Cornell University is facing a storm of outrage after its student newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, published a professor’s op-ed accompanied by a shocking illustration — a bloodied Star of David defaced with Nazi “SS” lightning bolts drawn onto the back of a Palestinian person.

The image, which appeared alongside an article by Professor Karim-Aly Kassam, ignited immediate backlash from students, faculty, and Jewish advocacy groups who called it a grotesque act of antisemitism and Holocaust inversion. The newspaper quickly took down the graphic and later republished the piece without it, but the controversy has exposed growing concerns about the campus’s cultural climate.

“To me, it reflects the normalization of Holocaust inversion, both on the internet and now on Cornell’s campus,” said William Jacobson, a Cornell Law School professor and founder of Legal Insurrection, a conservative website. “This graphic is specifically inside a bloody Jewish star — no reflection of Israel at all. It clearly pursues the idea that Jews are the new Nazis. It’s obviously highly offensive.”

The “SS” insignia depicted in the image was the symbol of Adolf Hitler’s secret police, the Schutzstaffel — the organization responsible for mass atrocities during the Holocaust.

Kassam’s op-ed, titled “Thousand & One Eyes for An Eye,” accused Israel of seeking revenge in Gaza and equated its rhetoric toward Palestinians to that of Nazi Germany toward European Jews. “It is not unlike what the Nazis said about another peoples living in Europe to justify their genocide,” he wrote. The article was published just days after the second anniversary of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel.

Backlash poured in on social media, which decried the illustration as antisemitic propaganda. Under mounting pressure, Kassam issued a statement to The New York Post, saying, “I am deeply saddened to learn that this portion of the artwork has been interpreted by some as antisemitic. That was not my intention, and I have learned from this experience.”

An editor at The Cornell Daily Sun later defended Kassam in a column, arguing that the professor “did not imply that the state of Israel is equal to Nazi Germany,” but apologized for allowing the graphic to appear in the first place.

Jacobson, who has long criticized the campus for what he describes as growing hostility toward Jewish students, said the episode points to a broader issue. “If a professor feels comfortable sharing a graphic like this, and the Daily Sun initially felt comfortable running it, that reflects a very toxic campus culture,” he said. “The lesson here is not to censor people but to understand what’s happened on campus. It shines a light on a profound problem.”

The controversy comes as Cornell continues to grapple with allegations of discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students. Jacobson’s organization, the Equal Protection Project, is reportedly preparing a civil rights complaint on behalf of Oren Renard, an Israeli student who said he was pushed out of a class because of his national origin. Cornell’s Office of Civil Rights recently issued a finding of discrimination in that case — further evidence of a university struggling to confront deep-seated bias.

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