Reporting anti-Semitism: There’s an app for that

Campus hate has a new enemy that fits in the pocket of your pants. 

CombatHateU, a new smartphone app for Apple iOS and Android developed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is intended to allow Jewish college students to immediately report and confront anti-Semitism. 

The app aims to make the reporting process as simple as possible, Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center researcher Rick Eaton told the Journal via email.

“To use the app to report you only need click the center shield from the home screen and it will give you the report form,” Eaton said. “We ask each user to give us a one-time profile with their name and email address and school, if they chose. All reports to us are confidential, but we need to be able to reach someone reporting in case we need to clarify information.”

CombatHateU also includes a news feature that aggregates reports of anti-Semitic incidents all over the world. 

The app is available for download through the iTunes store for Apple users and through Google Play for Android devices.

The Wiesenthal Center describes the app as the third in a series of special anti-hate apps. A previously released app, CombatHate, is available for junior high and high school students.

The Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) became involved with the promotion of the app following an anti-Israel incident at Ohio University last month. 

“Anti-Semitic rhetoric on campuses has to stop. [We are] thrilled to be partners with the [Wiesenthal Center],” AEPi executive director Andy Borans said in a press release. “Now … [AEPi] members have a place to report anti-Semitic hate speech, which has no place on campus.” 

The app’s release, announced during an Oct. 7 launch party in New York, came on the heels of a major anti-Semitic incident at Emory University in Atlanta, where swastikas were spray-painted on the AEPi fraternity house hours after the end of Yom Kippur. 

An L.A.-based launch party for the new app is expected to take place in the coming weeks.

The Wiesenthal Center is a Los Angeles-based human rights organization. It oversees the Museum of Tolerance as part of its mission of confronting anti-Semitism, standing with Israel and educating about the Holocaust.