Lawsuit Accuses NYU of Failing to Address Campus Antisemitism

Three students are claiming that the university has willfully neglected the struggles of Jewish undergraduates, allowing a flood of anti-Jewish animosity to thrive on the campus.

By Batya Jerenberg

Three Jewish college students have filed a lawsuit against New York University for its allegedly weak response to campus antisemitism that has left them feeling besieged, The New York Post reported Tuesday.

The complaint charged that throngs of undergraduates have regularly intimidated their Jewish peers by shouting epithets like “Hitler was right,” and “Gas the Jews.” Students as well as staff member, it added, have “enthusiastically endorsed” the Hamas invasion of Gaza envelope communities on October 7 in which the terror organization’s forces massacred 1,200 men, women, children and infants.

When asking the administration for firm action in response, their grievances are either “ignored, slow-walked, or met with gaslighting,” the suit said.

It gave as an example that “Whereas pro-Hamas faculty and students are permitted to engage in vicious antisemitic hate speech, Jewish students are told to keep quiet, maintain a low profile, avoid making waves, and call a wellness hotline.”

“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 lawsuit charged.

One of the plaintiff’s lawyers, Marc Kasowitz, said in a statement that the school’s “deliberate indifference towards the plight of its Jewish students…has been outrageous.” The purpose of the lawsuit, he explained, is to have the court “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 one much-publicized display of anti-Israel antipathy, NYU Law Student Bar Association President Ryna Workman had put “full responsibility” on Israel for the slaughter in a missive to the school paper three days after the Hamas attack.

She called their actions “resistance against oppression” and declared that she would not condemn it, preferring to accuse Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid.”

Workman was then filmed weeks later covering over posters of some of the 240 hostages abducted by Hamas with a page calling for a “National Student Walkout” on October 25 to “demand a free Palestine,” in a video that went viral on X after being shared by antisemitism watchdog groups.

Some 300 NYU students demonstrated at the walkout, accusing Israel of genocide and dehumanization of the Palestinians, and holding signs that called for Israel’s destruction in order to “keep the world clean.”

The university rejects the charges in the lawsuit, spokesman John Beckman told The Post, saying in a statement that NYU “take[s] the issues of antisemitism and any other forms of hate extremely seriously,” and has taken “many steps” to fight Jew hatred “and keep the campus safe.”

It is unclear whether any disciplinary action was taken against Workman for her missive, but the administration had condemned it, saying that “Acts of terrorism are immoral. The indiscriminate killing of civilians and hostage-taking, including children and the elderly, is reprehensible. Blaming victims of terrorism for their own deaths is wrong.”

The student bar association did dismiss her from her post, and she lost a job offer from a prestigious law firm that same day due to her “inflammatory comments regarding Hamas’ recent terrorist attack,” as the statement from Winston & Strawn put it.