Anti-Israel Ivy League elitists who tried to paralyze NYC revealed as they vow ‘we’ll do it again’
Ivy League graduates, an artist with millionaire parents and a woman honored by the Obama White House were among the hundreds of anti-Israel radicals who brought chaos to Manhattan commuters this week.
They also included a Fulbright scholar, multiple NYU graduate students, a filmmaker for HBO and Netflix — and out-of-town protesters who gave cops home addresses as far away as Georgia and Florida.
And after being arrested and released, the protesters were defiant on social media, with one gleefully tweeting photos highlighting her involvement and another boasting: “We’ll do it again.”
The protests Monday were carefully coordinated by at least six anti-Israel groups to cause maximum disruption, with blockades of traffic out of Manhattan on the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges and at the New Jersey-bound lanes of the Holland Tunnel.
NYPD and Port Authority Police Department cops made more than 300 arrests and issued desk appearance tickets for disorderly conduct charges — meaning they were released without bail and are due back in court later this year.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg could drop or downgrade charges, but his spokesman said they are still pending.
The Post has learned many of the protesters who were arrested come from privileged backgrounds and attended some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell and New York University.
They gave home addresses that included tony areas of Brooklyn such as Cobble Hill, Park Slope and Prospect Heights, sources told The Post.
Among the arrests were Naay, or Naye, Idriss, a 25-year-old Columbia graduate and NYU graduate student, who previously admitted writing “f**k” over the word Israel and “free Palestine” on a discarded Israeli mailbag when she was working in NYU’s Bobst Library mailroom.
She was fired, and sued to get her job back, claiming it was protected speech.
The day after the October 7 massacre of hundreds of innocent Israelis by Hamas terrorists, she addressed a rally in Times Square and called the murders “the beginning of our victory,” according to video recorded by Canary Mission, an organization which tracks antisemitism.
Idriss, of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, was far from the only NYU graduate student arrested.
Ilana Cruger-Zaken, 36, of South Salem, in Westchester, is a graduate student at NYU’s Center for Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement, studying Judeo-Neo-Aramaic dialects of northeastern Kurdistan.
The married mom celebrated being arrested, posting an image from the Manhattan Bridge protest on Instagram and adding: “And we’ll do it again.”
Also arrested was NYU law graduate Daniel Kim, 28, who works for the nonprofit Bronx Defenders as an attorney, and Yale graduate Lina Cohn, who appeared to have traveled from Jamaica Plain, Mass., to block Manhattan traffic and is a filmmaker whose work was praised by the New York Times.
Another out-of-town Ivy League protester was Trava Tam, 29, of Roswell, Georgia.
She is a population scientist for property firm Zillow who was a Fulbright Scholar in 2016 and has a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School — whose other graduates include former President Donald Trump.
Another Ivy League graduate issued a desk ticket was Azani Creeks, from Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, who was at the Harvard Divinity School, and now attacks works for anti-Wall Street group the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.
Many of the protesters had long association with trendy left-of-center causes, including Pratt Institute teacher Ann Holder, 66.
In 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Holder, a gender and sexuality teacher, participated in a “scholars strike” held at the downtown Brooklyn school, which asked students and faculty to revolt against “business as usual.”
Two years later, she bought a $1.2 million, two-bedroom, two-bath condo in the upscale Prospect Heights neighborhood.
The most high-profile arrestee appears to have been Sunita Viswanath, who was an adviser to New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ transition team and lauded as a White House “champion of change” by the Obama administration, earning a place as an official “White House author.”
Viswanath, 55, was arrested with her husband, Stephan Shaw, and said she spent 15 hours in custody before being released — then posted photographs of herself on X at the Brooklyn Bridge protest.
She lives in upscale Cobble Hill and has a second home on two acres in El Prado, Taos County, New Mexico, and has been a serial adviser on Hindu faith issues around the city, including to Adams’ transition team, and to public health authorities on COVID.
Viswanath, executive director and co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights, was named a “Champion of Change” by the White House in 2015.
“This was my small group, blocking traffic to Brooklyn Bridge yesterday morning!” Viswanath wrote Tuesday on X.
Viswanath identified herself as a Hindu Indian American and a “person of faith” when reached for comment Wednesday and said the protest was not antisemitic, adding that her husband is Jewish.
“For my husband and so, so many like him, the best way to be Jewish is to stand up for justice and peace and an end to the bombing right now,” she said.
Also boasting family property wealth was Eli Coplan, a 31-year-old artist who lives in a Park Slope rental in Brooklyn but whose family owns property in California and Colorado.
Coplan’s work has been featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in galleries in New York and Los Angeles.
His parents also own a nearly $4 million home in La Jolla, California, that comes with a spacious 51,00 square feet. They purchased the 1973 home for $1.825 million in the early 2000s through a trust, according to public record. They also have a home worth at least $1.7 million in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.
His mother, Debra Coplan, is a former board member of the ACLU, while his grandparents were involved in the civil rights movement and hosted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at their home in 1968, when Debra was a child.
Coplan confirmed his participation in shutting down NYC on Monday by posting a reel to his Instagram boasting about the feat.
The reel linked to a post that said protesters would “continue to take action every day until there is an immediate and permanent ceasefire, the blockade on Gaza is lifted, all Palestinian political prisoners are freed, Israel ends its occupation of the Palestinian territories, and the U.S. stops sending aid to Israel.”
Coplan, who is Jewish, also signed an open letter created by Jewish writers that condemned the “widespread narrative that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic.”
He was far from the only Jewish artist from Brooklyn to be arrested, with Nora Herzog, 27, among those with a disorderly conduct desk ticket.
Herzog is a nonbinary drag queen, who has used their account to condemn Israel’s actions, as well as a graduate assistant at NYU’s medicine school and is studying the herpes virus.
And another Brooklyn artist with NYU ties, filmmaker Ben Snyder, 43, who graduated from its film school and won a prestigious Tribeca Film Festival award in 2022 for Best Screenplay for his film “Allswell,” was arrested.
He has also worked for HBO as a producer for the show “Betty” and was a writer on Netflix’s “Grand Army.” His work has been featured at the Cannes, Aspen and Austin film festivals.
Both Herzog and Snyder declined to comment and referred The Post to a spokesperson who asked to be called only “Mon” and who said the protesters wanted “creative and direct action” to support the people of Gaza and the West Bank to “inspire” solidarity.
Commuters affected included one father who got out of his car and called the protester idiots before driving through them to get to his daughter in Brooklyn.
“The NYPD did not exactly go easy,” said Mon, who was not arrested, adding that arrestees spent up to 10 hours in custody and some suffered migraines.
