Antisemitism ‘in the air’ at Stanford, university committee finds

A new report from a Stanford committee focused on addressing antisemitism and anti-Israel bias determined that antisemitism is “widespread and pernicious” at the elite Palo Alto, Calif., university, capturing the atmosphere on campus in its eye-catching title: “It’s in the air.” The 148-page document is the first official account to be released publicly by the committee, which was created by Stanford President Richard Saller in November weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel set off a wave of antisemitism on American campuses. 

Comprising Stanford faculty, staff, students and alumni, the 12 members of the committee detailed the hostile conditions faced by Jewish and Israeli students on campus since October. They described an environment of intimidation and fear, with students and Jewish faculty facing a complex mixture of exclusion and harassment. The report’s authors outlined instances of antisemitism across campus — in the classroom, on social media, in residential life and at campus protests. 

“Some of this bias is expressed in overt and occasionally shocking ways,” the committee found, “but often it is wrapped in layers of subtlety and implication, one or two steps away from blatant hate speech.”

Occasionally, the level of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment “reached a level of social injury that deeply affected people’s lives,” the report’s authors found. Students moved out of dorm rooms because of antisemitic incidents, such as mezuzot being torn down from their doors; some students were “ostracized, canceled or intimidated” for identifying openly as Jewish “or for simply being Israeli”; other Jewish students feared displaying Jewish symbols “for fear of losing friendships or group acceptance.”

One incident of particular concern, which was reported widely in the fall, happened days after Oct. 7, when the instructor of an undergraduate seminar asked Jewish students to raise their hands, saying “he was simulating what Jews were doing to Palestinians” by taking a Jewish student’s personal belongings while the student was “turned around and looking out the window,” according to the report. The instructor also minimized the deaths of Jews in the Holocaust. The instructor was suspended, and his contract expired at the end of last year. But more than 1,700 students signed a petition supporting him; Stanford has an undergraduate population of roughly 7,800. 

The report’s authors singled out the incident because it reflects the “current predicament” Stanford faces in addressing “incidents in which Jewish students feel singled out, intimidated, and harmed solely because of their identities as Jews, [and] are trivialized or dismissed by their peers and community in ways that never would be tolerated if done to students with other identities that have historically been subject to bigotry.”

The outright, direct targeting of Jewish students that happened in this freshman seminar was not a common occurrence, the report found. 

“The most common manifestation of antisemitism in student life,” according to the report, was “the imposition of a unique social burden on Jewish students to openly denounce Israel and renounce any ties to it.” 

Although antisemitism manifested itself in classrooms, campus protests and among friend groups, “no venue has provided a wider and more uninhibited berth for the expression of hostility toward Jews and Israelis than social media,” the committee found. On Fizz, a social media platform for Stanford students where all posts are anonymous, antisemitism is rampant. Posts call out “Zios,” using a derogatory slur for Zionists. Others mock Jewish students who expressed concerns about antisemitism or their safety on campus. 

The committee issued detailed recommendations for the university, such as applying disciplinary standards equally and meaningfully, enforcing content moderation on Fizz, improving training on antisemitism for resident assistants and including Jews and Israelis in the categories recognized in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs on campus. 

Most important, the committee argued, is for the university to prioritize civil discourse and aim to restore important norms that the report’s authors allege have declined precipitously since the fall.

“The core problem, we concluded, is not simply the failure to punish rule violations in a concrete way. It is the broader deterioration of norms that once stigmatized antisemitism,” the report said. “The best way for Stanford to respond to antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias is for it to recommit to core university principles that should be promoted and defended equally for all groups, irrespective of race, religion, nationality or other forms of identity.”

The antisemitism-focused committee pledged to work closely with a similar committee examining Islamophobia and anti-Arab discrimination on campus. The leaders of both groups met as they prepared reports, which were released on the same day. “Our concern and recommendations to counter bias on campus were written with concern for the broader Stanford community and not simply Jewish students, faculty and staff,” the antisemitism committee wrote. 

The university also released a report on Thursday from the committee formed to support the school’s Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities. Muslim and Jewish students shared concern on some issues, including a fear shared by religiously identifiable students, like Muslim women who wear a hijab or Jewish men who wear a kippah.

