Before the Camps, There Were Classrooms (Judean Rose) ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, May 07, 2025

Before the Camps, There Were Classrooms (Judean Rose)

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

In 1938, Eva G., a Jewish student at the University of Vienna, slipped her Star of David necklace beneath her collar before walking into a lecture hall. She was met with swastikas scrawled on the walls and whispers of “Juden raus.” Eighty-six years later, in 2024, a Jewish student at Columbia University pulls his hoodie over his kippah to walk past demonstrators chanting, “Go back to Poland."

Decades apart, these moments are uncanny in their resemblance—almost like a freeze frame. Eva is likely long dead and buried, but the fear she once felt—of being harassed, abused, and hated—remains a chilling reality for Jewish students today. Campuses, once assumed to be bastions of learning and tolerance, have become places where Jews are not safe, where they must hide, if not themselves, then their identity.

Since October 7, antisemitic incidents on U.S. college campuses have surged 477%. That number alone demands attention. But it’s the atmosphere—hateful chants and symbols in combination with administrative silence—that makes the past feel dangerously close. Where does all this hate for Jewish students lead?

During the rise of Nazism, German universities were among the first institutions to adopt antisemitic policies. At Heidelberg, Jewish students were boycotted in 1933. By 1935, lecture halls bore swastikas. By 1938, Jews were gone from campus altogether—expelled or worse. The violence didn’t begin in death camps; it began with students, professors, and rectors who either joined the mobs or stood silently by.

University of Heidelberg lecture hall adorned with swastikas.

A report from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 1933 described one such incident:

“Two hundred Nazi students surrounded the Jewish students in the campus restaurant and, employing chairs, tables, and glassware as missiles, attacked the Jews. Five Jewish students sustained injuries... The Rector of Berlin University failed to intervene.”

“The use of the academic environment to foster extremist views and expression against Jews was essential to the Nazi success in reaching elements of society who could be impassioned, inspired, and ignited towards violent expression through the systematic logic applied in the hate against the Jews,” says Dr. Elana Yael Heideman, Holocaust historian and CEO of the Israel Forever Foundation. “When this began in the decade prior to the rise of Hitler's Third Reich, no one could have imagined that antisemitic riots against students on University campuses in Austria and Germany throughout the 1920s and 30s would have developed into a full-blown genocide of the Jews as the primary targets. Yes, there were indications, but none saw the proverbial writing on the wall. By the time the Nazi regime was in full force by 1935, the social acceptance of the hatred was steeped in the public mindset, thus enabling the subsequent bystanderism that enabled horrific persecutions, and murder by bullet or gas.”

Today, Jewish students in the United States are not being expelled by law. But they are being targeted by hate speech, swastikas, and chants like “intifada revolution,” shouted on elite campuses from Princeton to Tufts. At Cornell, Russell Rickford, an associate professor of history exclaimed to an excited student mob that he felt exhilarated by the October 7 massacre.

At Harvard and Stanford, Jewish students have been harassed, doxxed, or pushed to the margins of campus life. And too often, university leaders respond with moral equivocation or bureaucratic platitudes and do nothing to stanch the flow of hate.

Sometimes history echoes rather than repeats. Then and now, it is the failure of moral leadership that not only allows hate to fester, but gives it permission to thrive and grow. This is not the same as 1930s Europe—but the hate is exactly the same, and it is still every bit as dangerous. As Holocaust survivor David Schaecter, president of the Holocaust Survivors Foundation USA, testified before the U.S. Senate:

“I remember vividly when Slovakian classmates taunted Jewish kids like me, and what’s happening today looks and feels the same.”

When protests devolve into chants denying Jews’ right to exist, glorifying terrorism, or intimidating visibly Jewish students, the line has been crossed. It is not “free speech” to threaten Jewish people with annihilation and it never was.

