I’m not sure why you think it likely that institutions are currently “ignoring” the issue of antisemitism. I can’t speak to what UVermont administrators were thinking back in 2021, but nowadays it seems pretty clear that charges of antisemitism on campus are a huge issue, and that the actions of individuals and institutions are being scrutinized extremely closely, both externally by, e.g., news media and donors, and internally by administrators, faculty and students.
There may be differences of opinion as to exactly what qualifies as antisemitic expression and how severe the problem of antisemitism is at a particular institution, but I think any college administrator right now would have to be on sabbatical in a cave on Mars in order to be able to believe that antisemitism doesn’t “really count as a problem” overall.
Honestly meh. I am thinking over a slightly broader time frame than the past couple of weeks, more than one news cycle.
Some backdrop to the trend and the responses before the recent surge in hate directed at both Jewish and Arab students (and newfound attention to it):
UVM wouldn’t be ignoring any report of any hate speech right now (especially after the shooting on their campus of visiting Arab students), but news cycles rise and fall.
Well… I think on the one hand we saw very clearly during the Trump administration that the surge in overt white supremacism was unsurprisingly accompanied by a surge in many forms of bigoted expression, including antisemitism. And it’s undeniable, as I’ve often said, that criticism of Israel’s actions is often at least partly motivated by, and/or used as a cloak for, antisemitic bias.
On the other hand, the article you linked seems to be sporadically unclear on how or whether it is distinguishing between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. At one point the author offers the following as an example of an antisemitic incident:
While I think it’s totally inexcusable to ram any nonviolent counterprotestors with shopping carts or anything else, I think the inference being drawn there is strongly dependent on the assumption that “anti-Israel” = “antisemitic”.
Then again, at a later point the article notes:
But then:
This seems to be again uncritically conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism. The BDS movement, AFAICT, is not directed against Jews per se or against Jewish “cultural background”, but instead against the Israeli state’s “political actions”, which the article a little while ago seemed to be saying is a legitimate (and not intrinsically antisemitic) viewpoint.
I get the overall point the author is making about the distinctions between antisemitism and anti-Zionism sometimes becoming very blurry in practice. But I think he’s letting that blurriness take over his interpretation of campus antisemitism, to the point that it’s hard to tell whether or where he draws any consistent line at all between (a) opposing advocacy of Israeli policy and (b) hating Jews.
Agreed that there is a fuzzy Venn diagram with pure anti-Zionism (or even anti current Israeli policies) and purely Jew hate and overlapping groups. My sense is that there is a lot more conflation of anti-Zionism generalizing into Jews as privileged oppressors and broader Jewish trope acceptance than you might have the sense of. And that lots of Jew hate with very thin veneers is ignored due to the thin veneer. But of course the opposite also occurs, misreading pure political anti-Zionism as being motivated by or generalized into Jew hate when it is not.
Non-Jewish supporters of Israel are not experiencing as many threats though.
Um, if the men throwing rocks and debris at the Hillel building were just trying to get a friend’s attention, what was with the bike-tampering? From the same investigator’s report:
"The other complainant told the Follow-up Officer that she “advis[ed] them not to break anything, as then they would have to call [the] police,” then closed the window to her room after “[t]he group mocked that statement” and “started to throw small rocks at the window they just closed.”
Another [redacted content] student informed the Follow-up Officer that the group might have been there to talk to [redacted content] subsequently called the Follow-up Officer and informed her that “his friends . . . ‘threw rocks at his window until he came out.’” He emphasized “that his friends ‘were not racist’ and had no ill-intent.” When the Follow-up Officer asked “if he would feel comfortable sharing the[ir] names,” he “seemed extremely unsure about that and wanted to check in with his friends.” The Follow-up Officer asked him to call her if he felt as though he could provide any further information, but the [redacted content] never did."
Add in the rock-throwers questioning the Hillel resident about whether she was Jewish, and the innocently-rowdy-students excuse appears a bit ragged around the edges.
You’ll note that I categorically stated in the post that you replied to that “asking somebody in a Hillel building if they are Jewish when that has no relevance whatever to any aspect of the situation is undoubtedly gratuitously rude and intrinsically antisemitic”.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the rock-throwing itself was an antisemitic act. As I said, the version of the incident given by another Hillel resident is that his friends were throwing rocks (and puffball mushrooms) specifically at his window to get his attention.
I wasn’t there during that 2021 incident and have zero firsthand knowledge of what actually happened, same as everybody else in this thread. All I’m saying is that at least one of the Hillel residents seems to have explicitly contradicted the “violent mob of antisemites were throwing rocks to break the Hillel building’s windows” narrative.
