JEWISH WORLD

JEWISH WORLD • AUGUST 11-17, 2023 25 ti-Semitic university.” Indeed, the aforementioned statement’s signa- tory list is replete with anti-Zion- ist/anti-Jewish scholars who con- sistently violate the tenets of the International Holocaust Remem- brance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism with bigoted and discriminatory views of Israeli and Zionist Jews everywhere. (Accord- ing to a Pew poll, eight-in-10 U.S. Jews say caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them.) Yet one name on the list of de- famers raises puzzling questions: Ilya Bratman. Maybe CUNY administrators discovered his name there and knew they’d found their man. The selection of Bratman to represent CUNY’s Jews in the matter of antisemitism and an- ti-Zionism may be one of the greatest betrayals of the univer- sity’s Jewish community, which has been left defenseless by so many, including nearly everyone in CUNY’s administration. Charles Jacobs is co-founder of the Jewish Leadership Project. JNS.org. New York City Council about his support of boycotts against Israel. Neither did CAFI condemn the university’s appointment of former CAIR director and BDS activist Saly Abd Alla to oversee all dis- crimination, including antisemi- tism, across CUNY’s 25 campuses. Instead, Bratman joined the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York (JCRC-NY) in negoti- ating a “discrimination portal” that included Saly Abd Alla as its head and listed the CAIR-endorsed Jeru- salem Declaration of Antisemitism (JDA) on the page. The JDA was created specifically as a counter to the core principle that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. CAIR is viewed by most mainstream Jew- ish organizations as an antisemitic organization. The FBI has connect- ed CAIR to Hamas, a U.S.-designat- ed Foreign Terrorist group, and the bureau no longer works with CAIR because of its ties to terrorism and its status as an unindicted co-con- spirator in the largest terror funding case in U.S. history. Even the United Arab Emirates has designated CAIR itself as a terrorist organization. The Bratman-JCRC-approved portal has done nothing to combat antisemi- tism. It could be argued that it only enables it further. Why so flaccid a response from CAFI? As it turns out, Bratman aligned CAFI with J Street. It spon- sored an event with a J Street affiliate, Women Wage Peace. J Street is not known for defending Jews or Israel against anti-Semitism. Indeed, while proclaiming itself to be “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” J Street supports some forms of the anti-Israel BDS move- ment and is seen by much of the Jewish community as spending most of its time blaming Israel for the con- flict with the Palestinians and thereby providing Israel’s foes with ammuni- tion. J Street aims to replace AIPAC as the go-to Jewish policy center for those who seek to press Israel to make “concessions for peace.” I f you were a CUNY administra- tor looking for Jews who wanted “peace” with their adversaries on your campus, Jews who would be eager to make concessions, you could do worse than pivot quietly from your “all external” rule and install Ilya Bratman as the Jewish defender of CUNY’s Jews. It was known that Bratman was a close ally of the feckless New York JCRC, which also, shamelessly, made no objection to a CAIR op- erative and BDS activist becom- ing the chief diversity officer for all of CUNY. The JCRC has been criticized for working directly with Bratman to negotiate this very por- tal’s parameters. Finally, there is this: On May 22, 2021, days after an unpro- voked Hamas indiscriminately rained missiles over Israeli cit- ies, killing civilians (including a 5-year-old child), the “Scholars of Jewish Studies and Israel Studies” issued a vile statement condemn- ing Israel’s defensive response, calling “the Zionist movement” a “settler colonial paradigm” that has brought “real benefit to many Jews, but … unjust systems of Jewish supremacy, ethno-national segregation, discrimination, and violence against Palestinians.” The concept of “Jewish supremacy,” we might note, was adapted from material published by infamous neo-Nazi David Duke in 2003. While vulgar and hateful lan- guage like this from known an- tisemites in academia is deeply painful to Jewish people, nowhere has the antisemitic vitriol been more pervasive or prevalent in re- cent years than at CUNY, dubbed by some as “America’s most an- A group of pro-Israel and Jewish supporters gathered outside a New York City Council hearing on growing anti-Semitism at CUNY schools, June 30, 2022. CAFI Director Ilya Bratman aligned the group with J Street, which is hardly known for de- fending Jews or Israel against antisemitism. CUNY continued from page 5 all dissent in Russia today. The communist regime in the Soviet Union named its official newspaper “Pravda” — the Rus- sian word for “truth” — because in a left-wing tyranny, the left- wing regime determines truth. Anything else is “misinformation” or “disinformation.” That Western societies are mov- ing toward Soviet-like suppression of speech is obvious in America and was made particularly clear in 2020, when the then-prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, told her country: “We will continue to be your single source of truth” and “If you do not hear it from the government, it is not true.” Fitting- ly, Ardern was awarded with two teaching fellowships at Harvard University — one of them at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, based at Harvard Law School, where she “will study ways to improve content standards and platform accountability for extrem- ist content online.” No. 10: Liberals are abandoning liberal values — in particular, their storied commitment to free speech. There are far more liberals than leftists, but over the past few years the liberals’ unswerving commit- ment to the Democratic Party, un- swerving commitment to The New York Times , The Washington Post or virtually any other mainstream news source, and their unswerving opposition to conservatives and the Republican Party has led them to embrace and unswervingly vote for left-wing values. As for the future, this is what Pew reported regarding young Americans: “The shares of young- er adults who say they support tech companies and the government re- stricting false information online have increased substantially since 2018 (by 14 and 19 percentage points, respectively).” But there is a better reaction than to weep. Fight. Dennis Prager, one of America’s most respected radio talk show hosts, has been broadcasting in Los Angeles since 1982. Pro-Palestinian students interrupt and eventually put a halt to a Zionist gathering. Speech continued from page 11