A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a bullhorn during a protest at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on March 11, 2025. Photo: Daniel Cole via Reuters Connect.
Jewish community advocates and civil rights lawyers discussed the campus antisemitism crisis in American higher education during two days of briefings and public comment held by the US Commission on Civil Rights last week, urging the agency to fight anti-Jewish hatred as aggressively as with other forms of discrimination.
Titled “Antisemitism on America’s College and University Campuses: Current Conditions and the Federal Response,” the forum served as one component of the commission’s bipartisan investigation of campus antisemitism, an inquiry led by Peter Kirsanow, a Republican, and Mondaire Jones, a Democrat. Drawing from advocates as well as critics of the Jewish community’s response to campus antisemitism, it highlighted work that remains undone while exposing some differences in opinion on Zionism, free expression on campus, and interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in any program or activity receiving federal funding.
During the proceedings, several students who witnessed the onslaught firsthand described how the administrative bureaucracy, a branch of higher education governance dominated by the American progressive movement, stonewalled discrimination complaints, ignored utterances of classic antisemitic tropes, and refused to acknowledge rising antisemitism on the political left while accusing Jewish community advocates of assaulting academic freedom.
“I raised concerns repeatedly with administrators — but was met with silence or deliberate indifference. My peers faced retaliation in classic DARVO tactic: deny, attack, and reverse victim-offender roles,” said Sabrina Soffer, research fellow for the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and a George Washington University alumna who sued the institution over alleged antisemitic discrimination. “We must stop this pipeline of hate in its tracks. Administrators must be held accountable for failing to enforce academic integrity and upholding their duty of care. We must scrutinize foreign funding, syllabi review, and the composition of academic departments.”
For several years before and since Hamas’s Oct.7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, The Algemeiner has reported daily on campus antisemitism incidents which involved identity-based physical assaults, verbal abuse, and others acts of discrimination. These included anti-Zionists spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew”; gang assaults at Columbia University’s Butler Library; swastika graffiti; the desecration of Jewish religious symbols; and the expulsion of a sexual assault survivor from a victim support group over her support for Zionism.
Other incidents include, a faculty group’s sharing an antisemitic political cartoon which marked Jews and Israel as enemies of people of color; a Cornell University student threatening to murder Jewish men, whom he called pigs, and to rape Jewish women, and perpetrate a mass shooting at the campus’ kosher dining hall; and professors praising Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, which included mass murder, sexual assault, and kidnapping as legitimate modes of “resistance.”
Many such incidents preceded the Oct. 7 massacre by several years and received little to no coverage in the mainstream press.
Lenny Gold, executive producer of the campus antisemitism awareness documentary “The Blind Spot,” said during the hearing that higher education has hidden from the problem in lieu of addressing it transparently and vigorously.
“Schools often invoke academic freedom to justify their indifference to antisemitism while failing to recognize freedom’s inseparable partner: responsibility,” Gold said. “Academic responsibility includes eliminating the blind spot towards Jews and our inextricable connection to our ancient homeland, and having zero tolerance for antisemitism in classrooms, on campus, and in curricula, academic departments, and administrative staffs.”
He continued, “Anti-discrimination programs and policies must treat Jews an antisemitism on an equal footing with other protected groups and forms of prejudice.’
Soffer and Gold’s point of view sustained a slew of opposition during last week’s gathering, with some critic isms being uttered by Jewish students from elite colleges who accused the media and pro-Israel Jewish community of exaggerating the antisemitism crisis in the name of profits, ideology, and bullying the Ivy League. They also accused US President Donald Trump — whose daughter is Jewish and whose administration has mounted a legal campaign against campus antisemitism and the ideological bias that fostered it — of exploiting antisemitism to promote a political agenda.
“Since the Gaza War, I’ve felt more hesitant to tell people I’m Jewish, not because I’m scared of being the victim of a hate crime, but because I’m scared people will assume I’m against Palestinian people and associate me with the Trump administration’s anti-Palestinian rhetoric,” American University student Ellie Sweet told the commission, insisting that what is being described as antisemitism is harmless, anti-Israel rhetoric.
Another student, Sarah Silverman of Harvard University, screamed her entire seven-minute statement, in which she at one point charged that “policy described as protecting Jewish students did not make me feel protected!” She added, “Instead, in a deeply troubling way, I felt blamed. I knew I had done nothing wrong, but when decisions are made in your name without ever speaking to you but are affecting your academic community in extremely negative ways, you begin to worry that others believed you asked for these actions.”
A highlight of the event was testimony delivered by Kenneth Marcus, who served as assistant secretary for civil rights during the first Trump administration and currently leads the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
“Antisemitism does have various disguises, and anti-Zionism in that sense brings forward to the present all of the same tropes, the same stereotypes, the same defamations that have historically befallen the Jewish people, viewing Israel as the collective Jew or Jew among nations” he told the commission. “That is the form of antisemitism that we see most commonly on colleges campuses and that we need to address.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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