Universities Are Seeing An Enormous Spike In Antisemitism. Here’s Why

 College campuses saw a significant spike in antisemitism over the past year as universities continue to miss the mark when it comes to protecting Jewish students from antisemitism, according to several Jewish experts and advocates.

In the 2021-2022 school year, threats to Jewish identity on college campuses doubled from 114 incidents the year before to 228 incidents, while incidents of suppression of Jewish identity almost tripled from 37 to 123, according to a report from the AMCHA Initiative, a pro-Israel college campus organization. Experts and organizations that work extensively with Jewish college students told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the attempts to remove Israel from Jewish identity on college campuses is at the root of the spike.

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of AMCHA, told the DCNF that she had been tracking antisemitism on campus for over two decades, but that the last few years had been “unprecedented.” 

“What we found, and what was really frightening to us [when thinking] about what this means in the future, there is a real attack on those Jewish students who support Israel and who feel that is a very important part of their identity,” she noted.

Thom Waye, Chief Strategy Officer of Chabad on Campus International (CCI), told the DCNF that the antisemitism of the past year is not new but that social media created a “hockey stick effect” that pushed the issue on campus to the forefront. Ori Raphael, a Texas-based civil rights attorney and the executive director of the Jewish Justice Foundation, expressed similar thoughts.

“Antisemitism [is] a disease, and college campuses are just the modern-day breeding ground,” Raphael stated. Rossman-Benjamin and Raphael argued that university administrations have left learning behind and substituted it for indoctrination, with antisemitism being the go-to form since Jews, according to Raphael, are an “easy target.” Rossman-Benjamin explained that university faculty and administrations have continued to push a “redefinition” of the relationship between Israel and Judaism that leads to discrimination and hatred towards Jewish students.

In May of 2021, Hamas and Israel were involved in a conflict that left almost 300 dead, according to Brandeis University. The conflict “opened the floodgates” for faculty and administrations to push anti-Zionist and often blatant antisemitic rhetoric on campus, according to Rossman-Benjamin.

“We saw 160 departments on over 120 schools across the country actually issue a statement ‘we put our full support behind the Palestinians and Israel is an apartheid state,'” she explained. “Many of the statements supported an academic boycott of Israel.”

Universities Are Seeing An Enormous Spike In Antisemitism. Here’s Why Universities Are Seeing An Enormous Spike In Antisemitism. Here’s Why Reviewed by CUZZ BLUE on January 02, 2023 Rating: 5

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