I am creating this thread as an off-shoot of the one on Claudine Gay’s Plagiarism as the subject seems to be taking over the thread. A lot of people have a lot of important things to say on this subject.
I am placing it in Great Debates because there already seems to be a pretty heated debate going on over there.
Let’s add some context with what’s going on at the University of Vermont, as reported by @DSeid. Which is truly the worst case I’ve seen discussed here.
In 2021, an unnamed University of Vermont teaching assistant allegedly targeted several Jewish students who expressed support for the Jewish state. The teaching assistant’s name and identifying information, including her social media posts, are redacted in the public version of the complaint disseminated to reporters. She threatened to lower the students’ grades, cyberbullied the students, and supported vandalism of the Israeli flag, according to the complaint.
“Serotonin rush of bullying Zionists on the public domain,” the teaching assistant tweeted in May 2021, according to a collection of social media posts included in the complaint.
“I get the indelible surge [sic] to cyber bully” Jewish students, the assistant wrote in an April 2021 tweet reacting to a student’s posts from a university Zionist group.
“Is it unethical for me, a TA, to not give zionists credit for participation??? i feel like its good and funny, -5 points for going on birthright in 2018, -10 for posting a pic with a tank in the Golan heights, -2 points just cuz i hate ur vibe in general [sic],” states another April 2021 tweet.
So to what extent has antisemitism on campus been a real issue? Is it widespread across universities? Is there a double standard in how universities treat harassment of Jews vs. other minority groups? Did Harvard president Claudine Gay and Penn President Elizabeth Magill deserve their comeuppance? What if anything should be done differently?
The tricky thing about anti-Semitism on college campuses - which are usually progressive places favorable to the ‘oppressed’ - is that it’s become so closely intertwined with who’s “privileged” or the “oppressor” and who’s not - often deliberately so.
When it’s Jews alone, few people would argue that anti-Semitism is bad - and most college campuses crack down on it appropriately. Unfortunately, Israel and Zionists are seen to be “privileged” or “oppressors,” which then muddles it up a lot. That’s why people like Gay were hesitant to call for blanket condemnation of “genocide of the Jews” because they couldn’t tell which was the more anti-oppressor message. If it meant genocide of the Jews as in “Let’s have a 2nd Holocaust,” of course Gay would have condemned it, but if it meant “Let’s see Palestine fight up against the oppressor, Israel,” then Gay might have been mum or even quietly approved. Gay’s questioners skillfully bound her up in that debate knot.
But yes, anti-Semitism is found on quite a few campuses. And like the examples in the OP post, there are some people who indeed hate Jews, period, but are cunning enough to dress it up as ‘anti-Zionism,’ or others who are too ill-informed or naive to recognize the difference.
I’d like to examine two of the categories of charges in that article separately:
attacks on Jews for expressions of Zionism.
attacks on Jews for being Jewish.
A lot of the attacks seem to be in the first category. That feels like a violation of students’ free speech rights. A student shouldn’t have their grade dropped because they support the state of Israel. And it’s similar to the free speech rights that some of those university presidents said they supported for students who made pro-Palestinian statements (and anti-Zionist statements.)
But there were also a lot of items mentioned in the second category. Physical assaults on the Hillel building, and when a student asked them to stop, asking that student if they were Jewish. Those are unabashed racism.
I think there is some truth to this, though it may run the risk of being an oversimplification. To be clear, I think Magill’s testimony was embarrassingly bad and she wasn’t doing all that well in the events leading up to it, either. There was a lot of pressure on her to resign before she even flubbed the testimony. What’s difficult for me to tell, however, is the extent to which allegations of unchecked anti-Semitism on campus are true. For example, if someone paints a swastika on the side of the building, and nobody saw them do it, what can the administration reasonably do to intervene? In my perfect world they would form some kind of Israel-Palestine alliance of students empowered to peaceably express their beliefs and change the university culture. This is probably what my university would have done twenty years ago. When 9/11 happened my first week of school, it could have been an absolute clusterfuck, but my university took steps to control the narrative. Students convened and discussed events. People on all sides of the discussion had their say.
I remember the tenor at the time being extremely anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war, such that students were calling Bush a fascist. One of our guest speakers stopped a kid on the street with his “BUSH IS A FASCIST” sign and said, look, I’ve lived under fascism, this is not fascism, if this is fascism you would be afraid to hold that sign. There needed to be experts there saying those things.
This is the kind of stuff I would look for in terms of university leadership.
I’m not sure if Ivies really have the will to do anything other than sweep it all under the rug. I already had a pretty dim view of them. It has not improved.
I would assume that anti-Semitism exists everywhere, including but not limited to college campuses. However, I do not agree that “genocide” (of anyone) has to do with fighting oppressors etc.—it sounds like straightforward Nazi stuff, unless I am missing something. (Genocide? Seriously? What happened to “Make love, not war”?)
Ergo that is a ridiculous interpretation. One cannot reasonably be “hesitant” to condemn mass slaughter and destruction.
