Up the Hudson 75 miles in Poughkeepsie, anti-Israel advocacy has bled into anti-Semitism at Vassar College with far too little objection by the school administration.
The odious BDS movement to boycott Israeli commerce, disinvest from Israeli companies and impose economic sanctions on the country has gained traction on campus.
Cloaked as a protest of Israeli relations with Palestinians, the movement ultimately attacks the Jewish state's right to exist and targets it, alone among all nations of the world, for punishment as a human rights violator. Therein lies anti-Semitism.
The fever led eight of Vassar's academic departments to sponsor a talk by a raving crackpot by the name of Jasbir Puar, associate professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers and master of using impenetrable language as faux intellectualism.
She lost us with the title of her remarks at Vassar, "Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters," as well as with her opening: "This lecture theorizes oscillating relations between disciplinary, pre-emptive, and increasingly prehensive forms of power that shape human and non-human materialities in Palestine."
But Puar moved beyond jargon by describing Israel as engaged in the "maiming and stunting of population" and, worse, by airing the idea that Israeli forces are harvesting organs from the bodies of dead Palestinians.
She also blessed "armed resistance in Palestine," a term that would cover the knifings Palestinians have inflicted on Israelis over the past few months and that have required Israeli authorities to use force against attackers.
Puar's hosts were entitled to invite her, and she was entitled to speak. Vassar President Catharine Hill made clear that freedom of expression must prevail. Missing though was a full-throated condemnation of Puar's libelous characterization of Israel and Israelis.
Merely calling Puar's talk "objectionable," was the mark of a cowed academic on a campus where Students for Justice in Palestine sells shirts with the picture of a PLO hijacker from the 1970s who now says ISIS is a "Zionist, American organization."
More bracingly, Vassar's board chairman, William Plapinger, told the Daily News: "The president and administration of Vassar College most certainly do not support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, and will not do so in the future."
Hill must stand taller.