Still, the reports diverged — for instance, in the “Rupture and Repair” report, a statement from the Muslim, Arab and Palestinian committee took issue with “calls for ‘civil discourse,’” alleging that the term “reflect[s] a suspicion of student activism, a distrust of speech outside the boundaries of institutional orthodoxy and opposition to [DEI].” The report called for broader protection of free speech and condemned disciplinary action taken against some anti-Israel protesters who interrupted a family weekend event, the university’s handling of which drew praise in the antisemitism report. 

The Muslim, Arab and Palestinian committee’s report also took a stance in support of anti-Zionist Jewish students who felt at times more aligned with the Muslim community than the Jewish community in recent months, the report’s authors found.

“​​We support these community members’ conceptual separation between antisemitism and anti-Zionism,” the report said. “We also think that the identification of ‘good Jews’ is an antisemitic trope, and we believe our recommendations on speech, safety and academic programming will serve Jewish members of the Stanford community as much as they serve anyone else.”

Saller said in a statement that the reports indicate “additional areas for attention” beyond what work the university is already doing to address hate. 

“The reports will contribute to the essential ongoing work of building a campus community in which everyone can truly thrive, and in which acts of bias and discrimination have no place,” Saller said. 

Anti-Israel Stanford students take over president’s office; university arrests 13 protesters

Months of intense anti-Israel protests at Stanford University escalated on Wednesday morning — the last day of classes for the spring quarter — when 13 students and alumni broke into and barricaded themselves inside President Richard Saller’s office, insisting that the university meet their demands to cut ties with Israel. Within hours of the 5:30 a.m. break-in, law enforcement arrested all of the rioters and the university shut down an anti-Israel illegal encampment that has engulfed campus since April. 

The demonstrators filmed themselves covering Saller’s desk in red paint, destroyed property and renamed the building to “Dr. Adnan Office,” in honor of Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, “the Palestinian General Surgeon who was murdered in April by the Israeli genocidal campaign,” the group told The Stanford Daily. Al-Bursh died while in Israeli prison, where he was being held due to national security reasons, the Israel Defense Forces said. 

Meanwhile, chaos ensued outside of the building as well; a public safety officer was injured after being shoved by the demonstrators, who were interfering with a transport vehicle. The Main Quad, the historic center of the university, was scrawled with graffiti such as “De@th 2 Isr@hell,” “Pigs taste best dead” and “F*** Amerikkka.” 

“There has been extensive damage to the interior of Building 10, [where Saller’s office is located], and exterior of the buildings in the quad,” Dee Mostofi, a Stanford University spokesperson told Jewish Insider.  

Dozens of students and alumni have continued rioting — including throwing medal barricades at police officers — outside of the building throughout Wednesday morning. 

“We are appalled that our students chose to take this action and we will work with law enforcement to ensure that they face the full consequences allowed by law,” Mostofi said. “All arrested students will be immediately suspended and in case any of them are seniors, they will not be allowed to graduate.” 

Mostofi continued, “We have consistently emphasized the need for constructive engagement and peaceful protest when there is a disagreement in views. This was not peaceful protest and actions such as what occurred this morning have no place at Stanford.” 

The student and alumni demonstrators issued three demands to Stanford: add the divestment bill submitted by Stanford Against Apartheid in Palestine to the next Board of Trustees meeting, with a recommendation by Saller supporting the bill; disclose finances from the fiscal year 2022 including endowment investments; and drop all disciplinary and criminal charges against pro-Palestinian students at Stanford.

The swift disciplinary action from Stanford administration on Wednesday stands in sharp contrast to how the school has approached prior anti-Israel demonstrations, which have skyrocketed on campus since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel. 

“The administration treated these people with kid gloves the entire time and have refused to discipline them from the get-go, back in October,” Kevin Feigelis, a doctoral student in the physics department, told JI. “When you refuse to discipline people that misbehave, you give an inch, they take a mile. They have gotten more radicalized.” 

In January, after students hurled antisemitic slogans outside of an on-campus forum meant to combat antisemitism organized by Feigelis, the administration took no punitive action. 

The chants shouted at Feigelis and other Jewish students included, “We’re going to find out where you live,” “Zionist, Zionist, you can’t hide” and “Go back to Brooklyn.”

