T-shirts emblazoned with swastikas that were being sold at USC by a vendor created a stir on campus the morning of Feb. 15 after a student discovered them at a central area of campus, near the Tommy Trojan statue.
A university official said the vendor was asked to leave as a result.
The shirts may have been referring to the historical significance of the symbol before its appropriation by the Nazis. One shirt featured the phrase, “To Hell with Hitler! I’ve been a Good Luck Sign Since the Beginning of Time” and different styles of swastikas appeared above the words “Buddhist,” “Greek,” “Christian” and more. The design featured the phrase, “Friends of the Swastika” as well as an image of a Jewish star with a swastika inside.
According to the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the swastika “was used at least 5,000 years before Adolf Hitler designed the Nazi flag. The word swastika comes from the Sanskrit svastika, which means ‘good fortune’ or ‘well-being.’ … To this day it is a sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Odinism.”
That didn’t stop some on campus from expressing their dismay at the symbol’s appearance. Among the first to discover the T-shirts was USC student Ilana Spiegel, who notified campus officials. USC had a contract with the vendor, whose name was not immediately available to the Journal, she said.
Spiegel took to Facebook to express her dismay at the incident.
“I’m shaking as I write this,” she wrote in a post on Facebook around 11:30 a.m., accompanying a photograph of one of the shirts. “I was walking to class this morning and saw this T-shirt for sale at this vendor.”
Chabad of USC Executive Director Rabbi Dov Wagner also denounced the shirts. He said the swastika’s connections to Nazism can’t be ignored and therefore the shirts were inappropriate to to be sold on campus.
“I think some symbols can’t be reclaimed. If it’s something clearly provocative, and I believe whether that was the intention of the guy — the vendor — or not, the intention of such material is to offend and many students were commenting they were grandchildren of [Holocaust] survivors, etc., and it triggered a deep emotional response to see such material displayed openly on campus,” he said.
A statement from USC Hillel said the shirts “have no place on our campus.”
“These items are anti-Semitic and trivialize the Holocaust, an incredibly dark period in history in which more than six million Jews perished,” the Feb. 15 statement signed by Bailey London, executive director of USC Hillel, says.
Eddie North-Hager, USC director of media relations, confirmed that the incident occurred: “A vendor was asked to leave because the items he was selling led to the vendor causing a disruption on campus. The merchandise the vendor was selling did not meet community standards, per USC guidelines for vendors who wish to sell goods and services on campus.”
North-Hager said the shirts were in violation of a USC campus policy that says, according to policy.usc.edu, “Approval for on campus sales will only be considered for those vendors whose products or services are not considered obscene as defined by community standards.”
Spiegel, 21, a junior who describes herself as a “mixed-race Jewish women,” characterized the instance as an exception to the rule in terms of what the campus atmosphere at USC is like.
“I feel like USC is supportive of the Jewish community … I’ve never felt unsafe on campus as a Jew before,” she said.
