(RNS) — Since this is the season of confession, let me confess to you a journalistic error that I made.
Last year, the Anti-Defamation League issued a “report card” on how colleges have been handling antisemitic incidents.
At my alma mater, SUNY Purchase, there were three reported antisemitic incidents. That was enough to warrant an “F” — a grade that it shared with such illustrious institutions of higher learning as Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, Stanford, Tufts and the University of Chicago, to name just a few.
At that time, I thought that this response was overheated.
I am no longer so sure about that.
In a recent conversation with a SUNY Purchase campus insider, this is what I heard:
“The situation on campus is worse than you think.”
On a subsequent Zoom call with Purchase alumni, we heard reports of antisemitic graffiti, vandalism, attempts to dismantle and/or defund Hillel, the use of “Zionist” as a slur, the willing participation and influence of faculty members and the curating of Jewish identity against Zionism, among other things. There has been at least one Title VI complaint. The situation is not only bad at SUNY Purchase but at other colleges in Westchester County, New York – one of American Jewry’s prime addresses.
The mall at SUNY Purchase in Purchase, N.Y. (Courtesy photo)
Add to that, ineffective responses from campus administration. About that antisemitic graffiti: It was scrawled at a campus housing unit. A campus administrator said: “Well, it was only chalk.” I wonder: Had it been racist graffiti or homophobic graffiti scrawled in chalk, would her response have been as nonchalant – or even, flippant?
You know the answer to that rhetorical question.
Several things have become abundantly clear about what Gil Troy rightly describes as the “academic intifada.”
First, there is the “free speech” argument: “Yes, we might not like what student protesters are saying, but they have the right to say it.”
Free speech: yes. Hate speech: no. There is no right to intimidate Jews, just as there would be no right to intimidate students of other groups.
Second: This is no longer a debate about Zionism and Israel (if it ever was).
Decades ago, hometown bullies called me a “Christ killer.”
Today, it’s “Zionist.”
It is just a cooler way of saying what you are really thinking: “Jew.”
Or, they are saying that you can be part of our ideological “club,” as long as you disavow Zionism.
Sorry: The overwhelming majority of Jews in the world have expressed sympathy for Zionism and Israel. Don’t curate our Jewish identity for us, please. That is antisemitism.
Third: Some students have gone beyond supporting Palestinians and profess their support for Hamas — an international Manson gang with antisemitism written right into its charter, a terrorist group that has been deemed as such by the U.S. government.
But it gets worse. Faculty members are touting pro-Hamas positions as well.
Consider that faculty members at a SUNY school are actually employees of the state of New York — state employees who are embracing the actions of a U.S.-designated terrorist group.
It gets bigger.
Several weeks ago, the noted pollster Frank Luntz convened a focus group of 18 Jewish college students from campuses all over the United States.
This is how those students described being Jewish on their campuses:
- “Terrifying.”
- “I am constantly walking on eggshells.”
- “I have friends who have been spat on.”
- “I have been called a kike and a baby killer.”
- “I have heard my fellow students chanting: ‘Hitler didn’t finish the job!’”
A student at Harvard reported that people with megaphones charged into an economics lecture, disrupting the lecture because the teacher is a “Zionist,” i.e., Jewish. They screamed: “If you stay seated, you are complicit in genocide!” Israeli students have been attacked.
What is even worse: A Harvard Divinity School student led some of the chants.
This is now part of the culture at Harvard Divinity School. A Harvard University student group holds an annual Israeli Apartheid Week. The Religion and Public Life program at the divinity school sponsors anti-Israel events — many of which occurred after Oct. 7.
A divinity student says:
I wear my keffiyeh every Thursday for Keffiyeh Thursdays. I bring up Israel/Palestine in my classes. I talk about it with friends, and I post on social media. … What happens at Harvard can be a huge precedent for other schools to follow.
Some of these students are candidates for Christian ministry. Within several years, they will be serving mainstream churches.
And, worse: Just days ago, a group of men attacked a student at the University of Michigan, who asked if he was Jewish.
Let us put all this into an even larger context.
According to a new study by researchers at the Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, during the 2023-2024 academic year, around 33% of non-Jewish college students embraced patterns of ideas hostile to Jews or Israel.
Among its findings: 15% of students surveyed were hostile to Israel, with many believing, for example, that Israel has no right to exist. Nearly 25% of non-Jewish students said they did not want to be friends with people who support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, which has essentially ostracized all their Jewish peers.
I go back in time to Berlin in 1933. When they burned books at Humboldt University, it was not the SS that did that. It was the students and the faculty who consigned the books to the flames.
A Nazi book burning in Berlin’s Opernplatz on May 11, 1933. (Photo by Georg Pahl/German Federal Archive/Creative Commons)
Today’s situation is a direct descendant of that madness. We never expected that universities would surrender themselves to the forces of nihilism.
But here is something that is better than we might have expected.
Let me go back to the focus group.
Every student in that discussion said that because of what they have experienced on campus, they would be more likely to lead a Jewish life as an adult.
It is a small solace. I would hope that something higher and deeper than Jew-hatred would propel people toward living a Jewish life.
There will be no easy fix for these antisemitic attitudes, mouthed by America’s supposed intellectual class. They are the most current manifestation and morphing of classic Jew hatred. They hardly require a war in Gaza for them to fester.
But there is a clear task before the Jewish community, and that is to sensitize campus administrators to what is going on and to ask them for their unfettered support — the same support that they would give to any other identity group on campus.
It simply cannot be the case, to quote the British author, that “Jews don’t count.”
In this coming year, let us make sure that every Jew counts.
