Colleen McMahon, a federal judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, dismissed a civil rights claim made by two Columbia University janitors, who alleged that they were assaulted and detained during the April 2024 occupation of the school’s Hamilton Hall as part of an anti-Israel protest.
Mariano Torres and Lester Wilson, who are not Jewish, alleged that those who occupied the hall, the group People’s Forum, called them “Jew lover,” “Jew worker” and “Zionist” while preventing them from leaving the building.
Protesters repeatedly asked Torres, “What are you, a Jew lover?” and “Why are you defending them?” per the complaint.
Wilson alleged that protesters mocked him, saying, “You work for the Jews” and “You’re a Zionist.”
The judge granted the defendants’ motions to dismiss the plaintiff’s claims on Monday.
The court concluded that the complaint plausibly alleged that there was an agreement to occupy Hamilton Hall but not that it was a conspiracy with the purpose of depriving Jews, or perceived supporters of Jews, of civil rights.
“The purpose, and the only purpose, of the alleged conspiracy was, in plaintiffs’ own words, ‘to seize and hold Hamilton Hall until such time as Columbia acquiesced to CUAD’s anti-Zionist, anti-Israeli and antisemitic demands,” McMahon wrote, of Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
The judge wrote in the 39-page ruling that the janitors were taunted by protesters, because “they would not give in to the protesters’ demands that they cooperate with the plan to take over Hamilton Hall.”
The protesters “would oppose, forcefully if necessary, anyone, of any race, ethnicity or political persuasion, who tried to impede their effort to take over Hamilton Hall,” she wrote.
She added that the anti-Jewish slurs were “ugly statements” and that if protesters rammed the janitors with furniture, as alleged, then that conduct “was despicable, but the allegations do not admit of any inference that interfering with the civil rights of perceived Jews and their supporters was a goal of the conspiracy.”
In the ruling, she wrote that the anti-Jewish remarks were allegedly made by individual protesters, not by the group, and that protesters’ use of the term “intifada” fell into the category of “pure political speech,” not anti-Jewish speech.
The group’s demands were not necessarily antisemitic “given the wildly differing opinions on the subject of Israel’s policies in Gaza, even among Jews and Israelis,” the judge wrote.
The federal claims were dismissed with prejudice, but the state-law claims were dismissed without prejudice, meaning the plaintiffs can refile in the New York State Supreme Court.
The judge also denied a request for attorneys’ fees.
