Tag Archives: progressive antisemitism

Cornell’s Socialist Revolution and Its Jewish Students

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There is something rotten in Ithaca.

In October 2023, Cornell professor Russell Rickford described Hamas’s massacre of Israelis as “exhilarating” and “energizing.” Weeks later, a Cornell student threatened to shoot Jewish students, rape Jewish women and murder Jewish babies. Three years later, Rickford remains on the faculty, socialist organizations have gained political influence across campus, and anti-Israel activists have transformed Cornell’s student government and political culture.

A speaker addresses a crowd at a protest, with a banner in the background reading 'ANTI-ZIONISM IS NOT ANTI-SEMITISM'.
Cornell Professor celebrated the October 7 massacre of 1,200 in Israel

Cornell’s socialist revolution has unfolded alongside a disturbing deterioration in the environment for Jewish students. Organizations promoting socialism and campaigning against Israel have become political partners, winning elections, organizing demonstrations and challenging the university’s institutional relationships with Israel.

Rickford’s October 2023 remarks were captured on video just days after Hamas terrorists murdered, raped and kidnapped Israelis. Jewish students questioned whether they could safely express opposing views in his classroom. Cornellians for Israel president Zoe Bernstein and Hillel executive vice president Simone Shteingart publicly challenged his remarks. Rickford apologized, took a leave of absence and eventually returned to teaching, including a course titled Socialism in America.

Within weeks, Cornell student Patrick Dai threatened to attack the university’s kosher dining hall, shoot Jewish students, rape Jewish women and murder Jewish babies. The threats terrified Cornell’s Jewish community, prompting a police investigation. Dai was arrested, pleaded guilty and sentenced to federal prison.

Mugshot of a young man with glasses, wearing a plain white t-shirt, looking directly at the camera.
Cornell student Patrick Dai

Cornell’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter lists more than 300 members in the university’s student organization directory. One Cornell organizer advanced to national YDSA leadership, while another won election to Ithaca’s Common Council.

YDSA increasingly works alongside Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace and Cornell Progressives. Their joint campaigns seek divestment from weapons manufacturers, opposition to Israeli institutions and an end to Cornell’s relationship with Israel’s Technion. The broader Coalition for Mutual Liberation has claimed participation by more than 40 campus and community organizations.

The transformation is particularly striking when measured against Cornell’s recent history.

In 2014, Cornell’s Student Assembly voted 15–8–1 to table an Israel divestment resolution. A decade later, nearly 70% of participating undergraduates supported a divestment referendum. Graduate students approved another referendum in 2025. By 2026, every Student Assembly candidate jointly endorsed by SJP, YDSA and Cornell Progressives had won.

That political ascent was accompanied by increasingly confrontational activism. Protesters established encampments, disrupted a career fair involving defense contractors and interrupted an appearance by former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni. Cornell imposed disciplinary sanctions and temporarily suspended SJP before reinstating it under conditions.

The Anti-Defamation League assigned Cornell a C in its 2026 campus antisemitism report card.

The relationship between socialism and anti-Zionism became especially visible in September 2026, when Hasan Piker addressed approximately 450 students inside Cornell’s Sage Chapel at an event involving YDSA and other anti-Israel organizations.

Piker had previously declared that Hamas was a thousand times better than Israel. When challenged about that comparison on Pod Save America, he responded, “I stand by that.”

At Cornell, Piker celebrated socialist electoral victories, including the rise of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and joined a chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Event poster announcing Hasan's talk at Cornell on September 24, from 6:30 to 7:30 pm at Sage Chapel, sponsored by student organizations.

Governor Hochul sits on Cornell’s Board of Trustees by virtue of her office. Together, the university’s leadership and trustees bear responsibility for protecting the freedom of political expression while ensuring that Jewish students can participate in university life without intimidation.

Cornell has spent three years demonstrating how much ideological extremism its academic culture can accommodate. A professor celebrated the slaughter of Israelis. A student threatened to murder Jews. Socialist and anti-Israel organizations expanded their political influence, and a speaker who publicly stood by his favorable comparison of Hamas to Israel was welcomed into Sage Chapel.

Cornell’s Jewish students have watched this transformation from the receiving end of threats and intimidation.

Cornell has decided to shut down fraternity events and parties for the rest of the year after a suit alleging gang rape at a fraternity in 2024 came to public attention. Will the school take similar action against the socialism and anti-Israel clubs?

Sign reading 'FRAT CULTURE IS RAPE CULTURE' held up during a protest.

Ramifications: Teaching Antisemitism and Whitewashing Antisemitism

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This is going to be part of a new series of articles under the header “Ramifications.” We often see and hear the news but we don’t often consider the underlying consequences of the information, as well as the lack of it.

