How to Fight Anti-Semitism on Campus

Advice for today’s Jewish college students: build and affirm, don’t plead and apologize.

Bari Weiss for Mosaic

During the fall of 2005—my sophomore year at Columbia—I took a lecture course on the history of the Middle East taught by a then untenured professor named Joseph Massad. One of my classmates, whom I’d met the previous year in a freshman literature seminar, was a Californian and a genuine Valley girl—naturally blonde and thin, but without the attendant ditziness. On one of my frequent weekend forays downtown, I ran into her in the subway. She had gotten to know me fairly well in that small freshman seminar, but now she confessed she had a question. You’re a reasonable, good person, she said. So how can you be a Zionist?

Her question was entirely sincere. The farthest thing from an activist or rabble-rouser, she was simply curious how I, certainly no obvious racist, could support the last bastion of white, racist colonialism in the Middle East—which was what she was now learning about Israel. We certainly heard nothing from Massad himself to suggest that, contrary to the infamous 1975 resolution of the UN General Assembly, Zionism was not racism. Nor did we encounter any text to that effect. Our one assigned book on the Jewish state was Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? by the French Marxist scholar Maxime Rodinson. Suffice it to say that the question mark in the title was superfluous.

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Princeton Is 'Quiet Ivy' No More as Raucous Israel Debate Roils Campus

Logan Sander for The Jewish Daily Forward

Princeton University has long been known as the “conservative Ivy.” It’s a reference that encompasses not just the school’s centrist political image when compared with Ivy League universities like Harvard or Brown, but also its bucolic atmosphere and generally quiescent student body.

But Princeton’s cultivated image of ivory tower calm seemed to vanish like a daguerreotype from another era recently, when student activists succeeded in putting the question of divestment from Israel up for a vote before the entire student body. With breathtaking speed, students from both sides of the issue began accusing each other of tearing down campaign posters, misrepresenting information and making offensive social media posts. Charges of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and hatred of Arabs also flew over social media.

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Anti-Semitism Goes to School

Anti-Semitism on American college campuses is rising—and worsening. Where does it come from, and can it be stopped?

By Ruth Wisse for Mosaic

“I never dreamed that it could come to this!”

In February, a Jewish college student was hospitalized after being punched in the face at a pro-Palestinian demonstration on a campus in upstate New York. His family has insisted on maintaining the boy’s privacy, but other such incidents, some caught on camera, include a male student punched in the face at Temple University, a female student at Ohio University harassed for defending Israel, and a male student at Cornell threatened physically for protesting anti-Israel propaganda. On three successive days last summer, the Boston police had to protect a student rally for Israel from pro-Palestinian mobs shouting “Jews back to Birkenau!” At the University of California-Irvine, this year’s Israel Independence Day festivities were blocked and shouted down by anti-Israel demonstrators. Every year, some 200 campuses now host a multiday hate-the-Jews fest, its malignancy encapsulated in its title: “Israel Apartheid Week.”

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Stanford Student Slams 'Anti-Semitic' Question About Jewish Faith

Molly Horwitz Objects to Group's Quiz on Israel Divestment

By Drew Himmelstein for The Jewish Daily Forward

(j weekly via JTA) — A junior at Stanford University who is running for the student senate says she faced anti-Semitic questioning from a student group whose endorsement she was seeking.

During a March 13 interview in front of eight members of the university’s Students of Color Coalition, Molly Horwitz, 21, alleges that the lead interviewer asked, “Given your strong Jewish identity, how would you vote on divestment?”

“SOCC is a pretty major influential group on campus,” said Miriam Pollock, Horwitz’s friend and campaign manager. “Their endorsement is the most influential.”

To secure the interview, the Paraguay-born Horwitz had submitted a written application to the student group in which she discussed reconciling her identity as both a Latina and a Jew. As she later recounted to Stanford campus newspapers, the Anti-Defamation League and Stanford officials, she felt the question about her Jewish identity was over the line.

“It is not OK that they brought my Jewish identity into this and implied it might impact my decision-making ability,” Horwitz said in an email to the J. weekly. “I interpreted the question as anti-Semitic.”

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