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Hate Exploded Across College Campuses Surrounding the October 7 Anniversary

The “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Columbia University, located in the Manhattan borough of New York City, on April 25, 2024. Photo: Reuters Connect

October’s anti-Israel protests were focused on the tragic anniversary of Hamas’ October 7 massacres, and the Israeli response that began the now year-long war. Campus protests included student walkouts, building takeovers, and vandalism at numerous universities including Columbia University, Pomona College, Tufts University, the University of Virginia, and Princeton University.

At Concordia University, demonstrators were dispersed with tear gas after breaking windows of university buildings.

The homes of the University of Michigan president and Chief Information Office were also vandalized, as was the office of the Detroit Jewish Federation. McGill University canceled classes for October 7, apparently for fear of widespread celebrations of the Hamas massacre. In New York City a Jewish counterprotestor was assaulted as pro-Hamas protests spread across Manhattan.

Other October protests included the attempted blockade of the New York Stock Exchange by 200 Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) protestors, which resulted in arrests, the vandalizing of offices across Britain belonging to the asset management firm Allianz, as well as a factory making parts for F-35 jets.

Bomb threats were called into New York area synagogues on Rosh Hashanah, while antisemitic materials were distributed across the Detroit area. Protestors outside a Jewish cultural center in London chanted “Palestine Is Not Your Home” and accused participants in an October 7th event sponsored by Haaretz featuring both left wing Israeli and Palestinian speakers of being “genocide supporters.”

Attacks on Jews and Jewish sites were common in October. These included the vandalizing of a Chabad sukkah in Pittsburgh by two Muslims males who were then indicted by the US Justice Department. More serious were a New York City car ramming attack aimed at a visibly identifiable Jew on Yom Kippur and a Chicago area shooting of a Jewish male on Simchat Torah, also by Muslim males.

The campus and other protests have been underpinned by a variety of funding and organizing groups. One key group is Samidoun, which was sanctioned as a “sham charity” and front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) by the US Treasury Department in October. Canada jointly announced similar sanctions on the Vancouver-based organization.

Samidoun has provided training to and jointly sponsored campus and other protests with Within Our Lifetime, Palestine Youth Movement, Jewish Voice for Peace, and other anti-Israel and pro-Hamas organizations.

In addition to the aforementioned college protests, pro-Hamas vandalism was also noted at American University, Georgetown University, Bryn Mawr College, and the University of Pennsylvania, where signs were defaced with the words “Sinwar lives,” and where protestors later broke into a board of trustees meeting to shout their demands.

Anti-Israel protestors also disrupted a talk by George Washington University’s president during alumni weekend.

More ominous were statements from a variety of student groups in support of violence. A statement from Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) and Columbia Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) said that they “support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance.”

The school’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter quoted dead Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s objectives “that Operation al-Aqsa Flood was launched with the objective to liberate Palestinian prisoners, the holy sites, and land of Palestine that has been occupied by the Zionist entity since 1948, in the context of the escalation of imperialist violence against Palestinians in scale and brutality over the past few years.”

The University of Michigan’s JVP chapter stated similarly that “Death to Israel is a moral imperative.” That posting was condemned by the university president, and was removed by Instagram.

A number of SJP chapters also mourned Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, while over 100 Columbia University clubs released a statement mourning Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

Similar praise for Sinwar as a “leader, fighter, and martyr” was offered by other SJP chapters in the US, such as at John Jay College, which lauded Sinwar’s “life of honor,” as well as in Britain by numerous Arab and Muslim student groups.

A new target for anti-Israel protests in October were job fairs. Protestors at a variety of schools including Cornell University, Tufts University, Case Western University, and the University of Massachusetts attempted to take over job fairs on the grounds that companies represented included “weapons manufacturers.” Protestors were removed from these and other events including at Temple University, where the Islamist group CAIR later alleged that police had removed a student’s hijab.

Despite the widespread failure to convince administrations or trustees to boycott Israel, student governments continue to support the concept of divestment.

The Rice University student government passed several referenda demanding divestment and condemning Israel. The University of Massachusetts student government passed a resolution reaffirming its support for divestment, as did a resolution by the University of California at Berkeley student government, and a student referendum at American University. Anti-Israel activists were also also permitted to make presentations to trustees at McMaster College.

