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Anti-Semitic Trolls Disrupt Jewish University's Gathering On Zoom

Anti-Semitic trolls invaded a large video chat of Jewish university students on Monday, posting vile memes and messages in the latest incident of bigoted “Zoombombing,” the practice of disrupting meetings held on Zoom, a video conferencing tool that has surged in popularity as Americans shelter in place during the coronavirus pandemic.

About 150 students at New York City’s Yeshiva University, one of the country’s most prominent Jewish higher education institutions, logged into Zoom on Monday evening to watch the school’s president, Dr. Ari Berman, give a speech about Passover, the major religious holiday that starts next week. Like other schools and colleges across the country, Yeshiva University closed its campus last month as the coronavirus crisis worsened, hosting classes and other events online instead.

But a few minutes into the president’s speech, a dozen or so accounts not affiliated with the school joined the Zoom meeting and quickly started posting hateful messages with tropes popular among neo-Nazis.

“They were bombing the chat with the usual nasty stuff,” Elazar Abrahams, a Yeshiva University sophomore, recounted to HuffPost via direct message. “Death threats, Holocaust references, ‘dirty jews,’ etc.”

Abrahams shared screenshots of the messages with HuffPost. They include images of the anti-Semitic “Happy Merchant” meme; another meme stating that the Holocaust, the well-documented genocide of 6 million Jews during World War II, “never happened”; and other hateful chats including “hail hitler” and “IMMA GAS YOU ALL.”

The university “locked the chat ASAP and attempted to kick out all of those accounts but it didn’t seem like they got rid of all of them,” Abrahams recalled.

The president, meanwhile, ignored the disruption and “calmly continued his speech to the end,” a decision Abrahams thought was the “right move.”

But Abrahams, an English major from Brooklyn, said he still found the whole...

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