The Stanford administration allowed an anti-Israel encampment to remain on campus since April. On Wednesday, Saller said in a statement that because of the morning’s occupation, the encampment was removed “in the interest of public safety.”  

The removal came after more than 300 people set up tents in White Plaza for more than a month, despite the administration announcing in a university-wide statement in May that the encampment “violates our policy on overnight camping, which is in place for the safety of our community members. Even during the daytime, the encampment also violates our policies on the use of White Plaza.” Around the country, dozens of universities shut down similar illegal demonstrations within weeks. 

Feigelis continued, “it’s sad that the only time they sent in police was when it was the president’s office himself, as opposed to every time Jewish students have been terrorized on campus.” 

University antisemitism task forces feature much talk, minimal action so far

In the aftermath of a surge in antisemitism that erupted following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel, top universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and Northwestern announced the creation of new bodies tasked with studying antisemitism on campus and identifying how to address it. Their impending work is framed with urgency, and the bodies are generally discussed using language about the importance of inclusivity on campus. 

But nearly five months after the environment for Jewish students on these campuses began to rapidly deteriorate, questions remain over the efficacy and mandate of such groups. They will also face the thorny issue of campus free speech as they delve into questions about what, exactly, constitutes antisemitism on campus. 

The question over the credibility of these antisemitism task forces was underscored this week at Harvard, following the resignation of business school professor Raffaella Sadun, the co-chair of the presidential task force, reportedly because she felt university leaders weren’t willing to act on the committee’s recommendations. 

“They’ve utterly failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students. It’s shameful,” a Jewish faculty member at Harvard told Jewish Insider. They requested anonymity to speak candidly about interactions with students and administrators in recent months. The professor has seen numerous Israeli students kicked out of WhatsApp groups unrelated to politics because they are Israeli. The professor also described widespread opposition, among many students, to topics having to do with Israel — and a corresponding reluctance to act from administrators, who fear pushback from far-left students. 

“If you’re an administrator, and you care about your own personal well-being, and you want to keep Harvard out of the news or off social media, you basically try not to engage with these people in a way that will provoke them,” the professor said. “In the end this backfired on Harvard, because their failure to take care of Jewish students contributed to the accusations of institutional antisemitism, the lawsuit, the congressional investigation.”

Harvard announced the creation of an antisemitism task force in January, which immediately faced criticism due to comments made by its other co-chair, historian Derek Penslar, suggesting that antisemitism is not a major problem at Harvard. The body’s full membership has now been announced, but the scope and timeline of its work remains unclear. 

Interim Harvard President Alan Garber said in a Monday email that he expects the work of Harvard’s antisemitism task force to “take several months to complete,” but he asked the co-chairs “to send recommendations to the deans and me on a rolling basis.” It is not clear if the university will provide updates along the way; or if Harvard’s leadership will accept the task force’s recommendations.

At universities that already had antisemitism task forces prior to Oct. 7, those that achieved the most success generally have a budget to pursue actual work, a clear timeline for their work and strong buy-in from administrators, who must be willing to actually implement the groups’ recommendations, according to Miriam Elman, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which works to fight anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism at U.S. universities. 

It’s not yet clear if the newly created task forces — especially those at private universities, which don’t have the same obligation for transparency as public universities — will achieve the needed support from leaders.

“I think if the mandate is not clear, if there’s not enough resources, if the council doesn’t have committees and jobs, it’s just going to be window dressing,” said Elman. “It’s not going to be able to do the work that needs to be done.”

At Columbia University, Shai Davidai, an assistant professor in the business school, said he doesn’t have confidence that a newly created antisemitism task force can succeed unless the faculty on the committee changes to include more Zionist and Israeli voices. 

“At universities, if you want to make sure something doesn’t happen, you set up a task force,” Davidai continued. “The task force at Columbia has done absolutely nothing. They just talk.” 

At Stanford University, an antisemitism task force created in the wake of Oct. 7 has, like Harvard’s, been mired in conversations and controversy over its membership. Faculty co-chair Ari Kelman, an associate professor in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and Religious Studies, had a record of downplaying the threat of campus antisemitism along with recent alliances with anti-Israel groups. He resigned, citing the controversy, and was replaced with Larry Diamond, a pro-Israel professor in Stanford’s political science department. Under its new leadership, the committee also expanded its name and scope in January to include anti-Israel bias. 

