The ornate rotunda of Yale’s student center, named after the Jewish financier who co-founded the alternative investment management giant known as Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman, was recently taken over by far-left activists for an anti-Israel phone bank campaign. 

For seven days during the two weeks starting January 29 and February 4, nearly 100 Yale students brought in tables and set up a large phone campaign to pressure the New Haven area’s U.S. Congresswoman, Rosa DeLauro,  to support a ceasefire in Israel, according to the Yale Daily News. 

According to the News, the students participating in the event were affiliated with Yales4Palestine. The group is synonymous with Students for Justice in Palestine, an anti-Israel organization that has been banned at several universities for disruptive protests in the wake of October 7. 

The event was organized by a Yale graduate engineering student, Bugra Sahin. Using statements from the anti-Zionist group, Jewish Voice for Peace, the engineering student had drafted a script that student activists, after calling Ms. DeLauro’s office, repeatedly read over the phone to her receptionists. According to the News, Mr. Sahin’s script highlighted four demands, “a total and permanent ceasefire, allowing humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, an end to Israel’s siege and a halt to the U.S. sending and funding weapons used by the Israeli military.” 

The reliably liberal Ms. DeLauro, 80, who is married to President Clinton’s pollster, Stan Greenberg, has been in Congress for 33 years and is now chairwoman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. She has refrained from calling for a ceasefire, though she has joined the ranks of Democrats who have sought to appease progressives on the matter by openly denouncing the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. 

In her most recent statement on the conflict on December 21, Ms. DeLauro wrote that, “On October 7, Israel faced the most devastating terrorist attack in its history. I continue to stand with Israel in the wake of this horror and unequivocally support its right to defend itself and defeat Hamas.”

However, she added, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is allowing unacceptable loss of civilian lives and humanitarian and health crises that is producing growing hunger and starvation on his watch. That has to stop.”

By inundating her office with calls, Mr. Sahin told the News that he hoped to get the Congresswoman to “change her mind” and take a harsher stance against the Jewish state. 

The Schwarzman Center at Yale was established in 2015 after Mr. Schwarzman, the billionaire Jewish investor and a Yale graduate, gave the university $150 million. Yale renovated and repurposed its century-old Freshman Commons and Woolsey Hall, which it renamed for Mr. Schwarzman, 77. Yale was heavily criticized for accepting the gift, which was described in the New Republic as a tribute to Mr. Schwarzman’s “infamous edifice complex.” The financier is known for insisting that objects of his benefaction be renamed for him.

Shortly after the October 7 attacks, Blackstone gave $7 million to Israel. And lately, a number of Mr. Schwarzman’s namesake institutions have been the target of anti-Israel demonstrations.

In November, the New York Public Library, already facing cuts as a result of the city’s migrant crisis, paid roughly $75,000 to clean up the vandalism of the Schwarzman Pavilion located at the public library’s landmark Bryant Park branch. Demonstrators had covered a plaque with the Blackstone founder’s name with red hand prints, purportedly signaling their belief in his culpability for the actions of Israel. 

In a statement to the Sun, Mr. Sahin defended the use of the location, asserting that it was at the recommendation of Yale’s own administrators. 

“I wanted to table outside on Cross Campus but was advised due to the cold weather by Yale administration that the Rotunda in Schwarzman Center would be better,” Mr Sahin wrote to the Sun. 

He added that, “The decision wasn’t made based on Schwarzman’s personal politics or beliefs. It was simply logistical and a suggestion by university administration.”

Mr. Schwarzman did not immediately respond to the Sun’s request for comment, which was sent via email to Blackstone. 

The phone campaign is but the latest in a series of anti-Israel events at Yale, which have courted strong criticism. On February 16, the News reported that the Department of Education had opened a Title VI antisemitism investigation into the University over a November 6 incident on campus when Jewish students were barred from a lecture series featuring a slew of anti-Israel speakers. 

Days prior, students at the top-ranked and far-left Yale Law School demanded an Israeli soldier be uninvited from a campus event on the grounds that he would “make Black and Brown students feel physically and psychologically unsafe.” The law school went ahead with the event, for which it hired security.