Wednesday, July 07, 2010

U. OF CALIFORNIA DISPUTES CLAIMS ON ANTI-SEMITISM

InsideHigherEd.com, July 7, 2010

The University of California is disputing the claims of Jewish organizations and leaders that there is a notable increase in anti-Semitism on the system's campuses, the Los Angeles Times reported.

A recent letter to the university said that an increasing number of incidents requires a specific focus on preventing anti-Semitism. University officials have acknowledged (and condemned) a number of incidents, but disagree about the extent of the problem. In a response released Tuesday, Mark Yudof, the president, said he
was disturbed by the incidents and would "do everything in my power
to protect Jewish and all other students from threats or actions of
intolerance."

But he also said that the letter overstated the problem and the
degree of concern of many Jewish students, and called the letter
sent to the university "a dishearteningly ill-informed rush to
judgment against our ongoing responses to troubling incidents that
have taken place on some of our campuses."

[Yudof, who is Jewish and whose wife, Judy, is the former lay
president of Conservative Judaism in North America, also wrote that
the Jewish groups may have based their concerns on an unreliable
sampling of student opinion. Most Jewish UC students' "perspectives
are more mixed than you suggest," he wrote. – LA Times]

[However, several authors of the original letter said they were
disappointed with Yudof's response. The signatories included leaders
of such groups as Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Stand with
Us, the Zionist Organization of America and several UC professors
and lecturers. – LA Times]


JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS PROTEST UC PRESIDENT'S
HANDLING OF REPORTS OF ANTI-SEMITISM
By Larry Gordon, Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2010

The president of the University of California and leaders of a dozen
prominent American Jewish organizations are in an unusual public
dispute about the extent of anti-Semitism on UC campuses and the
university's response to it.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0707-uc-jewish-20100707,0,1141548.story

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