Divestment was also supported by the Northwestern University graduate student union, and a poll of Columbia University engineering students. The City University of New York Graduate Center’s student government also passed a resolution barring purchase of any product “that support or benefit from the US-backed Israeli occupation of Palestine” including Starbucks and Israeli-produce. In contrast, the student government at Binghamton University overturned a BDS resolution that was adopted in 2023.

At the University of Michigan the student government had been taken over by BDS supporters who refused to fund any student clubs until the university divested from Israel. The university then funded clubs directly, which forced a petition to the student government which ended the crisis. The student government was then unsuccessfully petitioned to send its budget to Gaza universities. This move failed as well, and resulted in insults and death threats against opponents.

Strikes by graduate student unions as a means to protest university policies on Israel continue to emerge. A series of strikes by University of California graduate student unions were cut short by a court injunction for violating the terms of the union contract with the state.

Attacking Jewish organizations has become a formal strategy of pro-Hamas groups on and off campuses. The CAIR-backed Drop Hillel campaign, which claims to be Jewish run but which is fronted by National Students for Justice in Palestine and Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters, demands that Hillels be banned from campuses over their support for Israel.

The campaign has received attention at a variety of campuses including Duke University, claims that “Over the past several decades, Hillel has monopolized for Jewish campus life into a pipeline for pro-Israel indoctrination, genocide-apologia, and material support to the Zionist project and its crimes.” It claims further that Hillel is a lynchpin in campus harassment of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian students and in Israel’s “racist and settler colonialist practices.”

A report by UCLA’s antisemitism task force has detailed the antisemitic harassment and violence that emerged after October 7th, which culminated in the spring encampment and subsequent riots. The report noted that Jewish students were harassed and then prohibited from entering parts of campus. Some 100 physical assaults were also recorded.

Finally, in an especially grotesque turn, anti-Zionist students erected a number of “Liberation Sukkahs” at a variety of universities including Columbia. Similar unauthorized installations at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Northwestern University were dismantled by authorities, who were then accused of “antisemitism” by protestors.

The Hillel sukkah at Simmons University was vandalized with the words “Gaza Liberation Sukkah,” while the JVP chapter posted a note on social media stating,“This is not antisemitism. Drop Hillel.”

Faculty support for explicitly anti-Israel viewpoints is reflected in speaking invitations to pro-Hamas UN rapporteur and antisemite Francesca Albanese at Princeton University, Brown University, Barnard College, Georgetown University, and elsewhere. A talk on the October 7th massacre by Palestinian Christian theological Sari Ateek at Virginia Theological Seminary is another example of an invitation to a known Hamas supporter.

“Faculty for Justice in Palestine” chapters also have taken the lead in organizing campus protests. October examples include Columbia/Barnard calling for the boycott of local Harlem businesses, and the University of Pennsylvania’s joining an Indigenous Person’s Day protest and calling for the university to break ties with a local high tech firm.

Faculty leadership is also represented by efforts from the “International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network” to associate Zionism with ‘white supremacy.” These faculty are in turn members of various “critical studies” programs working to created anti-Israel and antisemitic K-12 curriculum.

In one example of an organized disruption, Harvard University faculty staged a silent demonstration in a university library in violation of new rules and in support of students who had similarly disrupted a library study area. In response, some two dozen faculty members had their library access temporarily restricted. Teaching staff at Simon Fraser University are voting on an Israel boycott resolution.

University responses to faculty provocations have been sporadic. In an extreme example, Muhlenberg College has fired a faculty member, Maura Finkelstein, who expressed support for Hamas and attacked “Zionists” on social media. One of the posts in question stated: “Do not cower to Zionists … Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable. Why should those genocide-loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat-out racist. Don’t normalize Zionism. Don’t normalize Zionists taking up space.”

While the terms of her firing have not been made fully clear by the college or by Finkelstein herself, her implicit threat to “Zionists,” which created a hostile teaching environment, may have played a role.

