College Campuses and Antisemitism...a Rising Problem

This week I was struck by two images that were quite disturbing:

The first was a released youtube video of a meeting of student government leaders at UCLA interviewing a Jewish student for membership on their judicial board. Her nomination for membership on the board was questioned with the leading statement,  “"Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community... how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?" That question was asked by Fabienne Roth, a USAC general representative.” The focus of the interview was on the candidate’s Jewish background, not on her qualifications for membership on the judicial board. The video eventually was pulled off youtube by the UCLA undergraduate students association, but the story made it into the New York Times and onto the national news.

The second disturbing piece of information was a message I received from my alma mater, Northwestern University, that the student government had passed a boycott and divestment measure.  According to the Jerusalem Post, “Associated Student Government Senate narrowly passed a measure to divest from Israeli companies on Thursday. It urges the university to divest from Boeing, Caterpillar, Elbit Systems, Hewlett-Packard, G4S and Lockheed Martin, according to the school's paper The Daily Northwestern.

In the vote, 24 people were in favor of the resolution sponsored by the BDS group Northwest Divest, with 22 people voting against the measure and three people abstaining.

The resolution serves as a recommendation to the school and does not hold sway regarding actual university policy, which maintains close ties with Tel Aviv University as a sister university.”

I thought I would look up the data about anti-Semitism on college campuses today, to see if these two incidences within one week were typical of what is going on nationwide.

 “ A comprehensive survey of anti-Semitism at American colleges released last week shows that significant hostility is directed at Jews on U.S. campuses, too.”

The National Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students, produced by a Trinity College team well-known for its research on religious groups, found that 54 percent of Jewish students experienced anti-Semitism on campus in the first six months of the 2013-2014 academic year.

Professors Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar asked 1,157 students in an online questionnaire about the types, context and location of anti-Semitism they had encountered, and found that anti-Jewish bias is a problem for Jews of all levels of religious observance.

“And this is a national problem; it’s not just happening in pockets of areas,” Keysar said. “Hopefully people will read this survey as a wake-up call. Clearly, the students want us to do something.”

The survey, she also noted, was given to students months before last summer’s war between Israel and Gaza, which ignited much anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses, sentiment that at times crossed the line into anti-Semitism.

The question sent to Jewish students on 55 campuses asked whether they had personally experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism on campus. Most of the 54 percent who responded “yes” reported one incident. That suggests that “Jewish students are notjust being paranoid, because if they were, then we would expect each of them to identify more than one incident of anti-Semitism per year,” the researchers wrote.

Similar percentages of religious (58 percent) and secular Jewish students (51 percent) said they had experienced hostility toward Jews or Judaism. And while 58 percent of those who say they are “always” open about being Jewish on campus said they had experienced anti-Semitism, 59 percent who said they “never” were reported the same.

As for the most common context of the anti-Semitism, 29 percent of students surveyed said the source was a single student, and 10 percent said it happened in a college club or society. Only 3 percent said the anti-Semitism stemmed from the college administration.

Kosmin and Keysar’s survey follows the 2013 Pew Research Center’s “Portrait of Jewish Americans,” which found that 22 percent of young Jews reported being called an offensive name in the previous year because they are Jewish, a far higher percentage than older Jews. It also comes 10 years after the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights declared that campus anti-Semitism had become a “serious problem” and called for more research on the issue.

Kosmin and Keysar end their report with recommendations to address anti-Semitism on campus, including the suggestion that administrators let it be known that “the university considers anti-Semitism a serious issue equivalent to other forms of hate and bias.”