland Herald.
Many are students at Barnard College, Columbia University’s liberal arts sister school.
Others are career activists with multiple arrests under their belts.
Minnesota congresswoman and “Squad” member Ilhan Omar’s daughter, Isra Hirsi, a Barnard student with a long history of civil disobedience, was among those cited for trespassing and taken into custody.
She was released a few hours later and declined to speak to The Post.
Also cuffed and removed from the Columbia campus was Isabel Jennifer Seward, daughter of high-ranking UPS executive William J. Seward.
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5Then there’s Avery Reed, a former summer intern for Letitia James who also worked part-time on “gender equality” for the Biden-Harris campaign in 2021 in Florida.Linkedin
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by Nicke Baum
As history shows us, the Jewish people are a minority who are often persecuted in whichever society they reside in, regardless of their perceived social and economic status. Europe undoubtedly had a thriving Jewish population on the eve of the Holocaust, just as medieval England had before their expulsion in 1290, just as Al-Andalus had before their expulsion in 1492, and just as the laundry list of empire after empire that the Jews had been massacred in or expelled from. If history is our guide, there is overwhelming precedent that suggests Jews will not be safe without a state for their own protection. To disagree is to delegitimize the fear and anxiety that many Jews on campus, let alone around the world, currently face.
These are all reasons why Jewish students often feel endangered by language and violence targeting Zionism. Zionism reflects nothing more than the right for Jews to continue existing in their ancestral homeland as they have for thousands of years, and the need to escape persecution that has been around for equally as long. While the belief in an Israeli state coexists with the belief in Palestinians’ right to self-determination, that hasn’t stopped Jews from being targeted and harassed for simply being Zionists. As someone whose Jewish seminary has seen heightened security, who no longer feels safe to wear a kippah, go to Shabbat services, wear a Star of David necklace, celebrate the Jewish state, or raise awareness about our hostages, the narrative around Zionism on campus must change. Students and faculty alike must put an end to the targeted language and violence against Zionists, and differentiate between support of Israel’s actions in the ongoing conflict and support for its right, and need, to exist. Instead, Columbia must recognize that the safety of its Jewish students starts with believing that they should be allowed to have a place to call home.
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Dean of Students Mona Dugo said she showed up at the rally on Monday to support anti-Israel activists’ "right to protest" and to "protect the right to free speech," according to the Daily Northwestern.
Protest organizers demanded that the university end its relationship with Hillel, a 100-year-old nonprofit group that operates Jewish community centers on campuses around the world, including Northwestern. The protest took place during Northwestern’s Admitted Students Day, which seeks to introduce incoming students to campus life.
"[Hillel] is one of the many ways in which this university is complicit in infusing Jewishness with Zionism," one protest organizer said in a speech at the rally.
A leaflet handed out by protesters accused Northwestern of "funneling Jewish students into Hillel, the Zionist ‘foundation for Jewish life.’" It also claimed the school "weaponizes claims of anti-Semitism on campus to silence pro-Palestinian activism."
Protesters also accused Israel of "genocide" and called on Northwestern to end any relationships with "Zionist companies."
The protest comes as alumni have accused Northwestern president Michael Schill of allowing anti-Semitism to proliferate on campus, where anti-Israel protesters have raised the Hamas flag at student demonstrations. During Northwestern’s Martin Luther King Jr. memorial ceremony in February, a speaker accused Israel of "genocide" as Schill sat silently in the audience, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Earlier this year, the Department of Education opened an investigation into alleged anti-Jewish incidents at the school. Last month, Jewish students also urged Congress to launch an inquiry into the university.
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The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has filed a civil rights complaint against Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), alleging severe, persistent and pervasive antisemitism in the schools that district officials have failed to address, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.  The complaint, against Maryland’s largest school district, was filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) today.
The ZOA’s complaint documents years of antisemitic harassment and intimidation endured by Jewish students and staff, including the following: 
Ethnic slurs, such as “Jewish f—k,” “Jew-boy” and Hey, Jew”; “Heil Hitler” salutes; and Jewish “jokes” from peers that recommend that Jewish students should be put in a concentration camp. One Jewish student was recently told that Hitler had not done enough and that he should go back to Israel. 
School property throughout the district has been defaced with swastikas.
In December 2022, the entrance sign at one MCPS high school was vandalized with the words, “Jews Not Welcome.” The day before, several staff members at the high school received antisemitic email messages.
School staff who have publicly denied the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, and who have publicly called for Israel’s elimination are tolerated and remain in teaching positions in the district. MCPS retained a staff member who promoted the lie that “Palestinians are being killed and their organs are being sold.”  MCPS hired this staff member as a “diversity, equity and inclusion” teacher.
Student “pro-Palestinian” walkouts at MCPS high schools after the Hamas massacre disrupted school operations and caused many Jewish students to stay away from school out of fear for their safety. School officials tolerated the walkouts and remained silent even after student protesters at these walkouts legitimized and encouraged violence and terrorism against Jews and Israelis and called for Israel’s destruction.
