Do you remember this incident which happened back in October 2023? A group of Jewish students were locked in a library to protect them from anti-Israel protesters who were outside chanting "Long live the Intifada" at them.

Jewish students at Cooper Union are in the library as protestors pound on the door.

Listen with sound on. pic.twitter.com/pwYRo5KA9X

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) October 25, 2023

After pounding on the door for a while the protesters moved to the glass windows and continued to harass the Jewish students inside.

Two identifiable Jewish students at @cooperunion are harassed at a pro Hamas rally. Police had to rescue the Jews from the library through an emergency exit.

It's good that the White House @PressSec said, "There is no credible evidence that this is happening in our country" pic.twitter.com/ozIkH1YHWE

— Joel M. Petlin (@Joelmpetlin) October 25, 2023

No one was harmed but both Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul condemned the protests.

State officials are in close communication with local law enforcement regarding protests on the Cooper Union campus tonight.

Antisemitism and all forms of hate and intimidation are unacceptable and have no place in New York State.

— Governor Kathy Hochul (@GovKathyHochul) October 26, 2023

A few months later, a group of 10 Jewish students sued the school.

A group of students have filed a lawsuit against Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art after a tense pro-Palestinian rally at the school last October...

The plaintiffs' attorney says the lawsuit is to force Cooper Union to comply with anti-discrimination law as well as their own policies.

"Their policies provide that they will have a safe environment that's non-discriminatory for their students, for all students, and Jewish students have a right to an education that's safe, not hostile and free from discrimination and harassment, and they're not getting that," attorney Ziporah Reich said.

Cooper Union tried to have the lawsuit dismissed but today a federal judge denied that request. The school had argued that the speech of the protesters was protected by the First Amendment because it was aimed at "Zionists" not Jews. Judge Cronan didn't buy it.

...this case can be resolved without opining on whether conduct or speech hostile to Zionism, itself a term subject to a considerable variety of interpretations, is necessarily antisemitic. Gartenberg’s Complaint, for instance, alleges that pro-Palestinian students defaced Cooper Union’s colonnade windows with signs that specifically referred to “Jews” in Israel as “settlers liv[ing] comfortably on our lands” and suggested that Hamas’s October 7 attacks were a mere “reaction” or “counterattack” to that “settler colonization.”  Understood in the light most favorable to Gartenberg, such speech on its face goes beyond mere criticism of Israeli government policy or of Zionist ideology, and instead sends a message that Jews as a class do not belong in Israel while justifying and encouraging violence against those Jews who do live there...

On October 25, 2023, for instance, pro-Palestinian students at Cooper Union chanted slogans like “[l]ong live the intifada,” “[r]esistance is justified,” and “[i]t is right to rebel.”  In addition, demonstrators chanted the phrase “[f]rom the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Although the parties offer competing interpretations of these slogans, when uttered just two weeks after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust in a manner that reasonably appears to celebrate and glorify that same violence, the Court agrees that such phrases support at least a plausible inference of animus towards Jews. 

Of course this doesn't mean that a jury will completely agree with the students bringing this lawsuit. They could decide that other interpretations are more reasonable. However, there's enough here to allow the case to proceed to a jury.

Ultimately Judge Cronan had some pretty harsh things to say about the defense's claims. [emphasis added]

Pushing back, Cooper Union faults the Jewish students for “gather[ing] in a prominent place in the library where they could be seen by the demonstrators,” and for refusing the suggestion to “hid[e] in the windowless upstairs portion of the library out of the demonstrators’ sight or escap[e] the library through the back exit,” The school also notes that as the mob of protestors approached the Foundation Building’s library, an administrator locked the library doors to keep the demonstrators out.

The Court is dismayed by Cooper Union’s suggestion that the Jewish students should have hidden upstairs or left the building, or that locking the library doors was enough to discharge its obligations under Title VI. These events took place in 2023—not 1943—and Title VI places responsibility on colleges and universities to protect their Jewish students from harassment, not on those students to hide themselves away in a proverbial attic or attempt to escape from a place they have a right to be. In sum, the physically threatening or humiliating conduct that the Complaint alleges Jewish students in the library experienced “is entirely outside the ambit of the free speech clause,” and was objectively severe...

Obviously this is a loss for Cooper Union but it's also going to send a signal to other colleges about their exposure to similar lawsuits if they don't control aggressive anti-Semitic behavior on campus. Hopefully this will stiffen the spines of a few college presidents.