Jewish College Students Need Protection

The Forward
November 26, 2010 (Advance look)

Jewish College Students Need Protection

I’m sure the Jewish students at University of California at Davis — where in recent years there have been a rash of swastikas, a vandalized sukkah, and nasty anti-Israel events that included anti-Semitic rhetoric and imagery — would be astonished to learn that David Biale, the Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History at UCD, thinks Jewish students don’t deserve the same basic protections and civil rights as other ethnic minorities, because “the Jews are a group with power” (according to Federal Civil Rights Policy Expanded To Protect Jewish College Students, in the November 12 issue). Few Jewish students on the UCD campus would recognize such a description of them. In fact, if they were asked for their own opinion of the newly proposed Title VI provisions, it’s virtually certain that the overwhelming majority of Jewish students would embrace them.


Those students who have knowledge of the Holocaust would find it painfully ironic that Biale’s professorship is named after Emanuel Ringelblum, a Polish Jew with a doctorate in history, who spent the years prior to his murder by the Nazis documenting how a once-thriving Jewish community was slaughtered by the Nazis, and who desperately tried to help and protect his fellow Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. The situation of our students does not resemble that of the Polish Jews whose stories Ringelblum recorded, but, then, we don’t want it to ever become even remotely like that situation.


As a lecturer in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz, I have been deeply concerned about the growing threat to Jewish students at the University of California and involved in efforts to combat the problem. Under the auspices of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, this summer I co-convened a two-week scholarly workshop on contemporary anti-Semitism in higher education. The workshop participants recently issued a statement detailing the scope of anti-Semitism on college campuses across North America and offering recommendations for addressing the problem, including by ensuring that Jewish students are fully protected under federal anti-discrimination law. The statement can be viewed here.


Affording Jewish students normal civil rights protections through Title VI legislation is a wholly good development and should not be disparaged.


Tammi Rossman-Benjamin
Santa Cruz, Calif.