When Being Friendly Isn’t Enough

I went to UCLA as an undergrad, and although I never had the classic dorm experience (I commuted from my parent’s house), I still have tons of classic college memories. The Jewish school newspaper where we’d hang out, Ha-Am; The long, beautiful strolls on the lush, green Bruin Walk; The early form of an “As a Jew” professor, telling me that if they can come to school on a Jewish holiday, so could I; The Liberal Arts professor casually referring to Israel as a colonizer. Okay, the last 2 parts weren’t so much fun, but dealing with your annoying professors is still part of the college experience, right?

But then came something a bit more sinister. It wasn’t illegal yet, but it certainly marked the start of making people like me uncomfortable walking around campus. On Bruin Walk, I would sporadically be greeted with large chalk writing, that said, “Zionists are murderers; Israelis are Zionists; Therefore Israelis are murderers”. A simple little logic puzzle at work, and it was blatantly clear that Jew-hatred had found a safe way to attack us in the public eye; just exchange the word Jew for Zionist, and it wasn’t a hate crime.

A decade before nursing was even a consideration, I was an Art History major. One of those specialties you choose when you either have a focused interest in joining the art world, or for lack of figuring out what the heck to study. I personified the latter. I had a few Art History classes with the same male Muslim student. We were the only men in classes of 40-200 women, so I felt a kind of chromosomal kinship with him. In life, I make sure to always say hi to everyone I make eye contact with, because that’s the Boaz way, but I took particular care to always smile and say hello to him. As is the courteous human response, he got used to smiling and saying hello to me as well. Months went by. Totally uneventful.

Then one day, I was leaving Ha-Am, which shared the same hallway as the other offshoots of UCLA’s Daily Bruin paper. As I left our tiny Jewish periodical’s hangout, the Muslim student was leaving his Al-Talib office, the Muslim student paper at the time. He was walking with a female student, wearing her hijab. As they got to the exit first, he did the human thing, and held the door open for me. THANKS I said, with a huge smile. The young lady turns to him, and loudly spat the words I haven’t forgotten over 2 decades later, “How dare you hold open the door for a ZION!” He looked ashamed, which I hoped meant embarrassment over her unacceptable, antisemitic insult, but instead, he did not smile nor say hello to me ever again. He had been chastised, and realized I was apparently the enemy. Perhaps he also secretly felt shame over it – I’ll never know. But his actions were no longer that of a friendly classmate, and this saddened me.

A lesson that has stuck with me ever since that day, is that Zionist (in all grammatical conjugations) was the new sneaky/clever way to be antisemitic, but, you know, make it technically about politics, so it’s okay. A bit of semantic somersaulting, and the subterfuge is complete. This girl didn’t know me, but I was a Jew with a kippah on my head, and her colleague was holding a door for me, and that filled her with disgust. If she had said, “How dare you hold open the door for a JEW!” there could be repercussions from a university’s code of conduct. But “Zionist” and “Israeli” were, and continue to be, safe words for people to hide behind, and create lie after lie, and blood libel after blood libel. It’s just politics, right?

We’ve seen tide pods, car surfing, and Kylie Jenners’ lips become sensational challenges that have taken off among the young, in spite of being dangerously stupid ideas. What I see happening on college campuses from coast to coast, including my own alma mater, saddens me. But it can’t be entirely surprising. The idea started decades ago, as I watched people normalize turning Zionist/Israeli into an acceptable insult. And with a dash of antisemitism, a few million here and there from Qatar, the tenure of anti-Israel professors, and the manipulations from Chinese TikTok, what was a fringe insult 25 years ago for me, has become the normative college experience.

I venture to guess that if I was in those art history classes now, with those same anti-Israel professors in the Liberal Arts Department, my Muslim colleague would never have had the opportunity to hold the door open for me, I would have been Enemy #1 for daring to wear my Zionist kippah every day, offending their delicate, developing young minds.

Boaz Hepner works as a Registered Nurse in Saint John’s Health Center. He moonlights as a columnist, where his focuses are on health and Israel, including his Chosen Links section of the Journal.