NEW YORK — In the pages of a campus paper, Jewish college students in New York lamented Israeli children sleeping in shelters, debated alleged Israeli war crimes, discussed colonialism in the Middle East and criticized anti-Zionist Jews.

“Israel could have come to represent the fight for freedom, the struggle to exist,” one said. “But Israel won the war and in so doing she lost her ‘friends.’ Because she survived, she shall be punished.”

The students were not discussing the wars in Gaza or Iran, though: The year was 1969 and they were grappling with the aftermath of the Six Day War in The Flame, a Jewish newspaper at the City College of New York, part of the City University of New York (CUNY) public system.

The articles are housed in CUNY’s vast archives across its 26 campuses. A years-long archival project at CUNY is now making the material more easily accessible to the public and researchers, along with other lesser-known facets of New York Jewish history, from unused footage filmed for a groundbreaking documentary on American Hasidim to dated Yiddish humor and posters of champion Jewish boxers.

Until now, each campus had maintained its own database of archival materials; the new project will make the materials from all campuses searchable on one platform and digitize more than 70,000 items.

CUNY, the largest urban public university system in the US, is a sprawling network, with 247,000 students around the five boroughs.

The system has its roots in the Free Academy, a college established in 1847, and over the decades, the CUNY campuses amassed archival materials in 31 libraries around the city.

There had never been a “unified effort to look at what collections existed across all campuses,” though, said Natalie Milbrodt, a CUNY archivist leading the survey project.

In 2023, CUNY secured a 3-year grant from the Mellon Foundation to collate the archives across the campuses.

The project aims to determine the extent and condition of the archives, to unify the systems used to manage and provide public access to the collections, and to raise awareness about the materials and the history, Mildbrodt said.

Many of the materials relate to Jews, given Jews’ long history at CUNY.

The system, and the colleges that would become part of CUNY before its establishment, provided education to generations of Jewish New Yorkers, particularly immigrant Jews after World War II, when the GI Bill led to a surge in enrollment, according to a 2024 report on antisemitism at CUNY.

During........

© The Times of Israel