The University of California system has had more than its share of straight up anti-Semitic incidents this year. At UC-Davis, after a successful campaign to persuade the student government to demand that Davis divest from certain companies alleged to benefit from Israel’s West Bank activities, someone apparently decided to celebrate by painting swastikas on a Jewish fraternity house. At UCLA, the student government seriously considered rejecting a candidate for the campus judicial board because she was affiliated with Jewish groups on campus.
In response to those incidents and others outside the UC system, UC-Berkeley’s student government passed unanimously a resolution condemning and pledging actively to fight against anti-Semitism.
The vote comes on the heels of the release of a report co-authored by two Trinity College researchers that shows that, at least as self-identified Jewish students report it, anti-Semitism is much more prevalent on college campuses than one might have imagined.
The vote also comes as we commence the eleventh year of Israeli Apartheid Week on American college campuses. This week, now actually two weeks, is the only example I know of an ongoing campus movement devoted to demonizing a state and its supporters. That this state also happens to be the only Jewish state may just have something to do with the hostility toward Jews the Berkeley resolution targets. Perhaps the Senate’s new ad hoc Committee on Anti-Semitism could take a look.