Trump Backer and Former Partner Donates Millions to Jewish Studies at Ivy League School Plagued By Anti-Semitism
“From openly anti-Semitic professors to swastika graffiti, the campus can be a hard place for Jews."
10.28.2016
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Earlier in the year it was reported that “two events at Brown University... have unsettled Jewish students. First, a lecture having nothing to do with Israel was called off after students petitioned the lecturer to refuse to participate in any event co-sponsored by Hillel, as the lecture was to have been. Then anti-Semitic and homophobic graffiti appeared in a residence hall that includes a Jewish fraternity and a coed fraternity that is home to gay and lesbian students.”
Throughout the year at Brown, AMCHA Initiative, a group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism on campus, reported that students said,
“Other student groups were not willing to work with me because of my leadership roles in campus Jewish organizations. That was neither the first nor the last time that I would be ostracized this way... My fellow activists tend to dismiss the anti-Semitism that students like me experience regularly on campus. They don’t acknowledge the swastikas that I see carved into bathroom stalls, scrawled across walls or left on chalkboards."
Another Brown student noted,
“From openly anti-Semitic professors to swastika graffiti, the campus can be a hard place for Jews, and is certainly a hard place for Zionist Jews. The hype is true: anti-Zionism is alive and well… SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine, a terrorism-supporting campus organization] consistently facilitates anti-Semitism.”
In the face of that, Elie Hirschfeld, a prominent backer of Donald Trump and former Trump business partner, announced Thursday a $3.5 million donation to renovate Brown’s Judaic Studies Building. Hirschfeld is a prominent real estate developer who graduated from Brown University, and is President of Hirschfeld Properties, owner and developer of properties worth several billion dollars in NYC, who partnered with Trump on numerous projects, and famously rented his Hamptons mansion for two summers to Hillary and Bill Clinton.
Hirschfeld is also an ardent Zionist, and he vowed that the donation would go to expand the study of Jewish history, literature, language, politics and religions, with a special focus on “the history and culture of the State of Israel and its place in the Middle East.” Take that, SJP.
Brown University’s Judaic Studies Building has been renamed the “Hirschfeld House.”
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