Jewish students who were trapped in Cooper Union by protesters sue college over antisemitism
Ten Jewish students have filed a federal civil rights suit against The Cooper Union for allegedly failing to protect them and their classmates from antisemitism.
The complaint filed in Manhattan federal court Wednesday cites an Oct. 25, 2023 incident in which the students said feared for their lives while locked in the campus library as angry pro-Palestinian protesters marched nearby.
“Cooper Union has failed to adequately protect not just our clients but other Jewish students on campus in the face of pro-Hamas hate,” said Brooke Goldstein, founder of The Lawfare Project, whose group is representing the plaintiffs along with the law firm Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer.
“No student should be subjected to intimidation, fear or hatred when pursuing an education,” she said.
The suit claims Cooper Union — a private college in the East Village specializing in architecture, art, and engineering — failed to take measures to shield Jewish students from bigotry following Hamas’ Oct. 7 invasion of Israel, resulting in the slaughter of 1,200 Israeli and foreigners.
“This case is about the egregious and unaddressed rise in antisemitism at Cooper Union, which led to a group of Jewish students being locked in a campus library to shield them from an unruly mob of students that was calling for the destruction of Israel and worldwide violence against Jews,” the 70-page complaint said.
The suit claims that Cooper Union has sought to downplay the library incident, even though president Laura Sparks had a security officer stationed outside her office for the remainder of the fall semester.
The students later learned that city police officers offered to enter the building to intervene, but Sparks told them to “stand down,” according to the suit.
The withering legal complaint said that Cooper Union took no disciplinary action against the offending “perpetrators,” many of whom covered their faces.
Cooper Union declined comment on the lawsuit but referred The Post to its own article on what the NYPD said at the time.
NYPD’s Chief of Patrol John Chell told reporters no arrests were made because “there were no direct threats.”
Plainclothes officers were with the protesters at the library, Chell said.
The chief said the doors were closed but not “barricaded” — but acknowledged the tense situation.
“A school administrator thought it was prudent to close the doors and place private security as the protesters were coming down the stairs . . .For about roughly 10 minutes . . . [protestors] were banging on the doors of the library and banging on some transparent windows that you could see into the library,” Chell said.
The lawsuit insisted Cooper Union was negligent.
“The School has taken no action to communicate that misconduct directed at Jewish and pro-Israel students, including Plaintiffs, will not be tolerated. There has been no statement of condemnation,” the Jewish students said in the suit.
“Rather, the School’s course of action has been to bury its head in the sand, attempting to evade its legal obligations and commitments to its students.”
The suit claims Cooper Union’s negligence violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, state and city civil rights laws and other government laws, is a breach of contract with students and amounts to negligence.
Other plaintiffs include students Rebecca Gartenberg, Perie Hoffman, Jacob Khalili who testified before Congress about Jew hatred on campus, Gabriel Kret, Benjamin Meiner, Michelle Meiner, Meghan Notkin, Gila Rosenzweig and Anna Weisman.
The case against Cooper Union comes in the wake of several other lawsuits filed by The Lawfare Project against other universities, including Carnegie Mellon and Columbia, for allegedly failing to shield Jewish students from bigotry.
