Baruch College Receives $75K Donation for Antisemitism Research

The Antisemitism Studies Laboratory at Baruch College, a new initiative by the Wasserman Jewish Studies Center to study the rise of “contemporary antisemitism,” has received a $75,000 gift from the AddressHate nonprofit organization, the school announced on Thursday.

Founded in April amid a global surge in antisemitic incidents not seen since World War II, the Antisemitism Studies Lab will study, among other things, how antisemitism is fostered on social media. It has raised nearly $500,000 to date, a figure which Baruch College says is indicative of strong support for its mission.

“The environment for Jewish students and communities — in New York and around the world — has changed dramatically in the digital age,” AddressHate founder Joshua Laterman said on Thursday in a statement. “Baruch College has been a leader in taking this reality seriously, not only by studying antisemitism as a historical and social phenomenon, but by examining its dynamic in this fast evolving era of new media.”

He added, “Our investment in the Antisemitism Studies Lab and the Wasserman Jewish Studies Center is part of our effort to break the code of hate before it breaks us.”

Baruch College is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system.

CUNY Chancellor Felix V. Matos Rodriguez thanked Laterman, saying, “This gift will help our faculty and students analyze the dynamics and effects of digital hate with rigor, and, equally important, translate that scholarship into practical ways to strengthen campus safety, intellectual discourse, and cross community understanding. That’s what an education at Baruch College is all about.”

Founded in 1919, Baruch College in many ways stands as a tribute to the success of Jewish assimilation in America. Its namesake, Bernard Baruch served as an adviser to US President Woodrow Wilson and led the War Industries Board during World War I. Baruch was also a close friend of Winston Churchill, who faced down Hitler alone while waiting for US assistance to stop the Nazi leader’s aggression in the lead up to and early years of World War II.

The CUNY system is the alma mater of many other Jews whose scientific and cultural achievements helped create the “American Century.” That list includes vaccine developer Jonas Salk (City College), comedian and actor Jerry Seinfeld (Queens College), and Irving Kristol (City College) — whose political commentary played a key role in shaping the US conservative movement, in part by excluding antisemitic elements of the political right.

However, in recent years CUNY has been a key player in the campus antisemitism crisis.

In 2025, a professor told The Algemeiner it contains elements that are “virtually Judenrein,” and in 2022, Jewish students said they were threatened with strangulation and pressured to say that Jews are racially white people who cannot, and have not, experienced oppression.

“I witnessed a Jewish student get told by the professor in front of our whole class to get her whiteness in check,” a Jewish student and witness to the events told The Algemeiner, speaking anonymously due to fears of retaliation. “The professor basically said, you can’t be a part of this kind of conversation because you’re white and you don’t understand oppression.”

Last year, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), which represents over 30,000 CUNY staff and faculty, passed a resolution which falsely accused Israel of war crimes and other affronts to humanity, including “genocide” and “apartheid,” and called for the union to divest its pension plan of holdings linked to “Israeli companies and Israeli government bonds no later than the end of January 2025.”

That was not the first controversial resolution passed by the CUNY faculty union. In 2021, during a previous conflict between Israel and Hamas, it voted to approve a defaming statement which accused Israel of “ongoing settler colonial violence” and demanded the university “divest from all companies that aid in Israeli colonization, occupation, and war crimes.” Doing so set off a cascade of events, including a mass resignation of faculty from the union, the founding of new campus Jewish civil rights groups, and a major — ultimately unsuccessful — lawsuit which aimed to abolish compulsory public sector union membership.

In November, a City College graduate student disrupted an interfaith event by exploding into a prolonged rant in which he called for imposing sharia law on Americans, defended amputating the limbs of misdemeanor level criminals and the wealthy, and denigrated a Jewish co-panelist, Baruch College professor Ilya Bratman.

“I came here to this event not knowing that I would be sitting next to a Zionist, and this is something I’m not going to accept. My people are being killed right now in Gaza,” the student, Abdullah Mady, who is also purported to be a local imam, bellowed before challenging the religious bonafides of Muslim students in the audience. “If you’re a Muslim, out of strength and dignity, I ask you to exit this room immediately.”

Mady uttered other pronouncements drawn from the jihadist tradition of radical Islam.

“I’m talking about the elite, the filthy rich, the ones that continue to steal from people as we speak today. Those are the ones that deserve their tips to be cut off,” Mady said. “Sharia … stands against the oppressor. When sharia is implemented, pornography — gone. Alcohol industry — gone. Gambling system — gone. Interest is gone, which is what they use to enslave you.”

Widely criticized for not appearing to combat antisemitism before it became a system wide conflagration, Rodriguez told the US Congress in June that “we are committed to constant vigilance against antisemitism.” He also announced a robust policy agenda which includes a climate survey, an enhanced system for reporting hate crimes, and new training programs on antisemitism prevention and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.