What Antisemitism Requires of Us

A serious debate has taken hold in Jewish life over how to respond to surging antisemitism. It is often framed as a strategic argument, but beneath it lies a deeper question: What does this moment require of Jews?

One side believes the answer is to confront antisemitism in the broader culture: educating, persuading, building alliances and advocating against anti-Jewish hatred. The other has lost confidence in that project and argues that limited resources are better spent creating proud, educated Jews.

But antisemitism is more than an evil to be fought or withstood. It is also a calling – a summons to see what the hatred of Jews reveals about the society that produces it, and to reckon with the brokenness it exposes.

This is what is missing from much of the current Jewish debate. Fighting antisemitism and fortifying Jews against it are essential, and urgent. But they are not the whole of the matter. Anti-Jewish hatred also forces into view the lies, injustices and institutional failures, and urges us to confront them. That is not a distraction from Jewish survival. It is an integral part of what Jewish survival is for.

Nowhere is this clearer than on campus.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, universities and Jewish organizations have often treated campus antisemitism as a succession of incidents: harassment, encampments, exclusion, threats, administrative indifference. All of that is real. All of it matters. None of it should be minimized. Jewish students deserve protection, accountability and serious institutional response.

Strengthening Jewish life on campus is indispensable, too. Jewish students need community, literacy, confidence and organizations that deepen their connection to Jewish life.

Yet protection alone cannot repair the campus culture that made such hostility possible. A stronger Hillel or Chabad can help students endure that culture. It cannot, by itself, fix the university that produced it.

A recent study of three University of California campuses illustrates this larger point. In the two years following Oct. 7, incidents involving the harassment of Jewish students and others labeled “pro-Israel” or “Zionist” rose dramatically: over 3,000% at UCLA, 1,000% at UC Santa Cruz, and 500% at UC Berkeley.

Those surges did not arise in a vacuum. Across the three campuses, academic departments issued anti-Israel political statements, sponsored dozens of one-sided programs, promoted academic boycott-aligned campaigns through official channels and partnered with Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters and antizionist student activist groups. Faculty also brought antizionist activism into their classrooms, from canceling classes for protests to reshaping course content around political advocacy.

The issue is not whether faculty members may hold political views or express them as citizens. Of course they may. The issue is whether the authority, prestige and infrastructure of the university may be used for ideological campaigning. A professor’s private speech differs from a department speaking institutionally. A course that exposes students to contested ideas differs from one that indoctrinates them with predetermined conclusions. A department that hosts genuine debate differs from one that lends its official channels to one-sided political messaging.

When those boundaries collapse, antisemitism doesn’t simply descend upon an otherwise healthy institution. It emerges from habits embedded in campus life. Jews may be among its most visible targets, but they are hardly the only ones harmed. Once universities trade inquiry for mobilization and scholarship for politics, all students are denied a serious education.

That is why familiar campus remedies feel inadequate. Listening sessions, task forces, statements of concern and mandatory trainings may help at the margins. But they often respond to the flare-up while leaving intact the machinery that generates it.

The response must go deeper: restoring the boundaries between scholarship and activism, individual faculty speech and institutional authority, education and indoctrination. It would insist that universities return to their core mission of teaching students how to think, argue, investigate and reach their own conclusions, not train them to serve a political cause.

The campus example brings the larger debate back into focus.

Jews need protection. Jews need stronger communities. But when antisemitism exposes a failure larger than the hatred itself, we should not look away. On campus, antisemitism shows us where the university has stopped acting like a university, and where the boundaries that should protect education from political coercion and students from institutionalized hostility have collapsed.

The same is true beyond campus. Antisemitism shows us where institutions have lost the capacity to keep hatred at bay — where rules are enforced selectively, intimidation is excused as social justice, truth yields to ideology and those with authority no longer defend the limits that make civic life possible.

That is why the current Jewish debate cannot end with a choice between fighting antisemites and strengthening Jewish life. Both are necessary, but neither fully answers what this moment requires. Antisemitism shows us where institutions are broken, standards have been corrupted and limits have been abandoned. What matters now is whether we see those failures and take responsibility for what we can repair. That, too, is part of Jewish survival: not simply continuing to exist, but remaining faithful to what Jewish existence requires of us.

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is the director of AMCHA Initiative, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism at colleges and universities in the United States. She was a faculty member at the University of California for 20 years.