Despite the updates, Kevin Feigelis, a doctoral student in the Stanford physics department, who on Thursday testified at a House Education Committee roundtable with Jewish students, said that “the task force has still accomplished nothing and it’s not clear that they have the power to accomplish anything.” 

In January, Feigelis worked with the campus antisemitism task force to plan an on-campus forum meant to combat antisemitism. The symposium was disrupted by a pro-Palestinian protest that included threats to Jewish attendees.

The task force “was instituted just to appease people,” Feigelis said. “Stanford is aware of exactly what is going on, and if they cared they would have done something over the last five months. The university places people on these committees in one of two ways: either it places people who they think are going to be most sympathetic to the university or they go straight to Hillel and ask them. These are both troubling.” 

Feigelis expressed belief that the task force could accomplish more if it consisted of lawyers and more Israeli faculty. 

“If [the administration cared] the committee would not be made of political scientists and a biologist… lawyers should be the ones staffing a committee that determines what constitutes antisemitism. Instead they picked people who have no idea what constitutes free speech or what the code of conduct actually is.” 

He continued, “The task force is currently holding listening sessions, but it’s just not clear what will come of that.” 

After Northwestern University announced in November that it would create an antisemitism task force, 163 faculty and staff members at the university wrote a letter to President Michael Schill saying they were “seriously dismayed and concerned” by the announcement, raising concerns that the task force’s work would challenge “rigorous, open debate.” Three of the signatories of that letter — including Jessica Winegar, a Middle Eastern studies professor and vocal proponent of boycotts of Israel — were then named to the task force, which will also focus on addressing Islamophobia. 

“If you really want to fix the problem, why conflate it with other issues that are going to prolong trying to find a solution to it?” Mike Teplitsky, a Northwestern alum and the president of the Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern, said of the task force’s attempt to also focus on Islamophobia and other forms of hate. “I would call it a bureaucratic distraction from trying to fix the problem.” 

Mark Rotenberg, Hillel International’s vice president for university initiatives and the group’s general counsel, argued that antisemitism has proven to be so severe as to warrant its own mechanisms. The inclusion of Islamophobia “and other hateful behavior” in the group’s mandate would be like if a campus Title IX office, focused on gender-based inequality, was also required to focus on racism.

“Antiracism may be a very important thing, but merging it with the problem of violence in frat houses is not going to signal the women on that campus that they are really taking that problem seriously,” said Rotenberg, who works with administrators at campuses across the U.S. on antisemitism-related issues. “That’s our point about antisemitism.”

Lily Cohen, a Northwestern senior who is a member of the task force, came face to face with antisemitism on campus a year before the Oct. 7 attacks. After writing an op-ed in the campus newspaper decrying antisemitism and speaking out about her support for Zionism, she was called a terrorist and faced an onslaught of hate — including a large banner that was printed with her article, covered by “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in red paint. 

“I think it comes from the top,” said Cohen, who noted that, after the op-ed incident, “no strong actions were taken to stand up for Jewish students or protect Jewish students, or even just express that that wasn’t OK. It fostered an environment where antisemitism is tolerated at Northwestern as long as it stays just subtle enough that you’re not saying Jews.”

Afterward, she met with university administrators to talk about what happened to her. “At the end of the day, listening is not enough,” she said. “I don’t think in any of the meetings I had with any administrators, that they actually referred to what happened to me as antisemitism. I think that that’s a huge problem here, is how easy it is to say, ‘We are not antisemitic, we’re just anti-Zionist,’ or ‘We don’t hate Jews, we just hate Zionists. We just hate Israel.’”

The group started meeting in January, and it was asked by the president to finish its work by June, which Cohen worries is not enough time, especially given its broad scope. Administrators at the school have not instilled much confidence in her in the past, but she is choosing to be hopeful.

“Being on the committee, I have to be optimistic that we’re going to do something and that the president will take our recommendations seriously, and will put them into action,” she said. “Because if not, what was it all for?”

Gabby Deutch is Jewish Insider’s senior national correspondent; Haley Cohen is eJewishPhilanthropy’s news reporter.

Jewish students recount a series of campus horror stories at congressional roundtable

For two hours on Wednesday, lawmakers heard from a parade of Jewish students, each delivering the same message: They do not feel safe on their college campuses.

