In the Six-second video In the video, pro-Palestinian protesters are heard chanting and banging on the closed doors of the library at Cooper Union, a top school for art, architecture and engineering in New York City. Inside, a small group of Jewish students looked on nervously.
Then the clip ends. It’s the briefest snapshot of a frightening moment at the school of fewer than 1,000 students in Manhattan’s East Village.
But within a few hours, photos of the October 25 encounter had spread globally on social media. The pro-Palestinian demonstrators dispersed after just a few minutes, and no one was hurt or arrested, but the story seems to get more serious the further it goes. The widely circulated posts falsely claimed that the library had been barricaded to protect the students inside from an angry mob, and that police were afraid to intervene.
The Cooper Union protests quickly became a symbol, for some, of the rise of anti-Semitism on American college campuses during the war between Israel and Hamas. The Cooper Union, which is usually low-profile, was mentioned repeatedly in a GOP presidential debate.
Now, amid questions from Congress about how universities handle anti-Semitism, Cooper Union University is one of more than a dozen colleges under federal investigation after complaints of discrimination.
With campus rhetoric under intense public scrutiny, the episode in the library and its aftermath show how partisans can repurpose a brief moment, devoid of context or nuance, in the service of broader political discourse during a war in which information matters. a weapon.
“Off-campus groups have a great incentive to use these protests as a weapon,” said Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism at Hostos Community College in the Bronx. But the dangers of campus activity are now becoming more fraught. “What 20 or 30 years ago might have been an accident that no one would have discovered unless it actually existed, is now an accident that can be universalized and be a life-changing experience.”
The Cooper Union has a proud tradition of activism. Abraham Lincoln gained momentum in his presidential campaign with an anti-slavery speech there in 1860. In 2013, students occupied the college president’s office for 65 days to protest a plan to charge tuition at the school, which had always been free.
But like many colleges across the country, the school has struggled to respond to the war between Israel and Hamas in a way that satisfies a deeply divided student body.
After the October 7 attacks, Laura Sparks, president of the Cooper Union, posted a letter expressing outrage at Hamas’s “violent and deadly terrorist attacks on the Israeli people.” But as the death toll in Gaza rose, some students felt the school did not do enough to acknowledge Palestinian civilian deaths or the broader context of the war.
Among them was Mathieu Magloire Wilson, a 21-year-old art student who had just spent five months as an exchange student in Jerusalem.
A New Jersey printmaker and president of the school’s Black Student Union began printing and distributing small books containing articles about conditions in the Palestinian territories.
Soon, students on both sides of the conflict began placing posters and pictures of Palestinian or Israeli flags around campus. Many were taken down.
By October 25, the day of the library meeting, the climate on campus was tense.
At 1 p.m. that day, about 70 students left the classroom as part of a national pro-Palestinian student strike, forming a semicircle outside the building chanting. About 20 pro-Israel demonstrators lined up between the pro-Palestinian demonstrators and the school.
Three hours later, about 20 pro-Palestinian demonstrators entered inside — past security guards who asked them to stop, the video shows — to make demands, including calling on the college to cease fire and end the exchange program with Israel. Directly to the college president on the seventh floor. Police said Ms Sparks locked her door, but told police she did not feel threatened and allowed the protest to continue.
While the protest continued upstairs, some pro-Israel protesters went into the library, according to a college official who reviewed security footage.
About an hour later, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators came downstairs and reached the library on the ground floor. The security guard closed the large gray doors and stood outside.
In interviews, protesters said they didn’t know who was inside when they got to the doors, and were just angry at being turned away. They knocked on doors in time to their repeated chant, “Free, free Palestine.”
“This was in no way an attack on Jewish people, Judaism, Jewish students or faculty,” Mr. Magloire-Wilson said in an interview. He said that the demonstrators consider themselves defending the Palestinian people.
But inside the library the scene was different. The students were clearly worried about the knocking on doors. A six-second video was then recorded.
Several pro-Palestinian protesters and at least one Jewish student said in interviews that they believed the doors were locked. But the school later said security footage showed they were not.
Two minutes later, the demonstrators moved to a glass wall next to the library. Only then, they said, did they notice some Jewish opposition protesters inside. For about seven minutes, they held up posters, banged cardboard tubes and chanted, the school said.
A video clip showed that two students inside the library sat at a table inches away from the glass. Another student can be heard saying: “Hey, let’s take a picture.”
There is nervous laughter, as well as anxiety.
“This is not peaceful,” says a young woman. Someone asks if the police are there.
After the protesters left, the library doors remained closed for 20 minutes, not to protect anyone, the school said, but to minimize disruption to the people who study and work there. The police were there the whole time and said there was no reason to intervene. “At no point did they scream that they wanted to kill people,” Carlos Nieves, assistant commissioner of the police department, later said.
But within minutes, the campus violence took on a character of its own, engaging students in an intense national debate about free speech and anti-Semitism on campus.
Jake Novak, a pro-Israel media personality with thousands of followers, posted the video, which went viral on the social media platform X.
“BREAKING NOW: My sources tell me that several Jewish @cooperunion students are currently detained in the school library while a pro-Hamas march outside the Cooper Union building learned that Jews were afraid and sitting in the library, then brought the protest inside and besieged books after the event was already over.
He tagged major media outlets to get their attention.
Each post seemed to add more false details: that the Jewish students escaped through a secret tunnel, for example, or hid in the attic.
His photo and Mr Magloire Wilson’s name were published in a social media post accusing him of “orchestrating the mob attack” against Jewish students. His social media accounts were soon filled with racist insults and threats. Someone sent him a picture of a noose. He said he was afraid someone would hurt him, and worried about his future.
“The unfortunate thing about this is that it’s happening on such a large scale, this system of questioning and forcing students and young people into this horrific situation,” he said.
The day after the protest, supporters of the Jewish students held a press conference demanding Ms. Sparks’ resignation.
The student who filmed the six-second video, Taylor Roslyn Lint, was interviewed on Fox News. She said that although she was not normally threatened by pro-Palestinian protests, she felt threatened “when chants calling for the killing of Jews were chanted at me by my fellow students.”
(During the protest outside the school, students chanted various slogans, including the disputed phrase, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” but denied they were calling for violence.)
Zipporah Reich, litigation director at the Lawfare Project, a charitable legal organization, declined requests to interview Ms. Lent and other Jewish students she was representing in a potential civil suit against the school. She said her clients were the obvious victims, details disputed by the school and police.
Disagreements among students have become fodder for a growing number of organizations, most of them right-leaning, that advocate political behavior they don’t support on campuses, said Amy Binder, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who researches student activism.
“It’s incredibly divisive,” she said.
At Cooper Union University, this incident led to a decline in trust among students on campus. An internal review of the events is ongoing, spokeswoman Kim Newman said. “There is no tolerance here for discrimination, harassment or intimidation of any kind,” she said.
Ed Shanahan Contributed to reports.
The recent protest inside The Cooper Union, sparked by the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, has garnered widespread attention and sparked heated debate. The demonstration, which went viral on social media, highlighted the deep-rooted divisions and impassioned emotions surrounding the conflict. As tensions continue to simmer, the protest serves as a poignant reminder of the impact of international conflicts on local communities and the complex dynamics at play. This event has sparked a broader conversation about the role of activism and advocacy in addressing global issues and the challenges of promoting dialogue and understanding in the face of deep-seated conflict.