The most haunting question of course isn’t about what’s happening now—but where this all could lead. In Germany, the radicalization of universities helped normalize Nazi ideology. Academic complicity didn’t just reflect fascism; it fed it. Professors trained bureaucrats and camp guards. Rectors joined the Nazi Party. University violence, once ignored, metastasized into something far worse.

This time things are different.

“As there is no current administration driving the antisemitism on campuses forward into increased violent fervor,” says Elana Heideman, “there is a tentative sense of security that it will not get worse than what is already taking place. That it will dissipate, as sanctions for their actions grow. However there is and should be a palpable hesitance to rest on such baseless confidence that the hate-fests and public demonization of Jews will cease or level out. Rather, we must accept that what will come will not look the same, or be structured the same as 100 years ago.

“Elie Wiesel himself once said, the next chapter will not look like cattle cars and gas chambers. What it will look like, no one can be sure. But indeed, Jews, Israelis, and our allies, will continue to be increasingly listed, targeted, threatened into apathetic compliance with whatever demands are made upon the Jew in order to save them/ourselves.”

The doxing is a particularly frightening and danger-laden phenomenon. “Many of these lists,” says Heideman, “have already been exposed, the Mapping Project for example which now doesn't even mask its intention and has publicly emerged as the Map of Liberation, in which Jewish homes, businesses, and Israel connected institutions are all identified. But even with the efforts put into uncovering these blatant efforts to coordinate this modern genocidal effort against Jews, the lists, the labels, the systematic social and media assaults on truth continue to grow in numbers and in power.”

Where is this going? We know where it led to in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Vienna. Could today’s doxing, protests, and antisemitic chants on campus spiral into Holocaust-like horrors?

Probably not. “The result,” says Heideman, “will be an increasing isolation of Jews everywhere. There will be increased infighting between groups of Jews, as we saw in the Holocaust and as we already see having grown especially since the October 7 massacre, trying to point the fingers of blame and dividing ourselves, which of course weakens us against this enemy which is not a single regime but rather an entire world of totalitarian minded individuals who have been convinced by the propaganda of Islamofascism and who have been enabled sufficiently to achieve dominance, and will only continue to do so as they join forces with the other extremist elements who share the Jew as the common enemy.

“What might the next phase look like?” asks Heideman. “We are already in it. There are more attacks then are reported, out of a desire to remain anonymous or to avoid the inevitable trouble it will bring if they have to chase down every Jew hater that slings their slurs, or shouts free Palestine.”

The Jews, meanwhile, will continue to do what they have always done, find ways to keep a low profile and stay safe. “More Jews will be seeking smaller intimate communities where they are able to find or create a safe space,” says Heideman. “There are those who will seek to emigrate, many attempting to choose somewhere other than our ancestral Homeland in Israel. There are those who will try to convert, religiously i.e., to Islam, politically or socially, as if any of these are a way to save oneself.”

But then there are the others, says Heideman, “Those whose identities will be awakened, whose souls will be empowered. There will continue to be an increase in Zionism as a collective dream, and Aliyah, as Israel will become once again the sole safe haven that was envisioned when our 2,000-year-old dream was fulfilled through political Zionism and the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty at the end of the British Mandate on May 14th, 1948, Declaration Day.

“What will become of the America that we know?” asks Heideman. “Or the campuses and public streets of any country or society that allows this harassment and public expression against Jews, Judaism, Jewish history, humanity and nationhood? Violence will continue, as will the silence.

“But if the Holocaust has taught us anything, we must hope that Jewish response will be different. The existence of a Jewish state, and the vibrant voice of pride and passion in this war for the survival of humanity, will determine what the pending catastrophe to befall the world will look like.”

Will the Trump administration’s financial pressure on Ivy League institutions make a difference? Or will the courts get in the way of these efforts in the name of free speech, leaving Jewish students to twist in the wind? It’s anyone’s guess, but if there’s one thing history teaches us, it’s this: what starts with words can end in atrocities. The time to act is not after tragedy, but now.