Speaking to a roundtable organized by the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, Jewish students from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, Rutgers, Stanford, Tulane, Cooper Union and University of California, Berkeley spoke about about the harassment, threats and violence they’ve faced on their campuses since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

The students’ accounts were all remarkably similar, despite coming from a range of locations and school types, including openly antisemitic taunts and harassment, angry mobs rampaging through campus and overtaking campus buildings, vandalism and in some cases threats of or actual incidents of violence, all going largely or completely unaddressed by university administrators and campus police, despite repeated and sustained pleas from the students for help and support. 

In some cases, the students said professors and administrators were complicit or actively involved in the antisemitic activity. Students said that they feared for their safety and even their lives.

The students, saying they felt abandoned by their universities and had no faith in them to act to protect them, pleaded for action from Congress. They said that they hoped their testimony could serve as a wakeup call to both Congress and the American public.

“As my friends from Harvard and UPenn can tell you, it doesn’t end simply because presidents are replaced. Systemic change is needed,” Kevin Feigelis, a Stanford student, said. “Universities have proven they have no intention of fixing themselves. It must be you, and it must be now.”

Shabbos Kestenbaum — a Harvard student who said he’d contacted the school’s antisemitism task force more than 40 times without a response and had been threatened in a video with a machete by a still-employed Harvard staff member — called Congress and the courts the students’ “last hope.”

Multiple students and lawmakers said that the current events on campus carry echoes of 1930s Germany or the pogroms in Russia.

Some suggested potential courses of action that Congress and other federal branches could take, including leveraging U.S. taxpayer funding or the schools’ tax-exempt statuses, placing third-party monitors on campus and enforcing diversity requirements in Middle East studies departments requiring them to include pro-Israel views.

Students from Harvard, Penn and MIT all said that little has changed on their campuses since last year’s blockbuster congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, which prompted the ouster of Harvard and Penn’s presidents.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the committee’s chair, vowed that she and her colleagues would not stop their efforts to tackle antisemitism on campus.

“I was very emotional,” Foxx told Jewish Insider, “I’m a mother and a grandmother. I have one grandchild who went to college and I’m not sure what I would have done if he had come home to say he felt threatened on his campus like these students feel threatened. No student on a college campus, in this country, in the year 2024, should feel threatened.”

Foxx said that the committee’s antisemitism investigation is proceeding deliberately, but that the schools will be held to account. The committee has already requested documents from Harvard, Penn and Columbia and has now subpoenaed Harvard. Foxx suggested that other schools whose students had appeared Thursday could be next.

Anti-Israel protesters threaten Stanford students attending forum for combating antisemitism

“We’re going to find out where you live.”

“Zionist, Zionist, you can’t hide.”

“Go back to Brooklyn.”

“Our next generation will ensure Israel falls, and America too, the other terrorists.” 

Those were some of the antisemitic slogans hurled at Ari Arias and other Jewish students at Stanford University last Wednesday night outside an on-campus forum — meant to combat antisemitism. 

“We were trying to leave the event and the entrance and exit were both packed with them yelling that we can’t hide,” Arias, a premed student in his junior year, told Jewish Insider. “As we finally exited the venue, they continued following us… They started yelling super-threatening things at us, like, ‘We know your names, we know where you work and soon we’re going to find out where you live.’”    

The forum was organized by Kevin Feigelis, a doctoral student in the physics department. Speakers included the Stanford President Richard Saller, Provost Jenny Martinez and Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism. 

Dee Mostofi, a university spokesperson, told JI that the school is “aware of the protest that took place on Wednesday outside an event to discuss antisemitism attended by Stanford leadership.” It is not clear whether the protesters were university students.

“While we respect the right to peaceful protest, hateful language such as ‘Go back to Brooklyn,’ which is a personal attack based on identity and stereotypes, is beneath all of us, and it harms the ability to have the reasoned exchange of ideas and debate that is central to the university. Stanford remains focused on supporting civil discourse and the well-being of all members of our community,” Mostofi said. 

Asked whether the threatening statements violate Stanford’s speech policies and if punitive actions were taken, Mostofi did not respond. 

