Antisemitic threats at Cornell shutter kosher dining hall as Jews hide in their rooms
University president condemns hateful messages and promises that those who posted them will be punished
Cornell University. Photo by Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images
By Jacob Kornbluh October 29, 2023
Responding to reports that Jewish students at Cornell were afraid to leave their rooms, the university president on Sunday strongly condemned hate-filled messages posted to campus discussion forums and promised the people who wrote them would be punished.
“Threats of violence are absolutely intolerable,” Cornell’s president, Martha E. Pollack, said in a statement posted on X (formerly known as Twitter). “Our immediate focus is on keeping the community safe.”
“We will not tolerate antisemitism at Cornell,” she added. “This incident highlights the need to combat the forces that are dividing us and driving us toward hate.”
The statement came hours after a number of messages calling for physical violence against Jews on campus were published on social media. One former Cornell student, Annie Vail, said the kosher dining hall on campus was “on lockdown” and Jewish students were hiding in their dorms.
The messages were copied from internal campus forums. One said: “If you see a jewish ‘person’ on campus, follow them home and slit their throats. rats need to be eliminated from cornell.” Another read, “the genocidal fascist zionist regime will be destroyed. rape and kill all the jew women, before they birth more jewish hitlers. jews are excrement on the face of the earth. no jew civilian is innocent of genocide.”
Another user posted Sunday afternoon, “gonna shoot up 104 west,” referring to the kosher dining hall on campus. “If i see another synagogue another rally for the zionist globalist genocidal apartheid dictatorial entity known as ‘israel’, i will bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig jews,” one user posted. “Jews are human animals and deserve a pigs death.”
campus life for a Jewish student in 2023 is very out of control.
Currently on a @Cornell discussion forum, the kosher dining hall (104 west) is now on lockdown and Jewish students are scared to leave their rooms. pic.twitter.com/CYnROznk33
— Daniel Kraus (@rabbidkraus) October 29, 2023
As a result, Cornell’s Hillel advised students and staff to “avoid the building out of an abundance of caution.”
Rabbi Ari Weiss, executive director of Cornell Hillel, said the messages “shook a lot of students to their core” as they are still grieving the loss of life of some of the people they knew. He said the 2,500 Jewish undergrads and 500 graduate students are now “fearful for their safety.”
The hateful messages come as Jewish and Muslim students are reporting heightened levels of harassment at colleges and universities nationwide in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel and the retaliatory Israeli strikes on Gaza in the three weeks since.
At Stanford University, a teaching assistant was suspended for calling Jews in his class colonizers, at Columbia, a 19-year-old was arrested for beating an Israeli graduate student with a stick, and at Cooper Union college last week, several Jewish students said they feared for their life as pro-Palestine protesters banged on the windows of a locked library where they were sheltering.
At Tulane University in New Orleans, a clash between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian activists resulted in several injuries.
Pro-Palestinian protests calling for a cease fire also intensified over the weekend as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza deepened and Israel sent troops in on the ground in what the prime minister called the war’s “second phase.”
The Gaza health ministry said Sunday that more than 8,000 Palestinians have been killed since Oct. 7, when Hamas slaughtered some 1,400 Israelis and kidnapped 229 others.
A White House official said Monday morning that the Biden administration was “taking multiple actions” to address what they called “the alarming rise” of antisemitic incidents at schools and colleges since Oct. 7. The Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice are working with campus, local and state law enforcement agencies, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity according to White House protocols.
Cornell’s president said in her statement that the administration will “work to ensure that the person or people who posted” the hateful messages “are punished to the full extent of the law.” She said the FBI had been notified about the incident.
Pollack acknowledged that “the virulence and destructiveness of antisemitism is real and deeply impacting our Jewish students, faculty and staff,” and said that the university is committed to “reinforce a culture of trust, respect and safety at Cornell.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James responded to the Cornell situation with her own post on X. “There is no space for antisemitism or violence of any kind,” James said. “Campuses must remain safe spaces for our students.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul is set to meet some students at Cornell for a roundtable discussion about the incident Monday morning.
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