The News:

Guangtian Ha earned his doctorate at Columbia University and spent eight years teaching religion at Haverford College, the elite Pennsylvania liberal arts institution. His courses included Introduction to Islam, Blackness in Islam, Gender and Sexuality in Islamic Texts and Practices, and studies of Islamic culture in China.

On October 6, 2026, federal authorities arrested Ha on charges of cyberstalking a Jewish colleague. Prosecutors allege he operated at least four anonymous social media accounts, sending approximately 50 threatening messages between October 2025 and May 2026. The messages invoked Hitler, the Holocaust, the extermination of Jews and the victim’s children.

The indictment describes a campaign of terror directed at a Jewish family. Ha allegedly published photographs of the colleague’s mailbox, identified his home and referenced his children by name. The colleague’s wife and three children fled their home twice. The children were prevented from playing in their front yard or waiting outside for the school bus.

The messages attributed to Ha included:

  • “Jew, get the fuck out of my country.”
  • “Lower Merion will be cleansed of the jew filth.”
  • “If jews are so special then they should also be placed in special camps.”
  • “Eliminate the jewish cockroaches.”
  • “Give it another 10 years, and you shall see a true Holocaust.”
  • “The jews are angry because the world has woken up and realized Hitler was right all along.”
  • “the end of American Jews is close.”
  • To Sen. Ted Cruz “You are a slave to the rapist, bloodsucking jews,”
  • In a post directed at Jewish Columbia professor Shai Davidai, Ha allegedly asked what flavor of gas he would prefer.
  • Another post directed at Jewish congressman Randy Fine invoked making candles from his body fat.

Clearly horrible. Clearly anti-Jewish and not anti-Israel.

But what you didn’t see or hear is worse.

Ramification: Teaching Antisemitism

Over eight years, potentially hundreds of students passed through his classrooms, learning about religion, race, culture and society from a professor whom Haverford granted tenure in February 2024. Jewish students were aghast as Ha had long promoted a hateful and divisive environment on campus and filed a lawsuit against the university in May 2024.

In June 2025, the House Education and Workforce Committee specifically asked Haverford president Wendy Raymond whether the college had investigated Ha’s statements equating Zionists with Nazis and advocating their exclusion. Eventually, the college settled the students’ lawsuit in August 2026.

Consider that this vile antisemite wasn’t an irrelevant lunatic ranting on the streets of Times Square.

  • He is a Columbia-trained professor.
  • He was hired at a leading liberal arts school.
  • He taught religion.
  • He was granted tenure.

His students relied on him to explain unfamiliar histories, cultures and beliefs. And he used his credentials, his tenure and his position to teach his rabid antisemitism to over a thousand students over his teaching career. Ha taught that Jews are “filth” as fact, not noxious opinion.

And like all students know, to get a good grade, they needed to parrot the poisonous professor.

CONCERN: Extremist ideas circulate through American academic institutions under the authority of scholarship, tenure and “political expression.” Your tax dollars go to support this student indoctrination in Jew-hatred to poison society.

Ramification: Whitewashing Antisemitism

The New York Times covered the story – and minimized the vicious Jew-hatred.

In the three Ha quotes the Times decided to showcase, none said the word “Jew.” None described his deep hatred – instead they pointed to making the targeted person feel unwelcome with language of “Get out of my country,” “you scums have had it too easy” and “Run. Flee. Leave.” Note that according to court filings, the end of the second post was “Goyim are taking America back, blood-guzzling demons,” which the Times omitted.

To further confuse the Times readers, the article said the targeted “person is a Jewish faculty member, according to three people who know the person.” A reader had to INFER that the get-out-of-town comments were about the person being Jewish – or maybe Ha just had a general beef with this other faculty member.

Were the “jew filth”, “jewish cockroaches” and “rapist, bloodsucking jews” comments too clear that this professor is a vile antisemite?

The New York Times has twisted itself for years to say that hating the Jewish State doesn’t mean hating Jews. Is it also trying to whitewash plain Jew-hatred into a squabble between two faculty members in which one of them could be Jewish according to people who know him?

CONCERN: If even clear and blatant broadcast Jew-hatred cannot be called out clearly and explicitly in leading mainstream media (perhaps because the Jew-hating professor is a minority teaching Islam), there is no chance that more subtle forms of antisemitism will be reported.

RAMIFICATIONS

Americans are being educated in their colleges and in left-wing media that hating Jews is appropriate, and if Jews complain – especially if the actions come from so-called minority groups – they are overly sensitive and should make room for victims of preference. That is a movement of systematic exclusion and expulsion of Jews from the American promise, a much bigger story than a “professor being accused of harassing a colleague.”

