NY college ‘purged’ Jewish professors before Oct. 7: Lawsuit

A Queens College professor claims she was fired, not for budget cuts—but for being Jewish.

By World Israel News Staff

Queens College in New York City terminated the employment of Jewish professors at the school in May 2023, months before the antisemitic protests following the October 7th terror attacks swept the campus.

According to a lawsuit filed by former adjunct accounting professor Helen Schwalb, she and five other Jewish colleagues were unlawfully “purged” by the CUNY (City University of New York)-affiliated school.

At the time, the school claimed that the move was due to a drop in student enrollment and budgetary issues, but that justification was clearly false, Schwalb charged in the filing.

She noted that two classes she had been scheduled to teach were reassigned to a non-Jewish colleague who had less experience and lower performance ratings than she did.

Schwalb noted that her “classes were full” and that they were not ultimately eliminated from the school’s programs, which would have been the case had budgetary challenges been a true concern.

“The only remaining Jews in the [accounting] department are those with tenure who are in their 70s and 80s and will likely retire soon,” the New York Post reported Schwalb as saying in her lawsuit.

The lawsuit linked the alleged antisemitically motivated firing of Jewish professors to the intense antisemitic protests that erupted on CUNY’s campuses just months later.

In June 2024, the U.S. Department of Education found that CUNY had violated the rights of Jewish students by failing to rectify a hostile environment on campus for Jews and Israelis.

Anti-Israel demonstrators “publicly labeled me a genocide enabler simply because I called out the antisemitism of their protest,” a CUNY student said at a Congressional hearing about the school’s failure to stop antisemitic protests.

“All I ask is that Jewish students are treated with the same respect and dignity that any other student would be granted,” the student added.

Another student, who was told to stop wearing a Star of David necklace on campus for safety reasons, said that his experience on campus following the Hamas attack was “something of a nightmare.”

“I came to understand that my safety at school could not be guaranteed,” he said.

“This is not a one-off. The purging of Jews at CUNY has been purposeful, sickly methodical, and university-wide, from the highest levels down,” said Jeffrey Lax, a CUNY (Kingsborough Community College) professor and founder of the advocacy group Students, Alumni, and Faculty for Equality (SAFE).

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