The Stanford Daily on April 13 ran an op-ed by Molly Horwitz, a Stanford University junior, titled, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” in which she gives her account of events that transpired on March 13 when, she says, the Students of Color Coalition asked her, a candidate for Stanford Student Senate, whether the fact that she is Jewish would bias her decisionmaking on matters related to divestment from Israel.
“The rest of the interview was a blur to me,” Horwitz writes, describing how she felt in the interview with SOCC when, she said, they questioned her about her Jewishness. “I barely kept it together. As soon as I left the interview room I began shaking and hyperventilating…what made me so distressed was not that SOCC had asked me about divestment, but that they had thought my Jewishness might make me a poor senator.”
In the oped, Horwitz asks SOCC to “apologize and work to address the needs of Jewish students, as well as other minority students.”
The divestment movement is a growing phenomenon on college campuses across the country. Recently, UCLA student Rachel Beyda underwent a similar line of questioning during a UCLA student government confirmation hearing. The incident became a national news story.
Horwitz filed an official complaint shortly following the SOCC interview.
Elections at Stanford take place this week.
