‘Wild wild west atmosphere’: antisemitism on American campuses

“That, to me, was repulsive. As a father, that really got to me, that there’s a student that thinks antisemitism is normalised and treated differently.”

This was the response of US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona when asked in January about the rise in antisemitism on American college campuses. Since October 7, the Department of Education (DOE) has opened scores of anti-discrimination cases, the vast majority in response to charges of antisemitism, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination at federally funded campuses and school districts.

These cases involve many of the elite universities to which high-achieving Jewish students have long aspired, including six of the eight Ivy League colleges (two of these also have cases involving Islamophobia), Stanford, and MIT.

Elite universities have also been the centre of recent mass arrests over out-of-control pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests.

There have also been a number of legal cases independent of the DOE. All of this has led Alyza Lewin, president of the legal activist group Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, to characterise the situation as having “a wild wild west atmosphere”.

Just how wild is it? At the University of California Santa Barbara, the student body president Tessa Veskler, a child of Jews who fled the Soviet Union, was targeted with campus signs saying “you can run but you can’t hide Tessa Veksler”, multiple signs saying “Tessa Veksler Supports Genocide”, as well as signs declaring “Get these Zionist[s] out of office,” with others accusing her of being “racist” and “Zionist”. 

The complaint against American University in Washington, DC, says dormitory doors and posters of Jewish and Israeli students were vandalised with swastikas and threats, and that anti-Israel protests disrupted classes and blocked Jewish students’ access to dining halls, classrooms, and student spaces.