Feigelis said that the anti-Israel “mob” on campus Wednesday night is part of a larger pattern seen on Stanford’s campus since Oct. 7, where on any given day it’s common to see protesters “chanting for Israel’s intifada.” The group has also organized a sit-in, where students have camped out since October demanding that the university endorse a cease-fire in Gaza and commit to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, among other orders. Saller and Martinez met with students involved in the sit-in in December but have not commented on whether they plan to address the demands.  

The pro-Palestinian rallies are so common that David Schuller, an applied physics doctoral student, has set out to observe and document as many of them as possible — with an Israeli flag in tow. Most of the time he’s standing alone.   

“I actually interacted with the same group twice on Wednesday,” he told JI, explaining that while Wednesday night’s turnout outside of the antisemitism forum was notably large, the group also swarmed the outside of the engineering building that afternoon.   

Later that day, Schuller, wearing a kippah, can be seen surrounded by pro-Palestinians chanting “resistance is justified when people are occupied,” in a video that has since gone viral. “Rape is not resistance,” Schuller repeatedly responded in the video. 

“My intentions of going are to show them that we aren’t going anywhere… even though I’m a single person and they are at least 25 or 30 people,” he said, estimating that he’s been to 10 pro-Palestinian rallies since Oct. 7. None have turned physically violent, but sometimes threats are made if he doesn’t immediately leave, Schuller said.  

“I often offer to sit down and have a conversation, but they respond that they won’t talk to me. There’s no room for nuance when they are shouting genocidal slogans. I know that there is a silent majority that does think these protests are ridiculous, even though I go alone and am portrayed as an extremist… in reality I care more about the Palestinian people than a lot of these protesters do,” he continued. 

Arias, who describes himself as an active Jewish leader, said that he was afraid to walk around campus on Thursday. But he expressed the belief that “the president and provost have done a good job handling antisemitism relative to other schools.” 

He pointed to the school’s Dec. 8 statement that said “Stanford unequivocally condemns calls for the genocide of Jews or any peoples.” The statement came several days after the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT testified on Capitol Hill and refused to say that calls for genocide against Jews would violate university policy. “I don’t think what happened on Wednesday has to do with the administration,” Arias continued. 

Feigelis, meanwhile, called Stanford leadership’s words “empty.” 

“There’s been such a lack of clear communication between the administration and students since [Oct. 7],”  he said.

Stanford’s antisemitism committee co-chair aligned with anti-Israel groups, concluded antisemitism wasn’t a problem on campuses in 2017 paper

Amid rising tensions on college campuses since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war, it may come as no surprise that Stanford University’s newly formed Antisemitism Committee is already touching off a debate — before it has even held its first meeting. 

The controversy centers on the faculty co-chair of the committee, Ari Kelman, an associate professor in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and Religious Studies, and his record of downplaying the threat of campus antisemitism along with his recent alliances with anti-Israel groups. 

Kelman authored a 2017 paper on antisemitism he co-wrote with several other Stanford faculty members. The 36-page report, called “Safe on the Sidelines,” concluded that antisemitism isn’t a problem on college campuses because “different representations of campus culture come from the difficulties in defining what counts as political speech and what counts as antisemitism.” 

That conclusion, along with Kelman’s appointment and whether the committee will consider anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, “concerns a number of us,” a Jewish MBA student at Stanford who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter told JI.

Kelman also served on the academic board of Open Hillel, which has worked to overturn Hillel International’s guidelines that prevent partnering with anti-Zionist groups or individuals. The Open Hillel group has pushed for anti-Israel groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that advocates for the boycott of Israel and eradication of Zionism, to be included, even as these groups have been responsible for the growing hostility on campus against Jewish, pro-Israel students. 

Immediately after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, Jewish Voice for Peace released a statement declaring: “The Root of Violence Is Oppression,” laying the blame for the massacre on Israel.

Kelman said that he hasn’t been on the board of Open Hillel for over a decade. “I don’t recall doing anything as a board member, either,” he told JI. “I don’t think I ever attended a board meeting, even. Mostly my service was in the form of advice I gave to individual students,” he continued, noting that he also served on the board of Stanford Hillel from 2012-2015. “[On the Stanford Hillel board] I did attend meetings and participated in a strategic planning effort,” Kelman said. 