Elementary and secondary school teachers and their unions continue to be at the forefront of anti-Israel activism. In Seattle, a controversy emerged after it was revealed that the “Northwest Teaching for Social Justice Conference” included a number of anti-Israel presentations, including one by a well-known BDS supporter on “Incorporating K-12 Literature About Palestine — Preparing for False Allegations of AntiSemitism.”

Similar “social justice” teacher training was reported in Chicago, where a group offered sessions to promote “informed discussions on global issues, particularly settler colonialism, and we believe that addressing the complexities and misconceptions surrounding the Palestinian cause can contribute to promoting anti-racism and dismantling systems of oppression.”

The impact of pro-Hamas teacher training was evident even in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023 — when California teachers began to ask students, “What does Palestinian freedom mean to you?” and “How are you engaged with the Palestinian freedom struggle?”

The background of the immense anti-Israel bias that has been built into K-12 curriculum and teacher activities was partially explained by a new report that noted how the New York City Department of Education has allowed unions and foreign supported activist organizations to provide curriculum materials and teacher trainings.

Foreign entities including the American branch of the Qatar Foundation and local entities such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which is supported by Communist Chinese Party entities, are among those discussed.

In Los Angeles, Jewish teachers have filed a suit against the United Teachers Los Angeles union over dues that support anti-Israel activities. Since the union is the sole bargaining representative, union dues are automatically deducted from teachers’ salaries.

The suit details the pervasive anti-Israel activities undertaken under the union’s aegis before and after October 7, 2023, including advocacy for the racist Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. The union has now also voted to call for an arms embargo against Israel.

Jewish schools also continue to be targets for vandalism and other attacks. In Canada, shots were fired for the second time at a Jewish school.

The author is a contributor to SPME, where a significantly different version of this article first appeared.

The post Hate Exploded Across College Campuses Surrounding the October 7 Anniversary first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Social Studies 2024: Phobe Maltz Bovy’s year in nine big vibe-shifts

What happened in the past 12 months? Rather a lot! So to pare it down, I’m limiting this end-of-year recap to things that kept popping up on my own finite radar, with an emphasis on those with relevance to Jewish Canadians. I will not ask whether I missed anything; assume that I have missed—or skipped over—a ton. These are just a handful of the stories about our society I see as relevant going into 2025 and beyond.

Campus protest culture camps out

The encampment trend that took hold at Columbia University and wound up all over the place—including at numerous Canadian schools—became the big story of 2024 for Jewish media and points beyond, the bold, in-your-face sign that the next generation of cultural elites had made Palestine their cause. Or a sign of something else? Not all the student protesters were students; some were professors, others unaffiliated. And the students not on board with the goings-on were very possibly more likely to demonstrate this by going to class than by organizing a counter-demonstration, although the Jewish professor at least temporarily banned by Columbia showed up at the University of Toronto.

Literary world is purging ‘Zionists’

First, a small magazine called Guernica had a meltdown when an Israeli writer, Joanna Chen, wrote an arguably pro-Palestinian essay, but did so while being, you know, Israeli. Chen had refused to serve in the IDF, but she was still too Zionistic for the pages in question. Next up, author Joshua Leifer tried to do a book event for his Tablets Shattered, but a Brooklyn bookstore employee cancelled it just as it was about to start.

Why was this critical-of-Israel book a problem? The interlocutor was going to be a liberal Zionist and one can’t be having that. The books-and-essays world, once a place where Jewish authors once felt reasonably comfortable in North America, now had spreadsheets identifying authors based on indicators of their relationship to Israel.

Searching for signals of antizionism

Look, Diaspora Jews have gone off Israel! No, wait, they’re all-in on Israel, and that’s why they’re buying guns and going to vote for Donald Trump! But then we learned that Jewish Canadians—like our American counterparts—arevirtually unanimous in the belief that Israel should exist as a Jewish state.

(And in similarly shouldn’t-be-surprising news, American Jewish voters overwhelmingly preferred Kamala Harris.)

Tradwives are totally taking over

The concept went from a niche online subculture to mainstream news and just incessant critical coverage. Tradwife this, tradwife that, all to the bafflement of actual traditionalist brides, Jewish and otherwise, if they were even online enough to notice, that is. A tradwife, for the uninitiated, is a social media influencer who posts content wherein she performs being a gender-role-conforming old-school housewife. She’s in something low-cut and she serves her man, but to own the libs, not (allegedly) to titillate straight men of any which politics.

