Northwestern Must Fight Antisemitism on Campus

It's just one of many colleges that have recently experienced prejudice against Jews.

T hese past few weeks have been difficult for Jewish observers of higher education. Last month, several student groups signed a statement written by NYU School of Law’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter defending terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and accusing Zionists of controlling the media, a well-worn antisemitic canard.

On April 26, Georgetown Law School’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter hosted Mohammed El-Kurd, an activist who has accused Israelis of harvesting the organs of dead Palestinians and of having “an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood & land.”

In recent weeks, the Rutgers chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi — a historically Jewish fraternity — faced multiple incidents of antisemitic harassment. First, activists waving Palestinian flags yelled antisemitic slurs and spat at fraternity brothers. A few days later, vandals threw eggs at AEPi’s house during the fraternity’s Holocaust Remembrance Day proceedings — the second year in a row the house was egged during Yom HaShoah.

On Saturday, April 23, at Northwestern, where I am an undergraduate, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter organized a candlelight vigil and painted messages across Northwestern’s “Rock,” a boulder on campus that student organizations paint for various promotional purposes.

By Tuesday morning, alongside the SJP chapter’s Instagram username, the rock bore the slogan “From the River to the Sea.”

The slogan, used by terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, advocates the establishment of a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, erasing Israel from the map. To accomplish this goal would necessarily entail the ethnic cleansing of almost 7 million Jews within the Jewish state’s borders. Northwestern’s administration has yet to issue a statement.

This is not the first time students have painted the eliminationist slogan on the Rock. Last year, amid the firing of rockets fired from Gaza and the subsequent Israeli intervention, Northwestern’s Associated Student Government passed a resolution condemning the “Israeli occupation” and accusing Jews of “settler colonialism” in establishing a state in their homeland.

Soon after Northwestern’s student government passed the resolution, its supporters painted the “From the River to the Sea” slogan on the Rock.

Northwestern’s administration, as in the wake of this year’s Rock painting, declined to comment last year as well. There is a notable difference between the two instances, though.

In covering the student-government resolution and subsequent Rock painting, the Daily Northwestern, the campus paper, did note that some students opposed the language in the bill, such as use of the phrase “Zionist settler-colonialism,” though it did not mention the eliminationist slogan’s presence on the Rock.

In its coverage of this year’s Rock painting, the Daily Northwestern issued nothing but a press release. Though its track record leaves much to be desired, the extent to which the paper’s reporters took pro-Palestinian activists’ word at face value is disappointing.

The Daily Northwestern quotes a co-president of the SJP chapter “who asked to remain anonymous for safety concerns.” The co-president — without attaching his or her name to the comment, of course — said “there is so much propaganda” making the conflict “seem like such a complicated issue . . . being anti-Israel has nothing to do with antisemitism at all.”

That the Daily would reprint those words without any qualification speaks volumes, as does the Northwestern administration’s failure to issue any sort of statement opposing a call for ethnic cleansing.

When blatantly antisemitic conduct like this goes unchecked, it demonstrates a normalization of the hatred of Jews. And that normalization does not stop at the schoolhouse gate. Antisemites on college campuses are not disabused of their bigotry come graduation.

Amnesty International, which in February released a shambolic report accusing Israel of “committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians,” and California’s state legislature, which last year promoted an ethnic-studies curriculum erroneously portraying the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement as a benevolent force fighting for Palestinian rights, demonstrate just that.

American universities often act as a breeding ground for hatred of Jews, with students promulgating such views under the guise of, as an anonymous Northwestern SJP co-president put it, “an intersectional fight.”

The notion of intersectionality — an ideology prevalent on college campuses that stresses the overlap between various groups considered to be marginalized — is, as members of the tribe like to say, bad for the Jews. Under its umbrella, Jews are considered white and therefore oppressors, and thus antisemitism cannot possibly be a legitimate form of hatred. The SJP co-president demonstrated as much with his or her invoking of “Black liberation” in his or her statement to the Daily Northwestern.

A recent Anti-Defamation League audit found that 2021 was a new high-water mark for incidents of antisemitism in the United States. A report by Harvard and Tufts researchers shows antisemitic attitudes to be far higher among young people than other forms of prejudice.

It is unfair to name progressive racial essentialism as the sole cause of antisemitic violence. But there is no question that the demonization of Israel and the application of American leftist notions of race to Israel’s existence helps create a permission structure for bigotry against the Jewish people.

Until American universities take a full-throated stand against the world’s oldest hatred, it will continue to fester on their campuses. Until the fire of antisemitism is extinguished, it will continue to burn in the United States.