‘Wild wild west atmosphere’: antisemitism on American campuses

“That, to me, was repulsive. As a father, that really got to me, that there’s a student that thinks antisemitism is normalised and treated differently.”

This was the response of US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona when asked in January about the rise in antisemitism on American college campuses. Since October 7, the Department of Education (DOE) has opened scores of anti-discrimination cases, the vast majority in response to charges of antisemitism, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination at federally funded campuses and school districts.

These cases involve many of the elite universities to which high-achieving Jewish students have long aspired, including six of the eight Ivy League colleges (two of these also have cases involving Islamophobia), Stanford, and MIT.

Elite universities have also been the centre of recent mass arrests over out-of-control pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests.

There have also been a number of legal cases independent of the DOE. All of this has led Alyza Lewin, president of the legal activist group Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, to characterise the situation as having “a wild wild west atmosphere”.

Just how wild is it? At the University of California Santa Barbara, the student body president Tessa Veskler, a child of Jews who fled the Soviet Union, was targeted with campus signs saying “you can run but you can’t hide Tessa Veksler”, multiple signs saying “Tessa Veksler Supports Genocide”, as well as signs declaring “Get these Zionist[s] out of office,” with others accusing her of being “racist” and “Zionist”. 

The complaint against American University in Washington, DC, says dormitory doors and posters of Jewish and Israeli students were vandalised with swastikas and threats, and that anti-Israel protests disrupted classes and blocked Jewish students’ access to dining halls, classrooms, and student spaces. 

In one case, an Israeli student was allegedly spat on by students and a flyer promoting his piano recital was vandalised with antisemitic graffiti, including swastikas and the words, “Death to the Zionists, Hitler was right.” Jewish students also say they faced taunts of “Zionist killer,” “Zionist pig” and “You have blood on your hands,” and were accused of being “responsible for genocide”.

In another case, a professor showed photos of pro-Palestinian protests that included a sign depicting a Star of David in a trash can and the words, “Keep the World Clean,” the same antisemitic image notoriously associated with Australian Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi.

Putting numbers to these cases, Anti-Defamation League and Jewish campus organisation Hillel International found that 73% of Jewish college students said they had experienced or witnessed antisemitism on campus last fall - up from 32% in 2021. It should not be overlooked that even 32% is a shockingly high number.

As a result, as reported in The Forward, many high school seniors are rethinking their college choices, “crossing dream schools off their lists and replacing them with colleges where they believe Jews are welcome”.

One high school senior had planned to apply to Middlebury College in Vermont but changed his mind because of pro-Palestinian activism there. His second choice was Cornell, which he dismissed after a student was arrested there for making death threats against Jews and a professor said he was “exhilarated” by the Hamas attacks.

Some Jewish high school students may be informed by the Anti-Defamation League’s “Campus Antisemitism Report Card”, which grades 85 colleges including those with the highest Jewish population and certain top universities. The ADL gave only two of them A grades: Elon University in North Carolina and Jewish-founded Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Thirteen universities, including Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton received a grade of F.

Some have taken issue with the report by the ADL, which has long been criticised as painting with too broad a brush, conflating legitimate advocacy for the Palestinian cause with antisemitism. However, the ADL’s identification of 3200 antisemitic incidents across the US in the three months following October 7, a whopping 336% increase over the year before, must be taken seriously.

The challenges on campus can cut both ways. Last week, the University of Southern California cancelled a valedictory speech by a Muslim student, citing security concerns. The student in question denounced the move as resulting from a “campaign of racial hatred”, with the Los Angeles Council on American-Islamic relations characterising it as “a cowardly decision [hidden] behind a disingenuous concern for ‘security’.” The university provost replied that tensions around the Gaza conflict had “escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at the commencement”.

The Students for Justice in Palestine organisation has faced bans and restrictions on a number of campuses. A struggle is underway to determine whether fliers that call the slaughter of October 7 “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” are expressing protected political speech or endorsing genocidal attacks on the Jewish people.

Either way, Jewish students and prospective students at a wide range of universities are deeply concerned and, in many cases, traverse the once welcoming campuses in fear.

Secretary Cardona envisions “a place where conversations about religious identity or difference of opinions could be handled respectfully and civilly”. And, despite the Secretary’s hope that he “wouldn’t want Jewish students to not feel comfortable expressing who they are, their feelings, even if it’s in disagreement with some other students on campus,” such views can seem like an idealistic pipedream in the post-October 7 era.

Efforts to improve the situation are underway but have so far have achieved little more than recommendations. A taskforce at Columbia University, for example,  concluded that “rules to shield them from discrimination have gone part way in helping Jewish students feel protected but often go unenforced”. Its report includes a number of recommendations still under review and yet to be implemented.

President Biden has said “we can’t stand by and stand silent [in the wake of antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents]. We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism. We must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia.” 

Unfortunately, denunciation is easy, certainly compared to delivering programs, actions, and resources of a proactive, preventative nature. Harder still will be restoring college campuses to the culture of inquiry, dialogue and respect that were their ideal and often their reality for many decades.

As University of Michigan student Lauren Haines, writing in The Forward, put it: “Doxxing, boycotting, and silencing our fellow students - whether pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, or both - erodes the fundamental nature of higher education… You don’t go to college to fight - you go to learn.”

Meanwhile, given the hostile atmosphere on so many campuses, Elon University, nestled in the beckoning pine forests of North Carolina, could be seeing a lot more applications from New York.

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