Some encouraging news suggests that the heretofore depressing battle against out-of-control campus antisemitism is about to take a major turn.
As reported on The Jewish Press website, the U.S. Departments of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has commenced an investigation into charges that Jewish students at Brooklyn College, a unit of the City University of New York, have for years been subjected to persistent and systematic anti-Semitic harassment from both professors and fellow students.
The charges were contained in a formal complaint prepared and submitted on behalf of several students at the college by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. The complaint alleges that Brooklyn College has allowed a hostile environment to proliferate on its campus in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Findings of violations could jeopardize federal funding for the school.
The complaint outlines how professors and students have maligned Jews on the basis of race and ethnic identity, advancing age-old antisemitic tropes about Jewish power, conspiracy and control. Of particular resonance in light of the Whoopi Goldberg controversy is their narrative that Jews are “white” and “privileged” and therefore contribute to systemic oppression of people of color. Goldberg, of course, sought to conveniently include Jews as part of an oppressor class of white people by her rather bizarre, matter of fact assertion that the Holocaust could not have been about race since both Jews and the Nazis were white. It was, she said, just a matter of one group of white people doing something to another group of white people.
According to the complaint, Jewish students who challenged the divisive attacks were met with further harassment and intimidation from faculty and out-of-control administrators, who told students to “get your whiteness in check” and to keep your head down” rather than challenge the status quo.
The complaint goes on to charge that despite repeatedly being placed on notice of the developing hostile environment on Brooklyn College’s campus, the administration failed to take the measures necessary to provide Jewish students with a discrimination-free academic setting.
A similar complaint has been filed by the Brandeis Center alleging antisemitism at Stanford University and is currently being reviewed by several government agencies.
The Brandeis Center also reports that several universities, including the University of Illinois, Williams College, the University of North Carolina, Duke University, the University of Southern California and NYU have agreed to implement steps to combat rising antisemitic harassment and discrimination threatening Jewish students on their campuses.
In recent years the rampant depredations of well entrenched anti-Jewish and anti-Israel student groups have been well documented in The Jewish Press and elsewhere. They are a serious threat to Jewish students in terms of their ability to speak their minds and indeed, to their safety. Indeed, there is a clear and present danger that a good portion of the next generation of decision-makers will never have heard the flip side of the diatribes of the campus bigots.
Hand-wringing, eloquent calls to arms have plainly not worked. But sustained, professional efforts like those of the Brandeis Center can make a world of difference.