ACTION ITEMS

Haverford College. Please read the statement by President Wendy Raymond. She is upset that a professor was harassed. By what about the Jewish students on campus? What about the thousand students who were taught by this evil person? Demand a full audit and review of all class materials that the professor used over his time at the university, and interview the students who took his classes to learn more about how antisemitism might have infused his lectures. president@haverford.edu (610) 896-1021

The New York Times. Demand the paper be more explicit that Jew-hatred is Jew-hatred. corrections@nytimes.com letters@nytimes.com

Antisemitism As Political Currency

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It is very strange that Sen. Jon Ossoff would make fun of Donald Trump.

Trump has many more followers and, candidly, is much better at insulting people than just about anyone. So it begs the question as to Ossoff’s motivation.

At an Atlanta rally, Ossoff mocked Trump for supposedly not wanting to do the job of president, saying Trump wanted to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace,” referring to Trump aide Natalie Harp. He later doubled down, describing Harp and other aides around Trump as a kind of “security blanket” to make him feel good about himself.

Ossoff had to know that would provoke Trump’s ire and generate targeted insults.

And it did.

Trump mocked Ossoff as a “Pee-wee Herman” look-alike, while White House officials piled on with insults of their own.

But those insults would go out to millions of Trump followers. Ossoff’s supporters and anti-Trump people would simultaneously pile on online. Suddenly, Ossoff becomes the topic of conversation, and people start talking about him running for president in 2028. Indeed, that is already part of the discussion surrounding the episode.

It is all manufactured to improve his visibility.

Ugly. Vapid. And that’s politics.

But what about Rep. Jamie Raskin claiming that Trump manufactured the antisemitism-in-schools narrative?

Raskin seized on a whistleblower complaint from former Justice Department attorney Haley Van Erem, who alleged that the Trump administration’s investigations of antisemitism at Harvard, Brown and Columbia were driven by predetermined political objectives and, in some instances, pursued without sufficient factual or legal grounds. The Justice Department disputes those allegations and stands behind its investigations.

Raskin went considerably further in describing what the report meant. He accused Trump officials of abusing Title VI investigations to attack universities while using “antisemitic discrimination as a pretext and a ‘ruse.’”

That is not a silly swipe at Trump. It is an anti-factual smear about Jews under attack.

Why would Raskin do that?

In politics, it is to generate views and, consequently, power. He might get picked up by Hasan Piker or others who trade in Jew hatred online. He chums for antisemites to get their support for his own personal brand while simultaneously scrubbing any scent of Jew from his person.

That is a whole different kettle of fish than silly insults about Trump.

And it says terrible things about the state of the Democratic Party, that Jewish progressive politicians are whitewashing antisemitism in an appeal to votes from antisemites.

Checkpoint in California and Checkpoint in the West Bank. Only One Sparked Outrage.

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There are many ways to measure whether politicians are guided by principle or politics. One is to compare what provokes their outrage and what does not.

In April 2024, a Jewish student at UCLA tried to walk across his own campus.

Pro-Palestinian protesters physically blocked his path and decided, on their own authority, who could and could not pass. UCLA security officers stood by and did nothing. A federal judge later ruled that UCLA could not permit Jewish students to be excluded from parts of campus because of their identity or beliefs, calling such exclusion “unimaginable” and “abhorrent.”

Where were California’s Democratic members of Congress about the incident? Other “progressive” members of Congress? Where were the press conferences, the demands for investigations and the flood of social media condemnations?

Their silence was striking.

Then came Rep. Ro Khanna’s recent 7,500-mile trip to the West Bank in July 2026.

Khanna claimed that armed settlers and Israeli soldiers prevented his delegation from proceeding and that U.S. Embassy involvement helped resolve the situation. Israeli officials, the U.S. embassy, and various parties dispute key parts of that account, saying the delegation entered a restricted security area without proper coordination and denying Khanna’s characterization of the encounter.

Yet progressive members of Congress like Ilhan Omar quickly rallied behind Khanna, condemning Israel and amplifying his account around the world.

The comparison is not between two people who were blocked. It is between two very different reasons for being blocked and the reactions that followed.

At UCLA, private protesters established their own checkpoint and allegedly decided which Americans could pass based on who they were or what they believed. A federal court concluded that a public university could not allow that to happen.

In the West Bank, the issue was about security. The area was subject to access restrictions because it was an active conflict zone. The dispute is over whether those security measures were properly applied not whether Ro Khanna had a right to unrestricted entry.

One concerns equal treatment under American law, the other concerns the exercise of security authority in a foreign conflict zone. Yet the louder political outrage came in response to the latter.

If elected officials cannot summon the same moral urgency when a Jewish American student is excluded from his own campus as they do when a colleague encounters a disputed security checkpoint overseas, the question is no longer whether they oppose injustice. It is what kinds of injustice – and for whom – they choose to notice.

We are witnessing more and more of the elected progressive wing marking American and Israeli Jews as “absolutely vile” people unworthy of basic protections and rights who “must be stopped.”