The case of the day is Gartenberg v. Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (S.D.N.Y. 2025). The Cooper Union is a small private college in New York City. The complaint, filed by several Jewish students, makes detailed allegations about the school’s unsatisfactory response to the October 7 massacre, especially when set up against the school’s responses to violence and discrimination against many other minority groups, and about the school’s failure to protect its Jewish students from what the judge called the “wave of campus antisemitism” that swept over the school and many other American colleges and universities. It alleges violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and claims under New York law. The key event was on October 25. Here is how the judge described the allegation:

At about 4:00 p.m. that day,the demonstrators stormed into the Foundation Building, shoving past the campus security guards standing watch. After first attempting to locate Cooper Union’s president, the mob descended on the building’s library, where a group of students wearing recognizably Jewish attire were sheltering behind locked doors. The demonstrators surrounded the library and proceeded to bang loudly on the library’s doors and on its floor-to-ceiling glass windows, shouting demands to be let in and continuing to direct anti-Israel slogans and waive a Palestinian flag at the Jewish students inside the library. During the roughly twenty-minute ordeal, Cooper Union’s administrators did nothing to disperse the protestors and instead directed law enforcement to stand down, even as the college’s president had just escaped the building through a back exit. None of the protestors subsequently faced any discipline.

Later, the judge noted, “[I]nstead of taking any action to disperse the crowd that was banging on the library windows, a Cooper Union administrator and a school librarian instead suggested that the Jewish students ‘hid[e] in the windowless upstairs portion of the library out of the demonstrators’ sight or escap[e] the library through the back exit,’ offers that the Jewish students declined.”

A dean later described the incident as a “peaceful gathering,” and when the president addressed it, she “did not acknowledge the library incident as one of antisemitic harassment, and instead ‘condemn[ed] discrimination of any kind, including antisemitism and Islamophobia.’”

Cooper Union moved to dismiss. The school’s position was that a lot of the speech the lawsuit cites—”long live the intifada,” or “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” for example—were just examples of ordinary political speech, not antisemitism. But although “the parties offer competing interpretations,” the judge wrote, “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.”

In the end, while the court did not rule in the students’ favor on every issue, it denied the motion to dismiss the Title VI claim. The most striking bit in the opinion was the judge’s take on the school administrator’s suggestion that the Jews should have hidden in the attic, so to speak:

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.

The deliberate yet measured reference to the Holocaust in the decision (issued February 5) resonated with images we saw a few days later, as Hamas released three emaciated Jewish Israeli hostages after forcing them to participate in one of its grotesque ceremonies. As the German ambassador to Israel wrote, it was “[a]lmost unbearable to see the emaciated hostages forced to give interviews to some Hamas ‘reporter.’”

Look, there is a lot of bad stuff going on now that has nothing to do with the new antisemitism, some of which I hope I’ll get to write about. But when we are faced with a powerful (though irregular or informal) government official giving a Nazi salute at a right-wing rally, and when a popular influencer with twice as many followers on social media as there are Jews on our planet declares that he is a Nazi, attacks the Jews, and hawks swastika t-shirts online, I’ll never apologize for focusing on the troubles facing this “smallest of peoples,” who really do need the support of people of good will from across the political divide.