Challah baking has become political

Some baked it to connect with fellow Jews througn established community channels, while others took, shall we say, a different tack.

Yes, 2024 was the year Chatelaine, a Canadian general-interest women’s magazine, published, then quasi-unpublished, an article about baking challah to free Palestine. In an awkward twist, the personal essayist wore an inverted red triangle in the accompanying author photo. This—combined with the content of the essay in question, an essay that didn’t merely criticize Israel’s response to Oct. 7 (which, fair) but erase the fact that Oct. 7 even happened—suggested that maybe it was one of those red triangles. One gesturing at, perhaps, a spot of friendliness towards Hamas.

War of the sexes (cont’d.)

The latest discourse began with the revelation that young men world over are veering to the right, young women to the left. Had women all gone off men? No. But a bunch gestured at plans to do so once Trump won a second go at the U.S. presidency.

And as someone who recently finished writing a book about straight women (to be published by Signal, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada), I have been kept plenty busy.

Reviving the concept of ‘shiksa’

Yes, the Netflix series Nobody Wants This offered a heartwarming rom-com treatment of the extremely adorable scenario of a Jewish man finally being spared the ghastliness that is Jewish women when a bubbly blonde comes his way. Can an ambiguously-Reform rabbi date a woman played by Kirsten Bell? In 2024, anything was possible.

The new death of wokeness

Left-wing illiberalism of the sort that brought us cancel culture is officially passé according to enough big thinkers out there.

Wokeness ain’t actually over yet

There’s also enough evidence to suggest ‘woke’ didn’t go anywhere, but rather transformed and migrated. The transformed bit goes like this: In lieu of a series of current things—individual social-justice concerns that were suddenly the only thing that mattered, only to be displaced by a different one five minutes later—there’s now the omnicause. You can plaster your backpack or coffee shop window or social media bio with a potentially endless set of concerns, as long as they all align, omnicausally speaking.

The migrated one: In a sense, there may have been some geographic migration. Maybe you can’t be cancel-cultured in the States as much as was once the case, but in Canada there are still good old-fashioned campaigns to shut down literary magazines for purity-politics reasons. But when I speak of migration, I mean primarily virtual. Twitter begat X, which in turn begat Bluesky. In layman’s terms, a social media platform that had once been the preferred gathering space of journalists, academics, and sui generis social-media pundits ceased serving that function once Elon Musk took over in October 2022, not all at once but in stages. X, what Twitter is now called, because nigh unusable, a pay-to-play scheme wherein right-wing rage-bait rules the day.

So a bunch of old-Twitter’s so-called power users (dubious honour) migrated, no, fled to a Twitter clone called Bluesky. I wrote a less than rave review of it in the Globe and Mail, which caused the Good folks who love love love Bluesky to anoint me main character. I was even parodied by Canada’s persistent cousin to The Onion with the assumption that the readership understood who they were referring to.

Shortly thereafter, everyone mad at me forgot about this, as actually prominent people arrived on Bluesky and became the source of fury that made what I elicited look like small potatoes (or perhaps I mean smol beans).

The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at pbovy@thecjn.ca, not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.

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Letter from Jasper: This hanukkiah miraculously survived Alberta’s summer wildfire

Warren Waxer has lived in Jasper, Alta., since 1980. His home, along with 358 others, was destroyed in the wildfire that roared through the town from July 22-24, 2024. Very little survived the intense flames—even his car keys were found melted in the rubble, he told The CJN. But as professional crews scoured the razed house, he writes, they uncovered one treasured object.

Three weeks after the wildfire that swept through Jasper National Park and the townsite, Team Rubicon arrived and got to work. Team Rubicon is a humanitarian group, led by military veterans, that helps clean up after disasters. Wearing hazmat suits and breathing masks, this group safely sifts through the ash and debris—the remains of people’s homes and businesses.

