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Student Who Sued NYU for Anti-Semitism Empowered by New Executive Order

(New York Post) Adela Cojab Moadeb - When I first started at NYU, I was excited to go to a school that championed diversity and inclusion - until that diversity and inclusion applied to everyone except my community. After years of overt protests, boycotts, and direct aggression toward Jewish students from NYU's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the university honored the organization with the President's Service Award for "outstanding contribution to NYU life." Violent acts against students on the basis of their views are not only tolerated, but celebrated, and the concerns of Jewish students are not taken seriously. NYU's position stands in direct defiance of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which states, "If an institution knows or has reason to know about student-on-student harassment, Title VI requires that the school take immediate and effective action to eliminate the harassment." When I sued NYU for campus anti-Semitism, religion was not a protected class under civil rights law - at least until last week. The new executive order expands Title VI's existing protections to explicitly include discrimination against Jews, correcting a longtime gross injustice against Jewish students. The president's executive order should serve as a source of empowerment to ensure that Jewish students can proudly live on campuses without checking any part of their identities at the door. Anti-Semites have won when they are allowed to define where a Jew can and cannot feel comfortable. To that I say, never again. The writer is a Syrian-Lebanese, Mexican Jew who graduated from NYU in May 2019.
2019-12-16 00:00:00
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