She attacked Israel and the NYPD, making her law school a target.

Each year, law school graduates choose a member of their class to give a speech, and this year they chose Ms. Mohammed, an activist dedicated to the Palestinian cause. Though her comments would later be presented as a thunderbolt of anti-Semitism, she began uncontroversially, talking about the pain and loss of Covid and how it shaped her cohort’s first semesters in law school.

She now looked to the public and saw “traffic lawyers, corporate lawyers, professors, librarians,” she said. “I see future lawyers who will defend tenants and not those who expropriate our communities from their homes.” In these instances, her tone was optimistic and celebratory rather than indignant, although there was a lot of outrage.

“Let’s not forget that Gaza was bombed just this week while the world watches,” she said at one point. “That brown and black men are being killed daily by the state at Rikers.” She praised CUNY as “one of the few legal institutions created to recognize that the law is a manifestation of white supremacy that continues to oppress and oppress people in this country and around the world.”

Coincidentally, much of her commentary fell under the umbrella of conventional left-wing rhetoric – the call to fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism – delivered with a zeal not unknown to young people and fighters. But it was the ferocity with which she denounced her denunciation of “Israeli settler colonialism” and CUNY’s collaboration with “the fascist NYPD” that particularly inflamed the political class, even though her own audience, including the dean of law school, admissible.

Ms. Mohammed’s comments went largely unnoticed until The New York Post featured her on the cover, more than two weeks after graduation on May 12, with the headline “Stark Raving Grad.” Jewish groups, Fox and various news outlets around the world stepped in and expressed their horror and disbelief. Elected officials followed. Among them was Ritchie Torres, the Democratic congressman from the Bronx who joined Republican lawmakers, including Senator Ted Cruz, in attacking the foreign policy positions of a young, impassioned individual who holds no political office or clear power. (“Imagine being so maddened by hatred of Israel as a Jewish state that you make the subject of your opening speech,” Mr. Torres wrote on Twitter last week. “Anti-Israel derangement syndrome at work.”)