Recent Jew-hatred in schools worldwide

This was a particularly bad past couple of weeks. Antisemitism is getting more and more mainstream from every direction on campus and schools.

Here's a list of recent events:

A student at Tufts University, Max Price, suffered months of harassment for his opposition to a Students for Justice in Palestine initiative to create a referendum to pledge not to have Tufts employees go on any Israeli security programs. 

Price’s lawyers, who are from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, claim that Price endured a months-long campaign of intimidation, harassment and discrimination for speaking against SJP’s attempt to include the referendum on the ballot.

The harassment included Price having to sit through meetings by Tufts student-government leadership questioning his personal beliefs and identity as a pro-Israel Jew, according to the lawyers. Even after the TCUJ determined that there was no evidence of bias and no need for Price to recuse himself, he was placed on “mute” for the entire final Zoom meeting when TCUJ members considered the referendum.

“They wanted me to back down and to silence me, and when I didn’t, SJP expanded their campaign to slander me in the student newspaper, had me interrogated numerous times as to whether I was fit to hold office, attacked me with age-old anti-Semitic tropes about money and power, threatened me with impeachment, and now, I’m being denied a fair trial,” he said.

SJP tried to have Price removed from office, but dropped the attempt after Price's lawyers got involved. Yet the school not once defended Price from months of harassment.

From Germany:

Students at an elite German university fraternity regularly greeted each other with the words “Heil Hitler” and used the word “Jew” as a pejorative, according to one of its former members in explosive revelations published this week by the German newsmagazine Spiegel

The fraternity in question — Normannia — has been under German police investigation following an outrage at a party held by its Heidelberg University members at their mansion on Aug. 29, 2020. A 25-year-old student in attendance who spoke about his Jewish ancestry was berated with antisemitic abuse, whipped with belts and pelted with metal coins by several assailants.

Massachusetts:

School Committee member Robert Hoey Jr., who referred to a former administrator at the Lowell Public Schools as a “kike” on live cable access TV on Wednesday, announced his resignation on Friday in a video posted on Facebook.

Hoey, who hosts the morning show “City Life” on Lowell Telecommunications Corporation cable access Channel 8, made the statement on the live program at around 6:35 a.m. while discussing school personnel. “We lost the kike, I mean the Jewish guy. I hate to say it but that’s what people used to say behind his back – Gary Frisch … He was the guy in charge of our budget,” said Hoey.

From the UK:

About 200 academics from the United Kingdom and the United States have signed a petition defending a British university lecturer who had called Jewish students on his campus “pawns” of Israel, “a violent, racist, foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing.”

Jewish groups and organizations have protested the remarks by David Miller, a professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol, made during an online videoconference Feb. 13. Some have called for his ouster.

“Prof Miller is an eminent scholar. He is known internationally for exposing the role that powerful actors and well-resourced, co-ordinated networks play in manipulating and stage-managing public debates, including on racism,” the petition read.

At Columbia University, the Young Democratic Socialists of America have tied a popular tuition strike with BDS:

The tuition strikers are now prioritizing that the school reject what they call an “ongoing system of settler colonialism, military occupation, and apartheid” and comply with “the results of future referendums relating to investment decisions.”

This attempt to strong-arm the university into accepting the results of a controversial referendum by tying it to a far more popular cause—a tuition strike in the midst of a global emergency—is shameful. It has also alienated many students who would otherwise be supportive of the Young Democratic Socialists’ tuition strike.

As Adi Mayer, a sophomore at Barnard College, explained: “Students for Justice in Palestine’s intricate involvement in the tuition strike, and their efforts to use it to disguise the promotion of BDS, exclude me as an Israeli and Jewish student from participating in a cause I would otherwise believe in.”

Danielle Serota, a junior at Columbia, expressed a similar view: “I feel alienated by the tuition strike because it argues for some issues that so many of my friends and myself relate to and support but then strategically ties them together with a clause that directly harms me and others in my community.”

Miles Rubin, an Israeli citizen and sophomore at Columbia, went further, saying that he “supported the tuition strike at first.”

“I felt the cause was just and still do. We have legitimate grievances with the university [and] the strike was an opportunity to unite all the students.”

Because of this, Rubin was taken aback by an email from the tuition-strike coalition, sent on December 22, which stated that instead of “investing in fossil fuels and companies enabling apartheid in Palestine, Columbia should invest in its students and workers.”

As Rubin said, “I was pretty alarmed, and completely put off by what was said, as a Jew and as a citizen of Israel.”

Sweden:

The small number of Jewish children attending public schools in the Swedish city of Malmo experience “widespread antisemitism,” according to a new study published by the municipal authorities this week.

Fourteen Jewish children and 26 teachers were interviewed for the report, titled “Schoolyard racism, exclusion and conspiracy theories.” Speaking about the study’s conclusions to Swedish national television, Sarah Wettergren — chair of the Malmo Council’s primary school committee — stated that “we now have it in black and white that antisemitism is widespread in our schools.”

Netherlands:

A swastika is carved into the doorframe of a Jewish student’s house in the Dutch city of Maastricht and the mezuzah is torn off.

The Maastricht University student discovers the damage to his mezuzah, an object containing scripture on parchment that Jews affix to their doorframes, and makes a police complaint, the Netherlands chapter of the StandWithUs pro-Israel group writes in a statement.

The antisemitism on campus today becomes the mainstream Jew-hatred by the leaders of tomorrow. 

(h/t Andrew Pessin)

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