Variations on Ignorance: Modern-Day Anti-Semitism on College Campuses

Ignorance is sometimes associated with a lack of education; yet, college campuses are the setting of an alarming—and increasing—amount of anti-semitism. Inside Higher Ed recounts a number of incidents that have occurred following the horrific shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last October, where eleven people were killed. These acts have included the painting of swastikas and anti-semitic references on the office walls of a Jewish professor at Columbia University, over a memorial held at Duke University for the Pittsburgh shooting victims, and at multiple other colleges, such as Cornell University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Tennessee. At Pennsylvania State University, Jewish fraternity Zeta Beta Tau’s menorah was vandalized and stolen. At UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Vassar College, and Marist College, fliers were distributed claiming “Jews” were responsible for the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh and containing “caricatures of Jewish members of the U.S. Senate … surrounding Kavanaugh” along with the statement that “every time some anti-white, anti-American, anti-freedom event takes place, you look at it, and it’s Jews behind it” (Source 1).

There are many groups that spread dangerous messages and attempt to appeal to students on different sides of the political spectrum. Some of these groups explicitly promote white supremacy. For example, a group called Identity Evropa, which helped organize the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, has been infiltrating campuses across the country. Identity Evropa has rebranded itself to attract members and increase its popularity in the mainstream of even our most esteemed institutions of higher education. It emphasizes being “pro-white” and anti-immigration and “trying to move beyond the paradigm that includes … buzzwords like ‘racist,’” instead claiming to be “identitarian” (Source 2). Identity Evropa’s strategy involves “covertly taking over the GOP” by working its way up through College Republicans meetings and local GOP meetings and gradually normalizing its racist beliefs in politics (which has been helped by President Trump’s statements and policies, such as defending the Charlottesville KKK members and promoting anti-immigration policies targeting people of color).

On the contrary, there are some groups making students feel unsafe on campuses because of failures to share unbiased background information about controversial issues, which can lead to preconceptions and stereotypes. University of Michigan alumna Molly Rosen recalls her personal experience regarding "how one of America’s elite schools became the latest flash point of anti-Israel activism and anti-Semitic intimidation”— two concepts that people are often quick to entwine (Source 4). Rosen describes:

I was not prepared to be told that, if I cared about human rights, I could not support Israel … that my community was racist … to see my fellow students attacked with anti-Semitic slurs. And I was most definitely not prepared to be told that “anyone wearing the Israeli army uniform is a Ku Klux Klansman who does not deserve any place at any table in polite society because they are racist killers trying to break the back of Palestine, and they have succeeded.”

Rosen goes on to explain the role of a group called Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) on campus, which promotes the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. BDS is popular at many colleges and is based around the human rights of Palestinians and abuses against those human rights by the Israeli government. Yet, Rosen describes it as an “effort by those who have failed in the past to destroy Israel through conventional military means, and later terrorism, to do so through delegitimization and economic strangulation” that is “an ineffective means to achieve a resolution to the conflict, polarizes the campus community, and constitutes a one-sided tactic that presents one narrative while excluding others.”

SAFE has, in fact, called for the dismissal of a U-M student government representative after his verbal opposition to a mock wall, representing the security wall separating Israel and the West Bank, displayed by SAFE on campus the same day that a terrorist attack in the West Bank killed three people, including an American teen taking a gap year in Israel. It has failed to share the full picture of the conflict in the Middle East in appeals to people’s emotions, and, considering the other instances of anti-semitism on the U-M campus (such as a recent speaker who drew an alarming comparison between Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and Hitler), it is understandable how organizations like SAFE and BDS can fail to draw a clear line between opposition to policies of the Israeli government and ignorance and hatred towards Jews.

These organizations can spread messages that certainly seem like efforts that anyone who supports human rights should endorse. However, Rosen’s experience and other reasons for controversy surrounding these groups demonstrate that extreme organizations can actually discourage people from learning the complexities of both sides to an international conflict and create hostility, often through the oversimplification of the other perspective. People should want to help when they see human rights violations. Yet, there is often far more history to these issues than many of these organizations share in their seemingly straightforward appeals on campus to students’ morals and desires to help people. There is obvious danger (as we have seen in class in many cases) in politicizing the potential to take action against irrefutable human rights violations, such that people do not intervene when there are clear ways to help. However, there is also danger in ignorance— not simply lacking awareness of an issue but failing to gain a more complete understanding, in order to approach it more productively.

Opposing the policies of a country is a political choice. Further, every person should be in support of human rights. Yet, there is not always one side that is entirely good and one that is entirely bad; it is important to realize exceptions to rules before generalizing about complex situations and choosing to support a side that combats only part of an issue. Failing to look deeper than one pamphlet into an issue, refusing to acknowledge context before forming an opinion, and generalizing that an entire, international religious or ethnic group is to blame for the political strategies of leaders of one country, or the actions of select individuals, is immoral and ignorant.

1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/05/anti-semitic-incidents-surge-college-campuses-after-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting
2. https://www.today.com/video/how-white-nationalists-are-trying-to-infiltrate-campuses-1346218563687
3. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/military/sd-me-white-nationalists-campuses-20190324-story.html
4. http://www.thetower.org/article/staring-down-the-devil-at-the-university-of-michigan/
5. https://www.michigandaily.com/section/news/csg-meeting-2
6. https://www.foxnews.com/us/does-the-university-of-michigan-have-an-anti-semitism-problem