Towards the Margins of Campus
The other week I wrote about how antisemitism has leached into the groundwater on campus. As a result, the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is a boon for everyone, including those on campus, but there remains serious work ahead to remediate campus and address the Jew hatred that continues to poison campus communities.
To elaborate on this point, it’s important to understand what antisemitism tends to look like on campus today. On the positive side, there are far fewer mass rallies and demonstrations that demonize Israel and Jews. Even actions that require less commitment, like walkouts and petitions, garner less interest than they did last year and certainly less than in the aftermath of October 7.
What’s left behind is an underlying and persistent sense of unease around Jews and Israel. Yes, there will still be sharper comments about genocide and colonialism in classes and one-on-one interactions and BDS campaigns may coalesce once or twice a year, but the bulk of what will impact Jews is the vague, undefined feeling that Israel and Jews are associated with controversy and to be avoided. Most who hold these sentiments won’t necessarily be able to articulate them or directly connect them to what Jews and Israel have done, but in the name of avoiding friction, it’s easier just not to partner with the Jewish group or set up a partnership with an Israeli institution.
In many ways, these more subtle expressions of antisemitism are harder to recognize and fight. More specifically, if people don’t report them – as well as the more major incidents – to Jewish organizations and administration, it’s even more difficult to address them and hold perpetrators accountable.
Anticipating this, it’s important to work towards the following:
- Rejecting Post-October as a new baseline: Campus has been a hard place to be Jewish after October 7, especially during the 2023-2024 academic year. None of this is to say that it was necessarily easy beforehand, but we want to make sure that that period isn’t a new normal or the new baseline. In other words, our thinking around campus Jew hatred shouldn’t be, “At least it’s better than spring 2024.”
- Fighting inurement: Jewish students have been through an incredible amount over the past two years and have shown their strength and resilience. That toughness shouldn’t make any of us callous or indifferent to the ongoing issues they face or lead us to being inured to the less incendiary hostility they encounter now.
- Restoring confidence in reporting: When students don’t feel like universities take their reports of antisemitism seriously – when there’s reduced transparency about processes, limited sharing about adjudication decisions, and limited circling back about what consequences have been handed out – it’s hard to have confidence in the administrative systems and to see reporting as leading to accountability. As a whole, universities have a ways to go in demonstrating to Jewish students that their concerns are taken seriously and that perpetrators of antisemitism are being held to the standards that apply to students as a whole.
These may feel like small potatoes or baby steps. Nevertheless, realizing these goals can combat the day-to-day antisemitism many students experience and push Jew hatred further towards the margins of campus life than where it was on October 6, 2023.