At one MCPS high school, the organizers of the “pro-Palestinian” walkout posted on social media that “There is no country called Israel” and “‘Israel’ is a group of Zionist Jewish people from all over the world & dont [sic] have a state.” The organizers also openly called for Israel’s elimination, posting, “We want liberation, we want our lands back.  All of PALESTINE.  From the river to the sea.”  School officials not only failed to condemn the conduct; they allowed the walkout to proceed and disrupt classes, and later commended the protesters for “demonstrating peacefully.”
At another high school walkout in MCPS, a faculty member overheard one student say, “We should bring Hitler back,” and another student say, “Kill the Jews.” After being alerted to the antisemitic comments and threat, the principal failed even to alert the community or condemn the comments.  Instead, the principal praised the protesters for their “fantastic job.”  Moreover, MCPS retaliated against the faculty member who reported the antisemitic comments and threat, by knowingly making false accusations against her and baselessly sanctioning her.
MCPS retaliated against other staff members after they raised concerns about antisemitism in their schools.
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein and Director of ZOA’s Center for Law and Justice, Susan B. Tuchman, Esq., stated, “The ZOA’s complaint is based on horrifying reports from parents and teachers about the antisemitism that MCPS officials have known about for years and have failed to address.  Their indifference and inaction are a stark contrast to how vigilantly district officials have responded when other ethnic and racial groups were targeted.
“Members of the MCPS community have spent years trying to resolve the antisemitism in their school district. They’ve asked for district officials to speak out forcefully against antisemitism, to appropriately discipline perpetrators, and to provide students and staff with the training they need to understand how antisemitism is expressed today and how to respond to it effectively.  But these community members have largely been met with indifference and even hostility from district officials.
“We are grateful to the many community members who came forward to share their painful experiences with us.  And we are hoping that the Office for Civil Rights will investigate the ZOA’s complaint promptly and thoroughly.  It’s time that MCPS is finally held accountable under the law for failing to provide a learning environment that is physically and psychologically safe for Jews.”
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by Seth Mandel
A hideous article in the Washington Post goes out of its way to flaunt its disregard for journalistic ethics in the service of exacerbating the national anti-Semitism crisis. The piece itself is the reporting equivalent of corking the bat, filling an article with examples that undermine its thesis and hoping nobody looks inside.
The topic of the piece, written by Pranshu Verma, is the assertion that cancel culture is being applied to defenders of Hamas, so now cancel culture is bad. But the most objectionable part of the article is where Verma misrepresents an incident so egregiously that the credibility of the whole piece crumbles to dust.
To be clear, the rest of the article isn’t accurate either. For example, people weren’t being punished for “criticiz[ing] Israel,” as the headline declares, but usually for behavior such as destroying posters or chanting genocidal slogans and the like. Unfortunately, that sort of obfuscation is ubiquitous in media reporting on the aftermath of Hamas’s massacre on Oct. 7. The truly appalling part of the article is in the following excerpt:
Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel responded by attacking Gaza, groups have poured resources into identifying people with opposing political beliefs, sometimes deploying aggressive publicity campaigns that have resulted in profound real-world consequences. Within weeks of Oct. 7, ‘doxing trucks’ prowled the campuses of Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, displaying the names and photos of students and professors who had signed statements declaring solidarity with Palestinians. In January, a Rutgers Law School student sued the university, alleging that he had faced discriminatory disciplinary action after sharing what he deemed ‘pro-Hamas’ messages from his classmates with school administrators.
So here’s how the Washington Post frames the Rutgers situation: Pro-Hamas people are having their lives ruined by Jews who highlight their public comments, and this Rutgers fellow is an example not only of that but of essentially doxxing. (Doxxing means to reveal personal identifying information that is either nonpublic or requires enough effort to find that it is, in a practical sense, nonpublic.)
Here’s what actually happened. Members of the Student Bar Association sent their group chat anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas messages after the Oct. 7 massacre, and an Orthodox Jewish law student in the chat, Yoel Ackerman, responded. He shared the messages with the Rutgers Jewish Law Students Association. For this, the law school opened disciplinary proceedings against Ackerman, with the law school dean telling her colleagues “we have a Jewish law student seeking to take and publish the names of those he deems to be supporting Hamas.” He was then subject to a Sovietesque impeachment hearing from the Student Bar Association. Ackerman, without receiving sufficient explanation, was berated for three hours in what amounted to administrative harassment. In order to dispense of their troublesome Jew, the SBA then moved to suspend its own constitution in order to expel Ackerman.
That’s when Rutgers University stepped in, and briefly suspended the SBA while it could sort out the mess that Hamas propagandists and their enthusiastic supporters among the deans had made of the school. The SBA was soon reinstated.
This, the Washington Post tells us, is an example of a Jew oppressing the poor gentile.
This is not biased reporting. It is Jew-baiting propaganda with a long and very disturbing history. The rest of the article, meanwhile, is biased reporting: Verma simply launders the exterminationist language of domestic extremists into legitimate criticism of a foreign government.
The whole article is science fiction. But the apology the paper owes Ackerman is very real.
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CHICAGO, Illinois  — Pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel demonstrators blocked roadways in Illinois, California, New York and the Pacific Northwest on Monday, temporarily shutting down as part of a coordinated day of action against Israel’s war in Gaza.