Let’s keep in mind that the Hillel resident in question was the friend of the people doing the throwing. He would be extremely motivated to downplay whatever occurred.
I was born and raised on land that had been depopulated before the white man bought it from the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee in the 1790s. It had been the land of the Erie nation until a century before that, when the then-Five Nations exterminated the Erie people and took their land to keep as a hunting reserve for then-lucrative beaver pelts. The reason why the white man committed no Indian genocides in the Connecticut Western Reserve of Ohio was because the genocide had already taken place before they came along. In the 1790s the Six Nations weren’t using the land and they needed cash to pay off Revolutionary War debts, so it was an easy call for them to sell it off.
Personally, I feel the problem is escalating, and that it’s not just linked to college campus. A recent CNN article:
“After a thorough review of videos taken at the game and interviews with those who witnessed the incident, the Yonkers Public Schools dismissed the coach and one player from the Roosevelt basketball team,” the statement said. “The investigation is ongoing. Should the District determine other students were involved in the incident, further action would be taken by the school District where appropriate.”
This is a HIGH SCHOOL team. Playing in public. But based on the reporting I’d bet it tied in perfectly to the question of “privilege” mentioned upthread, as the High School team that was targeted was from a private Jewish high school.
IMHO it’s all tied into the culture that Trump brought to a boil: if you want to hate, he said it’s totally Okay, hate all you want, I’ll support you. And people, given freedom to do so by their pastors, their politicians, and media (and yes, it is “theirs”) no longer choose to abide by civilized norms.
Note: I’m differentiating between the hatred generally embraced by the right as opposed to the genteel, largely condescending sort that @Johnny_Bravo was discussing in the parent thread (and I mentioned as well there) which often gets more of a pass. But both are rampant across society these days, fanned by politics both domestic and international.
Just wanted to bring the article up, because the underlying attitudes are set loooong before college.
Of course it’s not just colleges. And not just schools. There’s a gas station near me with an antisemitic sticker on the attendant’s booth. (It’s a star of David inside a circle with a line through it, like a “no smoking” sign, only this one says “no Jews”.)
But that sort of display wouldn’t be tolerated for a moment on any US college campus that I know of.
It’s one thing to be anti-Israel on account of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. And as we’ve discussed at length, there’s a whole lot of controversial gray area in the extent to which any particular instance of anti-Israel advocacy is ultimately influenced by or tantamount to antisemitism. But I haven’t seen any academic environment endorsing even a little bit of tolerance for unambiguously antisemitic rhetoric against Jews qua Jews, like the gas-station sticker you described.
I can’t blame anyone for some cynicism these days, but I disagree with this take. My understanding is that Stefanik’s question was centered around students chanting “from the river to the sea,” which US conservatives have been spuriously pushing as an absolute statement in favor of Israeli genocide as part of their usual cynical insistence that anti-Zionism equals anti-semitism.
So rather than referencing calls for genocide specifically, she was referencing the use of a slogan that can mean various things depending on who is chanting it. Gay rightfully identified this question as agenda-driven BS and tried to avoid engaging.
If there were a substantial number of Chinese students actively advocating for the Chinese government’s actions in Tibet and against the Uyghurs; or of Persian students openly defending Iran’s treatment of women; or Russian students advocating for the invasion of Ukraine; and above all of these three government’s actions had received decades of massive military support from the US government; then you might have a point.
I must agree. “From the river to the sea” obviously means taking over Israel, but as a college student I would probably not have realized that. It seems odd that Gay did not explain that with her job at stake.
Ignorance is not an excuse, especially among college students. If I’m shouting a slogan and I don’t know what it means, maybe I should learn what it fucking means.
But it rhymes! When I first heard people shouting it, the first thought that came to mind was Arab military leaders in 1947 allegedly saying they were going to drive the Jews to the sea.
There are lots of Jewish and Israeli college students in America who advocate for Israel’s right to exist, just like there are plenty of Russian or Chinese Americans who support the idea of a Russian or Chinese nation. There aren’t very many of them advocating for Smotrich to annex the West Bank. So, your comparison is pretty silly.
So if your ethnic group has a country that the US has sent funds to, it’s OK to deny you rape counseling based on your religious background? Cool cool cool.
It’s very similar to “States’ Rights”. There’s nothing wrong with states having their rights respected, after all! It’s just that we are leaving out the crucial context, which is that the people calling for “state’s rights” are people who are angry that the Federal Government forced them to do things they didn’t want to do, like ‘stop enslaving Black people’ and ‘desegregation’.