Standing up to Campus Anti-Semitism

This article first appeared in New English Review.

“The century-long relationship between American Jews and the nation’s elite universities has rotted away. Now is the time for all of the good people involved—students, parents, donors—to get out, and fast.”

Our colleague, Jerry Gordon, forwarded this article by Leil Leibovitz on the topic of Jewish students in our universities, which was published in Tablet Magazine, a Jewish publication. Leibovitz contrasts his own experience as a Jewish immigrant with what universities have become in terms of how Jewish students are treated. He specifically addresses New York University, where he himself taught, and which is currently in the middle of a controversy over campus anti-Semitism. The article is long, but well worth the time. Many of the points raised by Leibovitz remind me of so much of what I have observed teaching part-time at the University of California at Irvine (1998-2016). To illustrate that, I have selected the below sentences from the article.

“Just how inhospitable that place has become was evident this month, when the university’s branch of Students for Justice in Palestine won the Presidential Service Award, one of the highest honors NYU bestows on members of its academic community. The decision shocked and angered many in NYU’s Jewish community, who noted that the group’s actions frequently veered into the violent and the anti-Semitic:” 

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) was co-founded by UC Berkeley professor, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian who got his higher education in the US-specifically at San Francisco State University, where he was a prominent and annoying activist. This is a man who in 2004, called for an “intifada” in the US. He has a long list of anti-Semitic statements on his resume. SJP itself is a brown-shirt organization with chapters on over 100 US campuses. Their specialty is intimidation and disruption of Jewish pro-Israel events. At UC Irvine, SJP is serving a two year suspension after disrupting such events in May 2016 and May 2017, the latter of which I was present and videotaped.

“American universities are openly breaking their bonds with the Jewish community by embracing active discrimination against Jewish students and rejecting their intellectual, emotional, and moral attachments to the values of equal human dignity, universal rights, critical inquiry, and rational thought.” 

In the face of all the disruption and intimidation of Jewish students, most university administrations have chosen to turn a blind eye rather that confront the issue head on and throw the bullies out on their ears. There is a simple reason: Most campus anti-semitism in the US, as is the case in Europe, is coming from Muslims as exhibited by the largely Muslim SJP, the various chapters of the Muslim Student Association (or Union, as it is called at UC Irvine) and their allies on campus, within the community and among left-wing faculty. It is all masked as a concern for human rights for the Palestinians, but what it really is is nothing more than Jew hatred, a Jew hatred that can never accept a Jewish state in the Muslim Middle East. (The Christian minorities are being, persecuted and driven out of the Middle East as we speak. Few Jews still reside in any other Middle Eastern country aside from Israel.)

UC Irvine administrators and chancellors as far as I can remember have pooh-poohed charges of campus anti-Semitism and still deny the problem exists. They point with pride to their own Olive Tree Initiative (OTI), whereby students of all religions participate on guided tours of Israel and the West Bank hearing both sides of the issue. The reality is, however, that the entire enterprise is weighed toward the Palestinian narrative. I am aware of at least four Jewish students at UCI and UCLA who joined SJP after going on a tour. The West Bank tour guides hired by OTI are themselves leaders of the International Solidarity Movement. In short, OTI is a fig leaf.