In Chicago, protesters linked arms and blocked lanes of Interstate 190 leading into O’Hare International Airport around 7 a.m. in a demonstration they said was part of a global “economic blockade to free Palestine,” according to Rifqa Falaneh, one of the organizers.
Traffic in the San Francisco Bay Area was snarled for hours as demonstrators shut down all vehicle, pedestrian and bike traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge and chained themselves to 55-gallon drums filled with cement across Interstate 880 in Oakland.Kibbutz Nir
Similar protests were held across the United States and around the world, after the group A15 Action called for coordinating a “multi-city blockade… in solidarity with Palestine.”
“In each city, we will identify and blockade major choke points in the economy, focusing on points of production and circulation with the aim of causing the most economic impact,” the group said on its website.
Protesters marching into Brooklyn blocked Manhattan-bound traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. In Eugene, Oregon, protesters blocked Interstate 5, shutting down traffic on the major highway for about 45 minutes. Protesters also blocked roads Monday in Philadelphia, and anti-Israel rallies were held in Los Angeles and other locations.
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Demonstrators chant slogans at an outdoor shopping mall in downtown Los Angeles during a “Strike for Gaza” protest calling for the US to stop funding Israel and for a permanent ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict, on April 15, 2024, in Los Angeles, California. (Robyn Beck / AFP)
Near Seattle, the Washington State Department of Transportation said a demonstration closed the main road to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Social media posts showed people holding a banner and waving Palestinian flags while standing on the highway, which reopened about three hours later.
Protests were also planned in Canada, Italy, South Korea, Colombia and Belgium, while the X account for A15 posted photos of demonstrations in Greece, Spain and Australia.
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by Stacy Gittleman
Ten minutes before U-M President Santa Ono was about to speak, Momblanco said one of the keffiyeh-clad young women left. When she came back, she smiled at her seated friend and signaled a thumbs-up.
When Ono took the stage, Momblanco said the screaming and shouting began.
“At that point, someone behind me yelled ‘Death to Jews,’” Momblanco recalled. “That is when some girls and parents near me began to cry and leave. My husband and I left in fear and headed downstairs to try to find my daughter. We both began to cry when we saw each other and left the auditorium. That was the first time I saw security or police, and they were all outside. There were also other protesters filming us on the front steps.”
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Audience members were warned not to disrupt the Honors Convocation ceremony, yet they did anyway without consequence.
Students and parents fear that this is just a warmup for commencement ceremonies. There is chatter on Jewish parent Facebook and WhatsApp groups that stronger measures need to be taken or else they may consider not attending graduation events.
Many are hoping Ono’s administration can dial things back down by establishing new ramped-up anti-disruption policies in time for graduation.
U-M President Responds
In a campus community announcement, Ono on March 27stated that while he recognizes the importance of maintaining the campus as a bastion of free speech and expression, at the same time, the administration is surveying the community as it unveils its proposed Disruptive Activity Policy.
Ono stated: “No one has the right to infringe on the exercise of others’ speech and activities by disrupting the normal celebrations, activities and operations of the university.”
Ono continued: “Under the draft Disruptive Activity Policy, students accused of a violation would receive written notice and, after an opportunity to meet with a U-M official, may accept responsibility and an assigned sanction, or choose to participate in a hearing. Sanctions would include a formal reprimand up to and including suspension or expulsion, according to the draft policy.”
It is not clear when the policy will be finalized or enacted.
Meanwhile, the big time Detroit/Ann Arbor Jewish organizations have done next to nothing to stem the tide of area antisemitism. GA jr
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I'm back. It only took three messages to Tumblr customer support over the past week. They apologized for terminating my account. I was told it was a mistake. But I'm back and I'm as Jewish, Zionist, and jazz-loving as ever.
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by Jack Elbaum
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Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) addresses attendees as she takes part in a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, US, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
On Wednesday, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) refused to condemn anti-Israel protesters who chanted “death to America” and “death to Israel” during a rally in her district, sparking bipartisan backlash.
At an “Al-Quds Day” rally in Dearborn, Michigan protesters chanted “death to America” and “death to Israel.” A speaker at the event also quoted Malcom X saying “We live in one of the rottenest countries that has ever existed on this earth.”
The speaker continued, explaining that “The chant ‘death to Israel’ has become the most logical chant shouted across the world today.”
Another speaker proclaimed “Israel is ISIS, they are Nazis, they are fascists, they are racists.”
Michigan’s 12th congressional district, which Rep. Tlaib represents, includes Dearborn.
The initial incident sparked condemnation from both sides of the political aisle. The mayor of Dearborn, Abdullah H. Hammoud, wrote on Twitter/X that, at the rally, people chanted “statements that were unacceptable and contrary to the heart of this city.” 
“We reject all inflammatory and violent statements made at the gathering. Dearborn is a city of proud Americans; the hateful rhetoric heard on Friday does not reflect the opinion of the members of this community,” he continued.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates told The Daily Caller that “The White House condemns these abhorrent and Antisemitic remarks in the strongest terms. As [US] President [Joe] Biden has said, America is the greatest nation on Earth and a beacon to the world.”
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