What We Are Facing In The Campus Wars

The Jewish Week ^ | 3/11/05 | Rebecca Kahn

[Citizen James]

The David Project’s recent film “Columbia Unbecoming” has created a heated debate about the academic environment surrounding Israel at Columbia University. Moreover, as Gary Rosenblatt pointed out in his Feb. 11 column (“New Fronts In Campus Wars”), it has made us suddenly connect the dots and realize that the anti-Israel activity we have been seeing on college campuses is in fact spillover from what often is fomented in the classroom.

As the campus coordinator for Caravan for Democracy, a program that fosters constructive dialogue about the Middle East, I can attest to the fact that this problem is not limited to Columbia but is one facing campuses across the United States.

I graduated from Tufts University in 2003, just as the wheels of organized anti-Israel activity were being set in motion on American college campuses. But while my own academic experience was characterized by an intellectual curiosity about Israel and the Middle East conflict, this is not what I’ve found on most campuses I’ve visited as a professional. I visited more than a dozen campuses across the country last year and heard firsthand the serious challenges students are facing.

These include defending Israel’s policies (many of which they themselves don’t fully understand) to other students, teachers and administrators, but with the amorphous yet threatening challenge of defending Israel’s very right to exist. Students nationwide, from the University of California at Irvine to Sarah Lawrence College, have told me about sitting in classrooms with professors who openly criticize Israel. Between feeling intimidated to challenge a learned academic and anxiety over possibly receiving a bad grade, they are afraid to take a shot at fighting back or even expressing their point of view.

And besides the immature yet ubiquitous ripping down of posters announcing pro-Israel events, I’ve witnessed a variety of behaviors from challengers of Israel that range from upsetting to intimidating.

We’ve had programs at places like UC Irvine, where students speak of being forced to cross mock checkpoints and “apartheid walls.” At our event there, protesters stood outside the hall chanting, among other things, “Long live the intifada!”

At Ohio State, rocks were thrown through the Chabad House the day before the Caravan event there with Israel’s minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs, Natan Sharansky. The night before the Caravan event at Tulane University, swastikas were carved into the windows of the lecture hall with acid.

But the most shocking campus I visited was San Francisco State University. I had been warned that it was a hotbed for anti-Israel propaganda and downright hatred of the Jewish state, but being on the campus was a truly depressing and frightening experience. Jewish students there speak of being intimidated to the point where they feel unwelcome on their own campus. Zionism is equated to Nazism, anti-Semitic posters are displayed, blood libels are used and professors single out the “Zionists” in their classes. As we walked with Sharansky around campus, he was booed over a loudspeaker and told to get off the campus. Our lecture had to be canceled after the school was uncooperative in accommodating the minister’s security needs.

In contrast, when Caravan visited the University of Alabama, Israel and the Middle East weren’t getting any attention. Like many Southern state schools, it has a large Christian and Republican base, but even with a limited Jewish population, our lecture drew nearly 100 students. The student newspaper, The Crimson White, covered the event, and for the next few weeks I watched on-line the give-and-take responses in the paper — students discussing the issues in a true dialogue. We touched off the kind of intellectual exploration that is supposed to be part of the college experience but on so many other campuses has been lost in rhetoric and propaganda.

In my mind, most campuses fall into one of two categories: those where animosity, protest and propaganda (on both sides) is what passes for debate, and those whose students display apathy and indifference. Both scenarios are disturbing. It’s not so much that things have quieted down on campus in the last year as that we have grown accustomed to the unpleasantness.

By focusing on the protests and anti-Israel spectacles, we have been trying to fight the symptoms instead of targeting the problem. Understanding that this intimidation — intellectual and otherwise — is often systemic, it is all the more important now to continue focusing on promoting constructive dialogue and on educating students who will not be afraid to argue back. We cannot afford to lose the battle for the hearts and minds of Jewish students who will soon become the newest members of America’s workforce and society.

[The Fop]

I've said it 1,000 times, but the liberal Jews won't listen....anti-Zionism isn't just a new form of antisemitism, it has REPLACED the old antisemitism.

People who say "I'm not antisemitic, but I have problems with Israel's policies" have become the modern day versions of people who used to say "I know lots of nice Jews, they're not like those other Jews".

Jewish Week is a liberal paper that refuses to acknowledge that the anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses is more than just a "disturbing trend". These Israel haters are no better than neo-Nazis, but a paper like Jewish Week will never put them in the same category. Very frustrating.

[claudiustg]

---But the most shocking campus I visited was San Francisco State University.---

The time comes you've either got to clean out the shit hole or cover it over. I'm open to either alternative in relation to that campus. It's a major scandal, worse than Berserkley in regards to anti-Semitism if that's possible.

[Nate1984]

San Francisco Hate is a hotbed for it