Progressive Campus Caucus Targets Religious Jewish Prof and Evangelical Christian Provost

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/272354/progressive-campus-caucus-targets-religious-jewish-daniel-greenfield

It’s true in America. It’s true in New York, as this Armin Rosen investigation at The Tablet.

Michael Goldstein is a midlevel administrator and adjunct professor in the business department of Kingsborough Community College. For the past 10 months, he has been the target of a sustained campaign calling for his termination. In late May, as many as 1,500 flyers were distributed on the 16,000-student campus on the southern edge of Brooklyn calling for Goldstein, who is the son of the college’s late president, Leon Goldstein, to be fired. The notices featured examples of the “extreme racist, sexist, anti-Muslim Facebook screen shots of Michael Goldstein,” one of which happened to include an image of his 13-year-old daughter…

Between June 15 and Nov. 10, four articles on the website of the self-described communist Progressive Labor Party have referred to an organized campaign to have Goldstein dismissed from the college. “KCC Students and Workers Fight Racist Goldstein” the first article was headlined; one article, from August, claimed that the as-yet unfired Goldstein was “protected by a network of Zionists among the faculty.”

Months earlier, on Feb. 22, the words “fuck Trump Goldstein” and “kill Zionist entity” were scrawled on a photo of Goldstein’s late father that hung near his office. On Oct. 4, the same day as a college council meeting in which rising intrafaculty tensions on campus were discussed, nails were inserted into the tires of cars belonging to Jeffrey Lax, the head of the college’s business department, in which Goldstein teaches.

But it’s not just Jews that the “Progressive Labor Party” hates. Apparently they’re not too fond of evangelical Christians either.

Goldstein isn’t the only or highest-ranking Kingsborough staffer to be the subject of an aggressive campaign of denigration. In June, leaflets appeared at Kingsborough targeting Joanna Russell, the college’s newly arrived provost. (Claudia Schrader, Kingsborough’s president, took over the job at the beginning of this latest academic year.) The flyers had a picture of four coffins with crosses, set against a background of clip-art coffins that also had crosses on them. “Do you want these programs on this campus?” the flyer asks, listing “liberal arts programs” and the college’s women’s center, along with developmental English and various study-abroad and mentoring programs that Russell has allegedly endangered. The flyer also calls on professors to be paid “for their work as director of programs,” and implores Russell to “respect governance.”

Russell is seen by some faculty as a micromanager who is consolidating administration control over the college’s intellectual life. Others, including members of the Progressive Faculty Caucus, note her alleged membership in an evangelical church in Sheepshead Bay. Like Goldstein, Russell now has security officers posted outside of her office.

The original Know Nothings were lefties. (One of those history lessons that the Left doesn’t like.) Its modern counterparts, who hate every traditional religion except Islam, are too.

And then there’s the specter of anti-Semitism, the presence of which on the Kingsborough campus is difficult to totally discount. Lax and Goldstein are both observant Jews, as is the campus’ New Caucus-opposed faculty union rep. One of the articles about Goldstein refers to “a network of Zionists” arrayed against the forces of progress.

Next the progressives will be warning about the Elders of Zion.

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