Luke Tress is editor and reporter in New York for The Times of Israel.
The Anti-Defamation League has documented more than 350 incidents against Israel on U. S. school campuses. The U. S. government announced during the subsequent educational year, the organization announced this week, saying the activities had negatively affected Jewish scholars and were part of a developing trend to isolate Zionists.
The incidents ranged from harsh complaints against the Jewish state to harassment and exclusion of Jewish academics because of their perceived positions on Israel.
“The anti-Semitic vitriol directed at pro-Israel academics is deeply troubling and makes our schools and universities feel less for Jewish academics,” ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement.
The ADL’s annual campus report, released Wednesday, recorded 359 incidents against Israel in the 2021-2022 school year. The report, which focused on the most radical activism and not on the grievances of Israel’s regime, aimed to provide a snapshot of the campus environment and was neither comprehensive nor scientific, the ADL said.
Many incidents were “anti-Semitic in intent or deed,” the report said. “While other incidents would possibly not be anti-Semitic, they would possibly jointly contribute to a more hostile university environment for Jewish students. “
The report highlighted what it said was an ongoing motion to make opposition to Israel and Zionism “an indispensable element of campus life or as a prerequisite for full acceptance into the campus community. “Most American Jews think that caring about Israel is vital. or a need to be Jewish, although a 2020 Pew survey found that 18- to 29-year-olds were less likely to share that sentiment.
The large number of incidents consisted basically of demonstrations and demonstrations against Israel. There were also 19 cases of targeted harassment, 11 incidents of vandalism, a physical attack and 20 resolutions of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Three of the trends known through the report were ostracism of Zionist students, violence against Israel, and the adoption of anti-Semitic tropes.
Activists used the terms “Zionism” and “Zionist” to belittle and denigrate Jewish scholars, according to the report. Progressive university teams have also expelled Jewish scholars from their activities because of their help to the Jewish state’s way of life.
The attack concerned a pro-Palestinian protester throwing a rock at Jewish academics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Part of the vandalism included a sign supporting the conspiracy theory accusing Israel of being in favor of September 11 and graffiti reading “Whore [racist] genocidal species” on a Hillel building. The verbal harassment consisted of calling a Jewish student “dirty and racist. “Zionist” and saying that “Zionism is inhumane. “
Some of the report’s anti-Semitic tropes included a symbol depicting a Jew as a parasite, claiming that Jews controlled the media and that Jews used their wealth to “promote Islamophobia” and “maintain control” over the government.
The ADL compiled the report on social media, tracking anti-Israel groups, tracking educational magazines and other outlets, working with spouse organizations, and reporting on victims of harassment.
The ADL said it has developed a resource tool for Jewish students.
Separately, the advocacy organization Alums for Campus Fairness published an expired report last month that student newspapers were disproportionately critical of Israel and loyal more to Jewish state policy than to local anti-Semitism.
There has been a wave of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incidents on American campuses in recent weeks, the Jewish holiday season.
At George Washington University, anti-Israel protesters called for an outdoor intifada at a Hillel building during the holiday of Sukkot.
The university’s president said he was involved in the protest, as well as the “disturbing and desecrating posters” that “included anti-Semitic language” on campus this week. Students pointed to flyers that read, “The Zionists are going to shit. “
Swastikas have been drawn in weeks at Ithaca College, the University of North Florida, American University and California State University, Sacramento.
Wellesley College’s student newspaper backed the anti-Jewish mapping task, which targets Jewish organizations in Massachusetts, and then rejected it after harsh criticism from the university’s president, who said the task promoted anti-Semitism.
The president of Tufts University said this week that a club sports team had been suspended for a “gruesome” anti-Semitic incident that was under investigation.
Jewish scholars were attacked around the holiday of Rosh Hashanah with discarded eggs, anti-Semitic flyers, swastika graffiti and mezuzah vandalism.
Late last month, New York’s public schools formula pledged to combat anti-Semitism on campuses following allegations of widespread harassment of Jewish academics and a long-tense crusade by Jewish advocates.
A survey conducted through Hillel and ADL last year found that one-third of Jewish scholars suffered from anti-Semitism on campus, most commonly through verbal harassment on the user and online, as well as damage to assets.
Federal anti-Semitism research at the University of Vermont, the State University of New York at New Paltz, the University of Southern California, and Brooklyn College.
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