I’m an old guy and haven’t been on a college campus in decades, but I have always assumed that the recent rise in anti-Jewish sentiment was due to an increase in middle eastern/Muslum student organaizations on campus compared to years ago. I recall tha there were Islamic student groups in my colllege days, but they were not very vocal back then and mostly kept to themselves.
I don’t see it as an overwheming rise in Nazi sentiment, although a portion of it may be due to white power americanism.
Middle Easterners/Muslims and Jews can be right-wing, too… that said, there certainly are Israel-Palestine alliances, like @Spice_Weasel describes, here and there, and even though the discussion is not always friendly or comfortable I assume anyone bothering to join such an alliance/discussion is not going to speak in favor of genociding anybody. But I do not keep tabs on such things.
But relatively few Israel opponents (on college campuses) say it that way. Rather, they use a slogan: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” that could be interpreted in the best-possible light or worst-possible light, depending on which side you’re on.
Favorable light: It merely means there should be an independent Palestinian nation, with boundaries from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Unfavorable light: It means all Israelis should be killed and Palestine takes their land.
That’s the sort of thing Gay was getting at. “It depends on the context” - when someone chants a slogan like that, is it calling for genocide of Jews or not? I’m not even a fan of Gay, but her answer was a fair one (against a deliberate trap question).
I don’t know if there is evidence to support this, but I would be zero percent surprised if most of these incidents of antisemitism were not from Arab folks but from overzealous white kids “standing up” for Palestinians.
This just has all the vibes of:
Palestinian student: I strongly object to the occupation of Palestine!
White student: paints swastika on campus building
My alma mater had a large Arabic population and a large Jewish population and somehow we all survived. I think because the dominant narrative from university administrators and other leadership was: this affects all of us. Let’s talk about how.
Personally, not seeing any instances of anything like the anti-Zionist “cyberbullying” promoted by the UVT teaching assistant quoted in the OP. Nor would that behavior be tolerated in a faculty member in any institution I know.
However, I think the quoted excerpt in the OP confusingly blurs antisemitism with anti-Zionism. The TA in question bragged of “cyberbullying” members of “a university Zionist group” for things like “going on birthright” and “posting a pic with a tank in the Golan heights”—i.e., expressing support for and identification with Israel, as a nation-state. Not for things like keeping kosher, going to shul, saying Hebrew prayers, or other acts that are specifically about being Jewish, irrespective of opinions on Zionism or Israel.
To be fair, as other posters have noted, there are indeed lots of critics of Israel whose anti-Zionism is at least partly motivated by antisemitism, and for all I know that unnamed TA may well be one of them. But, also to be fair, there are also lots of defenders of Israel who often unjustly and uncritically equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism in every instance.
So I guess we need a more specific definition of antisemitism before we’ll be able to assess how much it’s increased on college campuses recently. It’s certainly true that vocal anti-Zionism has hugely increased on college campuses recently, but there do exist some non-antisemitic motives for that response, related to the current suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.
True, and there also exists Jewish anti-Zionism. There are a lot of varying combinations of views on Israel and views on Judaism, and it’s not always easy to tell to what extent a particular viewpoint is motivated by what kind(s) of bigotry.
In that specific instance it sounds like the students/teachers were the ones blurring the distinction. The logic seemed to be, “You are a Jew, ergo you’re a Zionist, ergo bad.”
I’m not sure the quoted excerpt necessarily supports that interpretation (although I don’t think it explicitly disproves it, either).
The students targeted by that TA are described as from “a university Zionist group”, and the first sentence explicitly says that the TA allegedly “targeted several Jewish students who expressed support for the Jewish state”. That makes it sound as though it was the expression of support for Israel, rather than being Jewish per se, that was targeted for retaliation.
The Hillel itself also was targeted when, in fall of that year, a group of University of Vermont students threw stones at the building. “When one student whose window had been pelted called out asking the perpetrators to stop, one of the students responsible for the rock throwing shouted, ‘Are you Jewish?’” the complaint states.
Would we give the bullies a pass if an ethnically Turkish student was being harassed by people who disagreed with his country’s treatment of Kurds? What if he dared to do “disgusting Turk things” [/s] like cheer for the country’s national team or eat börek?
Should we harass Persian men at universities because of their country’s treatment of women?
Oh no, those uppity Jews support a Jewish state! That makes bullying them justified. In fact, bullying them counts as resisting an occupier! (I am not attributing these thoughts to @Kimstu but to the unnamed TA)
@Johnny_Bravo made an excellent post criticizing this attitude on the Left -
Yes, in that particular case the act seems to have been far more clearly linked to Judaism per se than to Zionist views.
And that incident is likewise an example of behavior that I personally haven’t encountered in academic institutions, and that no academic institution I know would tolerate for an instant.
Well, I don’t claim to know what the unnamed TA was thinking. It’s also possible that what she was thinking was more along the lines of “oh no, those Zionists support a Jewish state denying rights and territory to non-Jewish natives of the land who have just as much right to be there as they do.”
Which IMHO still would not justify or validate bullying them, but would admittedly be a significantly different take from the one you hypothesized.