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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Boycott, divestment and sanctions: what the term means and why you should care

by Lizzie Zakaim for FreshInkForTeens.com

The room grew tense as the speaker’s audience became increasingly disrespectful. Ishmael Khaldi, the first Bedouin diplomat in Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, came to speak at a Hillel event at Rutgers University in 2010. He came to talk in a fair and diplomatic fashion about life in Israel for Arabs and Israelis, but his speech was sabotaged by supporters of BDS (the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement).

“A lot of BDS and anti-Israel students came and ruined our event,” said Liran Kapoano, a Rutgers graduate and now director of the Center for Israel Engagement (CIE) at the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey in Paramus. They got there early, sat in the front row and were “talking and hissing” throughout his speech. When it came time for Q&A they bombarded the speaker with “angry statements” and accusations. They were a disturbance to the event and ruined the experience for everyone else attending. No one got a chance to ask anything productive. “It’s the idea of uncivil discourse. People can’t sit comfortably in a room without feeling intimidated,” Kapoano said during an interview in his federation office.

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Why Small Campus Jewish Communities Are the Best

by Miranda Cooper, newvoices.org

When applying to colleges, I gave barely any thought to Jewish life on campus. This was not because I didn’t care about being engaged with a Jewish community; on the contrary, between leading my Temple Youth Group, attending regional NFTY events, working as a teaching assistant at a religious school, and moving up the ranks at a URJ camp, I was very attached to my various Reform Jewish commitments throughout high school, and wanted to continue this involvement in college. But having grown up in Pittsburgh, where you can walk down the main thoroughfare in Squirrel Hill and pass four shuls, a JCC, a yeshiva, and your friend’s Bubbe, it just never occurred to me that I might find myself in a place where I would actively have to seek out Jewish life. So unlike some of my friends at Williams College, for whom a strong Jewish presence on campus was a major factor in their college decisions, I had no idea that any one college might have a “better” Jewish community than another.

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Who Owns the Holocaust?

Op-ed by Evan Goldstein for newvoices.org

I've got this list. On it, I jot down the names of authors I mean to read when I have the time, and at the top of this list is James Baldwin. Knowing little about him, I somewhat absent-mindedly opened a 1967 essay Baldwin wrote in the New York Times Magazine. I was speechless:

    "It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,000,000 by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots…it is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew…one does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows that it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is."

There is so much to be said, and at the same time, no words that feel worthy of being spoken, after encountering Baldwin’s brilliance. He speaks for himself, and to reduce his unapologetically true witness to an analytical datum is intellectual malpractice. Baldwin is braver than most. But I think it is time for American Jews to give everyone permission to speak as truly as James Baldwin about our history. It is time, in short, to let the Holocaust be history, which does not mean forgetting so much as remembering the past honestly as past. It is, to be sure, part of our history (among others’), but it must be history nonetheless, not an a-historical symbol of radical evil that we claim to own and deploy against those who, like Baldwin, question the politics of Jewish identity.

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