Fighting Antisemitic Hate on College Campuses
Alliance for Integrity and Justice (AIJ)
RISING ANTISEMeTIC HATE ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES
While the Ivy League’s “Jewish quota” is a thing of the distant past, antisemitism on college campuses is a growing concern for the many Jewish students attending our nation’s top universities. Incidents of antisemitism have been on the rise, with nearly three out of four Jewish students experiencing some form of harassment for being Jewish.
College campuses are hotspots for a new and dangerous form of antisemitism, and administrators are ignoring this threat. What makes this form of antisemitism so insidious and dangerous is that unlike the hatred coming from neo-Nazis and the far-right, it is often masked by progressivism and disguised as “anti-Zionism.” Nevertheless, Jewish students of all backgrounds face the brunt of the hate. Jewish voices, which are in the minority on most campuses, are drowned out or silenced. Jewish students’ experiences and concerns are dismissed and sidelined, while perpetrators of blatant antisemitism are rarely disciplined.
At UC Berkeley, 14 student groups passed a law banning the participation of speakers who support Zionism. Jewish students, the majority of whom support Israel’s right to exist and feel some sort of connection to their homeland, are made to feel alienated, something any Jew with knowledge of our history can relate to. The exclusion of Jews and the restriction of free speech is not a step forward and leads to a culture that tolerates blatantly antisemitic acts such as the hateful graffiti “No Jew, Go Away” scrawled in a student building at UC Berkeley in 2023.
Things are so bad at Columbia University that a civil rights complaint was filed with the US Department of Education. The complaint cited a climate of antisemitic discrimination against Jewish students at a Holocaust remembrance event who were harassed by Students for Justice in Palestine calling for an intifada. Other Jewish and Israeli students have faced antisemitic vitriol and abuse from faculty and fellow students.
CUNY is perhaps the worst offender, with multiple complaints filed with the DOE over pervasive antisemitism at CUNY’s college campuses. Professors have upheld archaic antisemitic tropes while accusing Jewish students of benefiting from white privilege, a tactic aimed to silence the voices of the Jewish minority when they suffer from racial and ethnic violence. At Kingsborough Community College, one Jewish professor found swastikas on her door, while another was asked how many people she killed. The trope of Jews being bloodthirsty is not new, despite how liberal and progressive it might be painted – it has roots in the age-old Christian belief of Jews kidnapping gentile children and using their blood to bake matzah for Passover.
WHAT WE ARE DOING
The strategies used so far have not been working. Drastic, new, and intelligent measures must be taken to combat antisemitism on college campuses. Until then, campus administrators will continue to make empty statements condemning antisemitism while doing nothing of value to protect Jewish students in their institutions.
Alliance for Integrity and Justice (AIJ) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit whose mission is to combat antisemitism on college campuses using distinctive tactics that will force university authorities to take action against the pervasive antisemitism targeting the Jewish minority in their schools.
We’re reaching out to business owners and boards of directors from major corporations and asking them to sign pledges not to hire graduates from institutions that are breeding grounds for antisemitism. As more businesses uphold this blacklist, prospective students will become wary of applying to universities such as CUNY due to the potential of diminished employment options and the stigma of attending a school that foments antisemitism.
As enrollment declines, university directors will have no choice but to face the issue of the unrestricted antisemitism that has been left unchecked and disregarded under their watch.
While complaints to the DOE and social media posts condemning antisemitism have their place, we need a long-term strategy that will make college campuses a safe place for Jewish students in the long run and fix the issue of antisemitism in major educational institutions for good.
WHAT SCHOOLS MUST DO
Acknowledge the school’s history and apologize.
Many schools’ history of antisemitism is indisputable. Discrimination against Jews was standard practice for most of the 20thcentury.
Columbia University defended this practice by arguing that the school was exempt from New York State’s anti-discrimination laws. Columbia’s friendly relationship with the Nazi party in the 1930s is well documented. It hosted a Nazi ambassador and sponsored student exchanges with Nazi-controlled universities that hosted book burnings of texts written by Jewish authors. When class president Robert Burke protested Columbia’s cozy relationship with the Nazis, he was expelled.
Schools must publicly own up to and apologize for their past. The shame schools should feel over their ugly history is magnified by their refusal to acknowledge it and express remorse. Consequentially, any moral high ground individuals affiliated with these schools might try to take by criticizing Israel for denying visitors entry due to their political beliefs is hypocritical.
Improve the complaint review process and provide greater transparency.
Academic freedom and the First Amendment should be defended but must not be abused and wielded as a sword to silence others. Jewish and pro-Israeli students and speakers should not be silenced or intimidated in the classroom or on campus.
Schools must be more transparent about their internal systems for dealing with these kinds of violations, and its review process should advertise the steps the university will take if complaints are found to be credible. The reviewers must not be biased, and all complaints, without exception, should undergo a thorough review. Review processes that are merely for show only ensure the existing hostile environment persists.
Enforce school codes uniformly when violations take place.
Schools should adhere to their disciplinary policies whenever a school code is determined to be violated. There are numerous examples of administrators failing to follow official school policies and procedures, specifically regarding Jewish/pro-Israel groups.
Over the last several years, student members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have torn down fliers advertising events for pro-Israel groups, disrupted events involving invited Israeli guests, and demanded the expulsion of Jewish members who support Israel from SJP events with no consequences from the administration. SJP recently called for a boycott of the pro-Israel student group, Students Supporting Israel (SSI).
If a student or student organization violates school policies and no action is taken, the school should explicitly revise its code to clarify what the school considers a violation. There must be no double standards.
Terminate student organizations whose members engage in criminal activity.
Certain student organizations have targeted Jews and disrupted celebrations of Israel’s Independence by stealing microphones and flags. Student organizations whose members engage in criminal actions such as robbery and assault should be terminated.
Terminate faculty that openly endorse and call for the murder of civilians.
Academic freedom does not include incitement to violence, and common sense and basic decency demand that it should not consist of defending the murder of civilians. For the sake of their reputation as academic institutions, schools should immediately release faculty that engage in this kind of rhetoric.
Schools should create a board that reviews complaints about public statements made by faculty that endorse or justify terrorism. This commonly involves justifying or encouraging the murder of Israeli civilians through semantic recontextualization (e.g., claiming that murdering Israeli civilians constitutes “resistance” or that no Israeli could be considered a civilian due to the mandatory draft law).
Publicly reprimand faculty members who make antisemitic statements.
Free speech would not be compromised by acknowledging and calling out antisemitism on campus. Schools can openly recognize that some student groups on campus invoke antisemitism under the guise of criticizing Israel without impacting anyone’s civil rights. Thus, schools must clarify their views and exercise their freedom of speech by reprimanding faculty members who invoke antisemitic tropes.
Schools must provide a legitimate explanation for why they invite, honor, and hire antisemitic bigot
If a school earnestly believes its academic mission requires including hate speech, why are these “teaching moments” reserved exclusively for targeting Jews? If schools insist on broadening the spectrum of dialogue whereby academics and guest speakers promote vile prejudices, in principle, other groups must also be targeted. While we do not support this approach as it is morally repugnant, at least it would not employ a double standard. The fact that many schools create a supportive environment for hate speech against Jews, but no one else, inescapably suggests that they explicitly embrace antisemitism while pretending to stand against racism.
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