Campus Watch May 11, 2023

Harvard Student’s Thesis Alleges That Israelis Face Discrimination on Campus

Harvard University student Sabrina Goldfischer, who previously served as the president of the university’s Hillel, has published a thesis paper alleging that Israelis have faced discrimination on campus.

Goldfischer explained in an April 22 Times of Israel blog that the course of her investigation for her 110-page thesis — which examined the state of antisemitism on campus — revealed “the most acute examples of discrimination involved Harvard’s Israeli students.” “One student faced backlash for his involvement with Israel Trek, an Israeli student-led trip to Israel for Harvard students who do not identify as Jewish,” Goldfischer wrote.

Goldfischer told the Journal that it was “shocking” for her to learn “the amount of the brunt of antisemitism and anti-Israeli discrimination that the Israeli community on campus has to bear … The stuff that Israeli students go through at Harvard … it’s outright discrimination.”

More Than 80 Jewish Orgs Call on Anthropology Association to Reject BDS Resolution

More than 80 Jewish organizations have signed onto a statement calling on the American Anthropology Association (AAA) to reject a resolution supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The resolution would call for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions and will be voted upon digitally from June 15-30. It is the second time the AAA has considered such a resolution, with the previous time occurring in 2016. “While the Resolution asserts that Israeli academic institutions are ‘complicit’ in the oppression of Palestinians, the reality is that Israeli university leaders and faculty work hard to foster Arab-Jewish coexistence and ensure a diversity of opinion on their campuses, including support for Palestinian voices,” the statement read, adding that “an academic boycott would undercut the important work for peace and social justice being undertaken by many Israeli academics.”

Among the signatories of the statement include the Anti-Defamation League, J Street, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Americans for Peace Now.

UC Santa Cruz Students Celebrate Hitler’s Birthday

A group of UC Santa Cruz students reportedly celebrated Adolf Hitler’s April 20 birthday on campus, according to a statement from the university.

Dr. Akirah Bradley-Armstrong, the university’s vice chancellor for student affairs and success, wrote in the April 30 statement that the students “sang happy birthday and ate cakes adorned with hateful and horrific symbols.” She also noted that on April 28, a student found a flyer on their car in downtown Santa Cruz containing “despicable and degrading claims about Jewish people and LGBTQIA+ people.”

“We unequivocally condemn these – and all – antisemitic and anti-LGBTQIA+ actions,” Bradley-Armstrong said. “They are at odds with our Principles of Community and, as such, will be addressed accordingly.he concerning flyers reported downtown.”

CUNY Denies Report That It’s the “Most Systematically Antisemitic” University in America

A spokesperson for the City University of New York (CUNY) rebuffed a report claiming that the university is the “most systemically antisemitic” in the United States.

As previously reported in the Journal on March 29, the report by Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY (SAFE CUNY) included criticism of Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez for skipping two New York City Council hearings on antisemitism and hiring former CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations] Diversity Officer Saly Abd Alla as CUNY’s Chief Diversity Officer. A CUNY spokesperson told Campus Reform on May 2 that the report is “littered with factual inaccuracies and inflammatory accusations, is designed to malign our system, and ignores CUNY’s consistent and ongoing efforts to counter the violence, hate, antisemitism and racism that can creep into our campuses, our country and the world.” 

SAFE CUNY Co-Founder Jeffrey Lax told Campus Reform that the spokesperson’s statement amounted to “a horrifying admission that they cannot refute even one fact in our report.”

Report: BDS Threatens “Political Neutrality of the University”

An April 22 report from the National Association of Scholars  found that BDS threatens the “political neutrality of the university.”

The report, authored by Ian Oxnevad, studied the movement’s effect at Columbia University, Ohio State University and UC Riverside; Oxnevad found that “anti-Israel professors are instrumental in animating and organizing the BDS movement” and that the movement foments “an environment of intimidation against Jewish students and supporters of Israel.” Additionally, various BDS groups have ties to Palestinian terror organizations like Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, per the report.

“Far from a movement centered exclusively on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, BDS operates as part of a larger progressive, left-wing movement that is well-funded and connected beyond the university,” Oxnevad said in a statement.