Antisemitism on American college campuses is comparable to Stage 2 cancer, and if allowed to progress to Stage 4, academia will be “doomed,” the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust, told The Algemeiner a day after presidents of elite US universities refused to issue a condemnation of genocidal calls against Jews and Israel.

According to Dani Dayan, institutions of higher education are becoming increasingly filled with “pseudo-academic theories advocating for genocide of the Jewish people,” and the leadership of those colleges are supporting them, “either by action or inaction.”

Dayan said he explained to University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill — who drew outrage in September for refusing to cancel an anti-Zionist festival featuring speakers accused of promoting antisemitic conspiracies and violence against Israel — that antisemitism was a “cancerous process” that wasn’t stopped at Stage 1 by universities when it would have been “relatively easy” to do so.

“Now we are in Stage 2, which is much more difficult, and necessarily takes harsher steps,” he said.

“But if we don’t take those steps now, we will reach Stage 3 and Stage 4, which is terminal,” he added, clarifying the problem would be lethal “not for the Jews, but terminal for the university. They will be doomed if they continue this way.”

Yad Vashem, which is based in Jerusalem, released a statement on Wednesday saying it was “extremely alarmed” by the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) over their conduct at a hearing on campus antisemitism before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday. The statement highlighted a refusal by the administrators to clearly affirm that genocidal calls against Jews violate their university policies and codes of conduct.

“Yad Vashem is appalled that leaders of elite academic institutions would use misleading contextualization to minimize and excuse calls for genocide of the Jews,” the statement read.

Fitting with Dayan’s analogy of a progressive cancer, the Yad Vashem statement noted that the Holocaust “did not start with ghettos or gas chambers, but with hateful antisemitic rhetoric, decrees, and actions by senior academics, among other leaders of society.”

Dayan called on campus leaders to visit Israel and Yad Vashem during the upcoming university semester break “in order to learn what past calls for the genocide of Jews has led to — the Holocaust.”

“They will be able to understand what can be the consequences of condoning blatant antisemitism. Universities are not immune to bigotry,” Dayan told The Algemeiner. “Those that burned books in Germany in the 1930s, books written by Jews, were not the ignorant masses. They were professors and students in elite universities no less prestigious than Harvard, MIT, and UPenn are today.”

“Never Again must begin with education,” he concluded.

US college campuses have experienced an alarming spike in antisemitic incidents — including demonstrations calling for Israel’s destruction and the intimidation and harassment of Jewish students — since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.

During Tuesday’s hearing, presidents Magill of Penn, Claudine Gay of Harvard, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT largely evaded questions about the consequences of rising antisemitism on their campuses, where there have been several instances of both students and professors rationalizing the Hamas atrocities and blaming Israel. This anti-Israel activism has at times manifested in violence against Jewish students.

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