Other than the charred hulks of the furnace, fridge and stove, we couldn’t see much that could be salvaged, and we weren’t far wrong. When you see a couple of shiny metal parallel stripes on the grass where your aluminum ladder once was, you can’t be too hopeful.

The Jasper wildfire of July 2024 destroyed everything in its path, including Warren Waxer’s home.

Each item or partial item that the team recovered would be scrubbed of possible contaminants and was then presented us, the homeowners. We were handed a 35mm camera with the glass lens dripping out the front, shattered bits of marble sculpture, singed bits of pottery, and… wait, what’s that?

Our Hanukkah menorah!

A little worse for wear, listing backwards, missing a couple of nights and the shamash holder, but there it was, proud and defiant. From a fire that destroyed anything made of soft metal, somehow, this menorah lived to celebrate another Hanukkah. 

It had been a bad month realizing that treasured memorabilia and family keepsakes were most likely gone. Looking at the basement that was now filled knee-deep with ash and the charred remains of a two-storey house, it was hard to be optimistic. The fact that the menorah survived has boosted our spirits considerably. It has also boosted the status of this menorah from perfectly serviceable (albeit unremarkable) to treasured family heirloom. Not bad for a small-town menorah.

The menorah that survived the wildfire in Jasper, Alta. (Credit: Warren Waxer)

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Mural of Holocaust Survivors in Italy Completely Painted Over in Antisemitic Vandalism

Before and after photos showing the mural in Milan, Italy, that was painted over by vandals. Photo: Provided

A mural in Milan, Italy, that depicts two Holocaust survivors was recently painted over by vandals, who defaced the artwork last month as well.

The mural, located in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto, was painted by renowned Italian contemporary pop artist and activist aleXsandro Palombo and unveiled on Sept. 28. It shows Italian Senate member for life Liliana Segre and Italian author Sami Modiano, two survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. They are dressed in a striped uniform, worn by concentration camp inmates, underneath bulletproof jackets with yellow Stars of David badges that have the word “Jude” in the center. The badges resemble the ones Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis during World War II. The mural is titled “Anti-Semitism, History Repeating.”

Palombo shared on Dec. 2 that vandals painted over the entire mural with white paint, erasing it completely. He said in a released statement that he felt “profoundly embarrassed” by the vandalism. He described it as “an offense after the offense” and “the best way to hide antisemitism at a time when antisemitism is spreading and someone has also decided to deny honorary citizenship to a woman who survived the Holocaust.”

Palombo was referring to Pinero, a small town near Turin in Italy that recently rejected efforts to grant honorary citizenship to Segre. A public educator on the topic of the Holocaust, Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella named Segre a senator for life in 2018. This past November, the City Council of Pinero rejected a motion to confer honorary citizenship to Segre as a symbol in the fight against antisemitism. The move sparked controversy, especially in light of the fact that it took place not long after Pinero Mayor Luca Salvai displayed a Palestinian flag on the balcony of the town hall.

Palombo’s mural of Segre and Modiano was previously vandalized on Nov. 11. The yellow Stars of David and the faces of the Holocaust survivors were scraped off.

A partial view of the mural in Milan, Italy, before (left) and after it was vandalized. Photo: Piero Fassino via X/Twitter screenshot

Ignazio La Russa, president of the Senate in Italy, denounced the mural’s most recent vandalism in an Italian-language post on X. “A coat of white paint applied by some idiot can erase a mural but not the memory,” he wrote. “In firmly condemning a vile act, we reiterate our strong no to anti-Semitism and extend our sincere solidarity to Senator Liliana Segre and Sami Modiano.”

Italy’s Holocaust memorial museum, the Fondazione Museo della Shoah, said, “These acts not only harm art, but undermine the value of memory, which is fundamental for building a conscious and just society.”

In October, a mural by Palombo that showcased Vlada Patapov — a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre that took place during the Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7 last year — was also defaced by vandals.

In November 2023, a month after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Palombo painted a mural that featured Holocaust victim and teenage diarist Anne Frank next to a girl from the Gaza Strip. At the time, he made a second mural of a boy from Gaza dressed as a Hamas terrorist. The boy is depicted standing next to an adult terrorist and together they point their guns at a young Jewish boy from the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust.

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