A Jewish man from Israel who is attending Columbia University in New York City has filed a complaint against the school, alleging violation of President Donald Trump’s executive order forbidding discrimination against Jews in U.S. institutes of higher education.
The filing is the “the first legal action since [President] Trump’s executive order that asserts a university is in violation of Title VI for discrimination against Jews,” the student’s lawyer told Fox News on Tuesday:
In the complaint, Jonathan Karten, a senior at Columbia University, alleges he was subjected to anti-Semitism on campus. It was filed last Tuesday, about one week after President Trump signed an executive order targeting anti-Semitism on college campuses.
The order broadens the federal government’s definition of anti-Semitism to include the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition, which can include criticism of Israel, and instructed it to be used in enforcing laws against discrimination on college campuses under Title VI.
Under the order, the Department of Education could withhold funding from schools that it finds in violation of Title VI.
“We drafted and filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which is, to my knowledge, the first action of its kind since Trump’s executive order,” Karten’s attorney, Brooke Goldstein, told Fox News.
Goldstein is also the executive director of The Lawfare Project, a Jewish civil rights advocacy group that offers legal assistance to members of the Jewish community who have been mistreated because of their faith, according to Fox News.
Goldstein said Karten, who is 23, “has been ridiculed and embarrassed because of his religion and his national identity” by members of the group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), who have called him “a Zionist pig.”
“The redacted complaint obtained by Fox News outlined examples of alleged anti-Semitism, including by a professor at the university,” Fox News reported, adding that in April of this year, Karten was involved in an event for the Columbia chapter of Students Supporting Israel during which he was verbally assaulted by a Columbia professor of Arabic literature.
“Don’t believe a word he is saying,” the professor said of Karten. “He is Mossad” — the name of Israel’s national intelligence agency.
“Jonathan felt ridiculed and embarrassed due to someone in authority publicly targeting him, accusing him of being a spy for a foreign government because of his religion and national identity,” the complaint said.
Goldstein also cited the comments made by modern Arab politics and intellectual history Professor Joseph Massad.
Massad said:
The only thing standing in its way is the ongoing Palestinian resistance to Israeli settler colonialism and racism that continues inside Israel and Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza; the ongoing Marches of Return in Gaza; and the armed resistance of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades to Israeli invasions in Gaza.
“The Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades is the military wing of Hamas, which is a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization [FTO],” the complaint said.
“Izz al-Din al-Qassam has killed more than 650 civilians. It is also directly responsible for the kidnapping and brutal murder of Jonathan’s uncle, Sharone Edri,” according to the complaint.
The Jerusalem Post also reported on the complaint:
Karten told the Jerusalem Post that he is “not proud to say that over the past several years studying at Columbia, I have learned to become far too comfortable with anti-Israel sentiment, anti-Israel bias that often bleeds into antisemitism, a bias that has become all too normalized.”
Karten said this hit close to home, as it was “the very same brigade that kidnapped and murdered my dear uncle, Sharon Edri, as well as countless other citizens. I understood that I could not remain silent anymore while my campus became a breeding ground for lies and escalating discrimination… It was the wake-up call I think we all needed, enough is enough.”
Sharon Edri had been kidnapped and murdered in 1996 by members of a Hamas military wing cell, which was also responsible for murdering at least 10 other Israelis and wounding 49 in attacks that same year.
Lori Tucker, an attorney and Campus Civil Rights Project director at The Lawfare Project, said in the Post report that Karten and many Jews and Israelis on the campus have been “subjected to a continuous stream of antisemitic and anti-Israeli comments.” She said that “examples include being called a murderer, a Nazi, an agent of the Mossad.”
Tucker said:
The Columbia administration, despite having knowledge of many of the aforementioned activities, has refused to take any meaningful action to protect these students and re-mediate the hostile environment that presently exists on campus for members of the Jewish and Israeli communities.
“It is our hope that the filing of this complaint will result in the Columbia administration taking concrete steps to end the discrimination currently experienced by its Jewish and Israeli communities,” stated Tucker.
Follow Penny Starr on Twitter.