In the wake of an anti-Israel speech at the recent commencement of the CUNY Law School, the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists is calling on law firms to possibly avoid hiring CUNY graduates for their affiliation with the school. 

The  speech delivered at the City University of New York Law School commencement on May 12  is drawing condemnations from Jews and gentiles alike for the speaker’s antisemitic tirade that was recently disclosed on video.

The action by the Jewish Lawyers and Jurists appears, though, to be the first reaction from within the bar suggesting that it is prepared to take action. The speaker was chosen by her classmates to deliver the address.

“A clear message has been given to Jewish students, you as a people, a race and a religion hold beliefs that are not welcome at CUNY,” the president of the AAJLJ, Robert Garson, wrote in a letter obtained by the Sun. “We would urge members of the AAJLJ to think twice before hiring a CUNY School of Law graduate.”

The speaker, Fatima Mousa Mohammad, claimed that the legal profession that she and her colleagues are entering is “a manifestation of white supremacy” and one of many “systems of oppression to feed an empire with a ravenous appetite for destruction and violence.”

Shortly afterward in the speech, she praised her alma mater for issuing a defense of the anti-Israel “boycott, divestment, and sanction movement.”  

“Israel continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshipers, murdering the old, the young, attacking even funerals and graveyards, as it encourages lynch mobs to target Palestinian homes and businesses as it imprisons its children,” Ms. Mohammad told the crowd to applause. 

In a phone interview, Mr. Garson told the Sun that CUNY is fomenting antisemitic hatred through its actions. “Jews and Jewish students have made a massive contribution to the law in the United States and yet one of the places they feel most at risk is on university campuses and especially law school campuses,” Mr. Garson said. 

“This should have been the happiest day of their lives, graduating from law school. Instead, they were subjected to invective and filth,” added Mr. Garson, who is an attorney for, among other clients, The New York Sun. 

Many other Jewish groups have spoken out as well. The Jewish Community Relations Council called the speech “incendiary anti-Israel propaganda.” The Anti-Defamation League said it was “appalled to see such an egregious display of hostility toward ‘Zionists’ (which is how many Jews see themselves) and Israel in CUNY Law’s commencement address.”

Ms. Mohammad also launched invectives about the school not sufficiently supporting students, claiming that CUNY is “an institution that continues to fail us, that continues to train and cooperate with the fascist New York police, the military, that continues to train Israeli Defense Forces soldiers to carry out that same violence globally.”

The commencement address was delivered on May 12, but the story did not make its way into the press until recently because the school had removed the video from YouTube. 

One CUNY professor, Jeffrey Lax, took to the opinion pages of the New York Post in early April to decry his school as “America’s most anti-semitic university.” In his opinion piece, Mr. Lax describes the systemic replacement of Jews on campus, in tenured faculty roles, senior leadership positions, and even the student body. 

Mr. Lax notes that the chancellor of CUNY, Felix Rodriguez, hired a former leader of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Saly Abd Alla, to run the school’s diversity initiatives. CAIR has long advocated for the BDS movement and the end of the state of Israel. 

Many schools have been dealing with similar antisemitic sentiments in recent years. For years, New York University was under special scrutiny from the Department of Education for “extreme anti-Semitism on the NYU campus which has created an intolerable and unlawful hostile atmosphere for Jewish students.”

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This story has been revised and updated from the bulldog.