Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Brooklyn College Political Science Department Signs on as Sponsor of BDS Event

The political science faculty at Brooklyn College reportedly will be an official co-sponsor for an event in support of the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement.

The Feb. 7 event will feature Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the BDS movement, and Judith Butler, an academic who openly speaks sympathetically about Hamas and Hezbollah, according to the New York Daily News, which wrote an Op-Ed piece decrying the event. Barghouti has compared Israelis to Nazis, according to the newspaper.

A representative from the college, however, said the event does not demonstrate that the department endorses the BDS movement, which advocates the boycott of Israeli products, but that the “department’s support is simply for providing a forum for discussion and debate about the topic. Nothing else is implied.”

The primary host of the event is the Brooklyn College Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that says it is aimed at “helping end Israeli apartheid and the illegal occupation of Palestine.”

The Jewish Community Relations Council of New York strongly condemned the college’s decision to lend its name to the event, writing to JTA that “while we vigorously defend academic freedom, we believe that these freedoms do not extend to faculty and academic bodies exploiting their association with the university to enhance their biased and hateful agenda.”

The JCRC called on the political science department to remove its name from event.

Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz has referred to the BDS movement as one of the most “immoral, illegal and despicable concepts around academia today.”

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.