Set Up to Fail: The Liability of Being a Jew on Campus

As a former pro-Israel student leader, it takes a lot to scare me when it comes to Israel-bashing. But a few weeks ago, I saw something that terrified me.

On June 19, the senior class president at Pomona College, reposted a message about Yemen on Instagram:

“6 million people died in the Holocaust, we will commemorate it to this day. 18.4 MILLION people are dying in Yemen RIGHT NOW. That’s 3 holocausts at once. Saudi is responsible. SILENCE IS COMPLIANCE!!”

The post was referring to Yemen’s decadelong civil war, which turned into a proxy war between Iran, which backs the Houthi rebels, and the Gulf States, led by Saudi Arabia, which support Yemen’s government.

But there was an image underneath that read:

“once again, zionist-israel-birthright-vacation-stuck-on-comparing-holocaust-to-racism-WW2-worshipping bitches, this should be right up ur alley. oh wait u hate brown people.”

At the top of her repost the class president wrote, “[this] put into words all I’ve been thinking!” (When reporting this story last month, the Journal declined to name the woman, who said she has been a victim of domestic abuse and feared her alleged abuser could track her down.) 

Two Jewish Pomona undergraduates and one alumnus drafted a letter to the Associated Students of Pomona College and the administration, calling the class president’s words anti-Semitic and asking for an apology. They also asked other students to sign the letter. They wrote, in part, “Her endorsement of the comments … directly isolates and targets the Jewish students she is supposed to fairly represent.” 

I’m a moderate, but what I see is that if you’re a Jewish student, you must keep quiet because you are “privileged.”

So far, this was just another day in the abusive battle against pro-Israel students on campus — a battle that doesn’t take a summer break.

I’m Facebook friends with the alumnus, which gave me access to private social media activity that put a whole new spin on this disturbing story. Immediately after posting the letter, the alumnus — who worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign — received a flood of comments, mostly from non-Jewish peers, defending the class president, including this:

“I think that you should definitely consider your positionality trying to dox a first generation, low income, womxn of color attending a PWI,” commented one of his Facebook friends. (Doxing means revealing someone’s identity online for malicious purposes; PWI, in this instance, refers to a predominantly white institution.)

A self-described “Black-African international student” commented, “It is unfortunate to see Palestinian and WOC [Women of Color] leaders targeted for speaking up against Israeli human rights injustices …. I encourage everyone to question why [she] is being targeted for being a Palestinian woman.”

Another wrote, “i can hear what you are saying, but seeing an attempt to dox a first-gen, low-income, Palestinian Muslim woman for advocating for Yemen as an « anti-Semitic » attack is violent, especially as it was a RE-post.”

Notice a pattern? I’m a moderate, but what I see is that if you’re a Jewish student,  you must keep quiet because you are “privileged.” You’re not even allowed to be offended by anti-Semitism. 

The class president issued an official apology on June 23, posted to her now-private Instagram account. It said, in part, “When I wrote that my friend ‘put into words what I was thinking,’ I was referring to the original tweet highlighting the lack of global responses to the atrocities in Yemen. In hindsight, I now realize that my friend didn’t write the tweet, but rather the anti-semetic (sic) below. In my haste to repost the story, I truly didn’t mean to amplify those hurtful comments.”

The Journal reported that the Claremont Israel Progressive Alliance, which had launched a petition calling on the class president to apologize or step down, praised the apology.

But what the class president described as a mistake had ignited a backlash. Her defenders said to leave her alone, asserting that she was a victim, that those who took her to task were missing the bigger picture, and that she was showing compassion for Yemen. Someone else commented, “She was not coming from a place of anti-semitism (sic) but rather an understandable frustration with a lack of response on the awful Yemeni crisis.” Another commented with a link to a March 1 op-ed in The Forward by Peter Beinart titled, “Debunking the Myth that Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism.” 

Imagine if a white student had responded to racist comments about Black people by posting a video featuring conservative commentator Candace Owens, who, like Beinart, doesn’t represent the majority of her community?

Imagine if a white student had responded to racist comments about Black people by posting a video featuring conservative commentator Candace Owens, who, like Beinart, doesn’t represent the majority of her community?

Members of any faith and ethnicity are entitled to express themselves but Jews seem to be the exception and non-Jews feel compelled to tell them what’s anti-Semitic and what isn’t. The co-author of the letter stressed this hypocrisy in a video he created in which he announced that the student president had apologized for her actions. The apology prompted him to take down the petition, but not until after he’d received a barrage of “hate mail,” he told me.  

One young woman who described herself in the comments as “the leader of a Jewish group at the Claremont Colleges,” defended the class president and referred to the pro-Israel Jewish community as “a group of people who unfortunately frequently uses their very real history of suffering to delegitimize contemporary social justice issues and racism as lesser than.” She continued, “Further, though there certainly [are] undertones of anti-Zionism (a political stance that [the class president] has every right to have just as I do) in this post, anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism and never has been or will be.”

How can pro-Israel students defend themselves when one of their Jewish campus leaders denies any connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism?

How can a pro-Israel, white Jewish student have a voice on campus today, especially when a class president reiterates the message that Jews don’t care about “brown people?” That’s not only scary, but dangerous.

This is precisely where Sephardic, Mizrahi and Jewish students of color can play a huge role in taking back the Jewish voice that seems to have been silenced due to race because the concerns of white Jewish students increasingly are being dismissed. They’re not white and therefore can’t be muted as easily. I always believed my identity as a visibly nonwhite Jew from the Middle East gave me an advantage when I confronted anti-Israel peers at UC San Diego.

Jewish students also will continue to need non-Jewish student allies, including people of color and heads of LGBTQ groups, as well as campus Democratic and Republican groups, to defend Israel on campus and ensure respectful dialogue and debate.

I’m waiting for Pomona College to boycott Saudi Arabia, rather than Israel. If the senior class president and others are concerned about Yemen, they can organize campaigns to support Yemenis. Perhaps some of the supporters for peace and human rights in Yemen will be Jewish students, including a few whose families escaped Yemen in the 20th century and found refuge in Israel and the United States. But then again, activists may decide Yemeni voices must be heard, unless they’re Yemeni Jews.

Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker and activist.