Professor who held machete to NYP reporter's throat fired over anti-Israel posts

Professor Shellyne Rodriguez, who in May was filmed holding a machete to the throat of a New York Post reporter, has now been fired from her job at Cooper Union for anti-Israel posts on social media, the NYP reported on Sunday.

“Cooper Union has fired me because of a social media post I made about ‘Zionists,’” 47-year-old Rodriguez wrote in an email to students, according to the source, which was later shared on Instagram by the School’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter.

“This is fascism,” she wrote. “Y’all are learning about it in real-time.”

While the NYP was unable to confirm which of the many anti-Israel posts had led to Rodriguez’s termination, they made particular note of a post calling for landlords and businesses to cut ties with Israel. The post left critics accusing her of utilizing antisemitic tropes.

The SJP complained over the professor’s termination, claiming that firing her was “an intense escalation of repression” that “must be resisted.”

“The Cooper Union wrongfully terminated a valued educator who is indispensable to the community and the academic livelihood of students,” the group wrote in a letter to the administration defending her for speaking out against “genocide and settler-colonial violence.”

CUNY Law Professor Jeffrey Lax, who also co-founded ‘Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY,’ told the NYP: “Jewish students at Cooper Union are very relieved that they fired her. Her comments were really despicable.”

“Normally, I would say I commend the university for taking action against this professor but in this case, how can I possibly say that? She did something far worse before they hired her. I mean, she held a knife to a reporter’s neck,” Lax said. “They’re not to be commended, they should be ashamed of themselves.”

The machete incident

Leading up to the machete incident, Rodriguez reportedly cursed at a group of pro-life students handing out leaflets on campus. The NYP reported that when they questioned her on the incident, she yelled “Get the f***k away from my door, or I’m gonna chop you up with this machete!” Following this, she was filmed holding the machete to the reporter’s throat. 

Her actions led her to be terminated from multiple institutions and she was ordered by the court to complete therapy after accepting a plea to the charges of 'harassment and menacing,' according to reports.