The City University of New York (CUNY), which has been mired in a series of antisemitism scandals in recent years, hired last week Professor Marc Lamont Hill, who was let go as a CNN commentator in 2018 over controversial remarks about Israel.
The 44-year-old Hill, who previously held endowed chair at Temple University in Philadelphia, was appointed as a “presidential professor” of urban education at CUNY’s Graduate Center in Manhattan, JNS reported.
The Graduate Center’s website called Hill as a “radical educator” who “explores issues of race, education, citizenship and state violence in the United States and Middle East.”
In 2018, Hill was fired by CNN following a speech in which he called for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
“We cannot endorse a narrow politics of respectability that shames Palestinians for resisting, for refusing to do nothing in the face of state violence and ethnic cleansing,” he stated.
Hill also praised notorious antisemite Louis Farrakhan following a meeting with the Nation of Islam leader in 2016.
“Been blessed to spend the last day with Minister Louis Farrakhan,” he said at the time. “An amazing time of learning, listening, laughing, and even head-nodding to music. God is Great.”
The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) denounced CUNY’s hiring of Hill, describing it as “further proof of the school’s ongoing disregard for the well-being of its Jewish students.”
The abhorrent decision by @CUNY to hire Marc Lamont Hill, a professor who was fired as a CNN commentator in 2018 over antisemitic remarks, is further proof of the school’s ongoing disregard for the well-being of its Jewish students.https://t.co/H3wzsYRWaD
— Combat Antisemitism Movement (@CombatASemitism) August 28, 2023
This past May, CUNY faced strong backlash for the antisemitic remarks of a speaker at a law school commencement ceremony.
In her speech, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) activist Fatima Mousa Mohammed said, “I want to celebrate CUNY Law as one of the few, if not the only, law school to make a public statement defending the right of its students to organize and speak out against Israeli settler colonialism. That this is the law school that passed and endorsed BDS on a student and faculty level, recognizing that absent a critical imperialism settler colonialism lens, our work and this school’s mission statement is void of value. That as 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, as it continues its project of settler colonialism, expelling Palestinians from their homes, carrying [out] the ongoing Nakba, that our silence is no longer acceptable.”
Mohammed further urged graduates to join “the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism, and Zionism around the world.”
