Introduction
Hotspots of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment on US campuses 3
Introduction
Marking the start of the 2016-17 academic year, Mollie Harris and Benjamin Gladstone, undergraduates at McGill and Brown Universities respectively, warned Jewish students across North America to prepare for virulent anti-Israel and antisemitic hostility in the classroom and on the quad( Gladstone, 2016; Harris, 2016). The depressing portrait that these students paint for their Jewish peers is characteristic of the broader Jewish community’ s widespread concern about increased antisemitism and anti-Zionism on US campuses related to the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions( BDS) movement( Summers, 2016). Since the beginning of the 2015-16 academic year, student groups aligned with BDS have increasingly relied on more public types of disruptive activism( rallies, interruptions, and“ die-ins”). In some cases, these activities have led to the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students( Israel Campus Coalition, 2016).
In in the first half of 2016, AMCHA reported that 57 % of the 113 US schools with the largest proportions of Jewish undergraduates had incidents involving the targeting of Jewish students for harm, antisemitic expression, or BDS activity. Although this represents a marked increase in the number of incidents compared to 2015( see, also, ADL, 2015), the impact of these incidents on the overall climate of the campus and, in particular on Jewish students, is unclear. How often do Jewish students personally experience specific instances of antisemitic harassment? To what extent do they feel uncomfortable simply being Jewish or expressing their views about Israel on their campus? To what extent does a hostile campus climate affect Jewish students’ connections with Israel? How large a role does hostility toward Israel or Jews play in their day-to-day lives?
In 2015, in an effort to address the lack of systematic data about the intensity and impact of anti-Israel and antisemitic activity, we initiated a program of research on colleges and universities in the United States and Canada( Saxe, Sasson, Wright, & Hecht, 2015). Our research followed a study conducted by Kosmin and Keysar( 2015) which found that, in 2014, more than half of Jewish students in their sample had experienced or witnessed antisemitism on their campuses. Our study found that, in the preceding year, about one third of Jewish students reported being verbally harassed because they were Jewish, slightly less than half were told that“ Israelis behave like Nazis toward the Palestinians,” and about one quarter were blamed for the actions of the Israeli government because they were Jewish. However, the prevalence of these reports varied considerably across campuses. In particular, the study found that schools in the California state system and, to a lesser extent, large land-grant universities in the Midwest, had the highest levels of perceived antisemitism and hostility toward Israel. Our finding that these issues varied dramatically by campus was echoed by Maltz( 2016) who, after visiting several campuses in California in 2016, noted that,“ It’ s hard to generalize about Jewish student life in California, because no two campuses are alike.”
In response to these findings, we first expanded our research program to conduct comprehensive studies of undergraduates at select campuses on which we surveyed both Jewish and non-Jewish students. In studies of both Brandeis University and the University of Pennsylvania we found that issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ranked low on the list of students’ concerns, below issues such as racial inequality and diversity, stress and academic pressure, and the cost of