US universities are fever swamps of antisemitism
For anyone who cared to listen, our young people were telling us that something is seriously wrong with American universities.
Last December, Adina Pinsker told The Wall Street Journal she had been forced to take indirect walking paths to her classes at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., to avoid harassment from students who hate her.
She was also forced to hide her religion, to tuck her Star of David necklace beneath her shirt. This on a campus grown hostile to Jewish people. “We have basically been shunned,” she said.
During four months in the spring of 2021, 16 American college students said they had been spit on for being Jewish, revealed a survey of more than 1,000 Jewish students on 160 campuses by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
Incidents of campus vandalism, threats and slurs against Jewish students tripled to 155 incidents in 2021 from 47 in 2014, according to the AntiDefamation League.
During an online discussion in December at Baruch College in New York City, a student wrote: “Death to Israel,” “Heil Hitler” and “You will be with God soon,” the ADL reported.
Then came October 7.
Hamas rained down more than 5,000 missiles on Israel. They broke through the border fence in the southern part of the country and slaughtered Jewish civilians and others nearby. In all, they murdered more than 1,300 people and injured another 3,300, according to the Jerusalem Post.
This was not a legitimate military action. It was genocide, the worst bloodletting against the historically persecuted Jewish people since the Holocaust.
One would have expected an outpouring of grief and sympathy from American universities at the atrocities. There was some of that.
But more pronounced was an indifference and even hostility to the suffering of the Jewish people. Student activists and groups condemned Israel while academics went to social media to draw attention to Israel’s past wrongs. By so doing, they implied Israel deserved the horrors inflicted on its innocents.
Some university student groups used the moment to celebrate the terrorism, depicting Hamas paragliders used by the men who killed 260 young adults at an outdoor music festival.
Let that sink in.
They celebrated the work of armed thugs who had just committed an atrocity of historic dimensions.
From Harvard to Columbia, from Northwestern to Michigan, from George Washington University to Georgetown, from the University of Virginia to Cal Berkeley came the statements from student organizations – dozens upon dozens of them – aligning themselves with the Palestinians.
At the University of Wisconsin, they gathered with the Palestinian diaspora and its Palestinian flags and chanted, “Glory to the martyrs!”
That’s “martyrs” as in the Hamas animals who lobbed hand grenades into a bomb shelter where young Israelis huddled.
Yale professor Zareena Grewal went online and wrote, “My heart is in my throat. Prayers for Palestinians. Israeli is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity #FreePalestine.”
At Harvard more than 30 “Palestinian Solidarity Groups” issued a statement saying, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
This statement so revolted J.J. Kimche, a Jewish doctoral student at
Harvard, that he went to The Wall Street Journal to respond:
“The authors and signatories of this statement, men and women with whom we share dormitories and libraries, have exposed themselves as worse than common antisemites. They are enthusiastic proponents of our slaughter, a vanguard of apologists for those who seek the extermination of the Jewish people.”
When the university did not push back against the student activists, Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president and U.S. Treasury secretary, wrote, “In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today.”
He added, “The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups’ statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel.”
None of this is lost on the Jewish people in North America.
“I’ve always struggled to understand how the Holocaust could happen,” tweeted Claudia Mendoza, co-chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council. “In 2023, I finally understand.”
The college community consumes a lot of airtime and a lot of ink decrying global and national threats, from climate change to systemic racism. October 7 is their mirror.
If and when they finally look into it, they will see their own house is on fire.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic.
Columnist Arizona Republic USA TODAY NETWORK
Student activists and groups condemned Israel while academics went to social media to draw attention to Israel’s past wrongs. By so doing, they implied Israel deserved the horrors inflicted on its innocents.