Nutty NYC professor that held machete to Post reporter’s neck fired from Cooper Union over anti-Israel rants
She already has a machete — now she’s gotten the ax.
Shellyne Rodriguez, the nutty professor caught on camera holding the blade to a Post reporter’s neck in May has been fired from her latest teaching gig at Cooper Union for anti-Israel screeds, The Post has learned.
“Cooper Union has fired me because of a social media post I made about ‘Zionists,’” Rodriguez, 47, wrote in an email to students a week after the spring semester kicked off.
Her Jan. 23 email was shared the next day on Instagram by the Cooper Union Students for Justice in Palestine.
“This is fascism,” she wrote. “Y’all are learning about it in real time.”
In her own Instagram post, Rodriguez said she was fired over “public comments about ‘Zionists.'”
A spokeswoman for the college said it does not comment on personnel matters but Rodriguez is no longer listed as an adjunct on Cooper Union’s faculty page.
It is not clear which posts or comments got her canned but in January Rodriguez participated in a CUNY for Palestine panel and encouraged protesting landlords and business people with ties to Israel. Critics said she spewed antisemitic tropes.
On Instagram, Rodriguez posted a flyer promoting a pro-Israel event that was edited with cockroaches covering it, according to screenshots obtained by The Post.
One of the participants in the event was former Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr. “Look at this dirty f—ing roach former bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. a Zionist lapdog,” she wrote in the caption.
The pro-Palestinian student group slammed her firing as “an intense escalation of repression” that “must be resisted.”
“The Cooper Union wrongfully terminated a valued educator who is indispensable to the community and the academic livelihood of students,” the group wrote in a letter to the administration defending her for speaking out against “genocide and settler-colonial violence.”
Others found her firing good riddance.
“Jewish students at Cooper Union are very relieved that they fired her,” said Jeffrey Lax, a CUNY law professor and co-founder of Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY, which advocates for Jewish students discriminated against or harassed on campus. “Her comments were really despicable,” he said, referring to the CUNY panel.
“Normally, I would say I commend the university for taking action against this professor but in this case, how can I possibly say that? She did something far worse before they hired her. I mean, she held a knife to a reporter’s neck,” Lax said. “They’re not to be commended, they should be ashamed of themselves.”
The firing comes about three months after Jewish students at Cooper Union were forced to barricade themselves inside the elite university’s library, as pro-Palestinian protesters blew past security and aggressively pounded on the building’s doors.
Rodriguez made headlines in May 2023, when she went viral for cursing out a group of pro-life students handing out information about abortion at CUNY’s Hunter College, where she was teaching art at the time.
When The Post visited Rodriguez at her Bronx apartment to seek comment, she flipped.
“Get the f–k away from my door, or I’m gonna chop you up with this machete!” she yelled before accosting the scribe. She then followed the reporter and a photographer out to the street, wildly swinging the weapon. The unhinged assault was caught on video.
Hunter sacked her the same day. Rodriguez also taught some classes at the School of Visual Arts in Chelsea, though she wasn’t teaching there at the time of the incident.
After a review, she was fired from there, too.
In the attack on the reporter, she pleaded guilty to harassment and menacing, according to the Bronx District Attorney’s Office. Under the terms of a conditional plea agreement, she must complete a therapy program and, if successful, can withdraw the misdemeanor plea and will be sentenced on the violation to a conditional discharge, according to the DA’s office.
Rodriguez began teaching a sculpture class at Cooper Union just four months after the incident at the start of the fall semester in September, according to a schedule from the Cooper Union School of Art.
Rodriguez helped organized “f–k police” protests which led to mass arrests in 2020, The Post reported at the time.
Rodriguez didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.