Asked whether he currently supports allowing JVP to be included in the Hillel umbrella, Kelman said, “I’m not in a position to say what Hillel ought to do.” 

The Jewish MBA student pointed to that lack of clarity as a reason for concern. “What we need is an advocate who is really aggressive in pursuing the kinds of actions and speech we see on campus, and many of us feel that very harsh anti-Zionist activities on campus are really just code for antisemitism and a chair that distinguishes between the two, we fear may not be the most aggressive watchdog over this,” the student said. He expressed further concern that the committee established “does not cover anti-Israel hate, only anti-Jewish hate,” a charge that Kelman denies. 

“That’s a double standard,” the student said. “Because at the same time Stanford created a committee to combat Muslim, Palestinian and Arab hate, it lumped in ethnicity, religion and state-based hate. In our case it’s only antisemitism. If someone says something targeted at Israelis, they are not protected.”

Another Jewish student, a senior studying computer science, also expressed concerns about the committee. “They’ve chosen people to lead this committee who believe anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism,” she said. “They don’t have to make this a democratic process, but I don’t feel the committee represents the Jewish community.” 

“They’re making this committee only to prevent from liability,” she continued. “If they actually wanted to help they would actually listen to the concerns of Jewish students. There is so much polarization on campus right now.” 

The student pointed to a rally she witnessed on campus attended by 300 people, where “someone called to take up arms to undo Zionism,” adding that some members of Stanford’s administration were at the rally, and that afterwards a “video was shared with the university many times and they never did anything about it.”

“It feels like every day, something new happens and the university does nothing, so it feels like a lost cause and it feels empty to allow a student to call to take up arms on campus and then make a task force,” she said. 

The MBA student argued that Kelman’s research deliberately excluded pro-Israel or Hillel-affiliated students, while focusing on those in favor of the BDS movement.

Kelman’s paper stated, “It is likely that those who are highly connected to Israel become a target of antisemitic or anti-Israel sentiment because they make their support for Israel known. It is also likely that those who are more connected to Israel are more sensitive to criticism of Israel, or more likely to perceive such criticism as antisemitic. Both dynamics are, perhaps, in play,” the paper continued. 

Kelman denied the claim that pro-Israel students were ignored, calling it “preposterous.” 

“Based on a paper published by the [Cohen Center at] Brandeis around the same time as ours, they found that students who were involved in AIPAC on campus were actually much more likely to report antisemitic acts on campus,” he said. 

“So we were trying to mitigate against that bias that had been established in previous research. We also didn’t interview first-year students because we wanted to exclude the noise of adjustment to college life. We also excluded late seniors because they’re checked out. We didn’t exclude students who go to Hillel, but we chose people who are not in Hillel leadership. We didn’t choose people who are on any kind of far extreme, we didn’t include student leaders of any kind.”

Regarding the newly formed Antisemitism Committee, Kelman said that “while there’s some flexibility in our range, our main focus [of the committee] is on antisemitism, in all of its forms, on our campus and in the larger Stanford community.”

“The student is quite wrong to presume that ‘something targeted at Israelis won’t be considered as antisemitism,’” Kelman continued. “The student’s presumption on this matter is simply and plainly incorrect.”

Kelman said that he realizes that the situation on campus regarding antisemitism has changed since 2017. “America has experienced a significant increase in antisemitism since then,” he told JI. “The goal of that paper was to understand from the position of Jewish undergraduates on college campuses in California how they were experiencing antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campuses. What we found was that they were not concerned for the most part.” 

But when it comes to determining what constitutes antisemitism, Kelman has argued in an amicus brief through the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism is “flawed and overly expansive” and “silences Palestinian voices.” The brief was filed in support of San Francisco State University in a case brought by Lawfare, in which SFSU later admitted to antisemitism. Kelman said he stands by criticism of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. 

“I still believe that it does [silence Palestinians],” he said. “I don’t think the IHRA definition is operationally appropriate in the context of the university.” 

Kelman said the current climate for Jewish students at Stanford is “tense.”

“There’s no monolithic climate,” he continued, noting that Stanford’s move to create two committees, one to combat antisemitism and one to combat Islamophobia, was “absolutely the right strategy.” 

“For our campus, I don’t think for a variety of reasons that the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office is equipped to deal with the level of concern and complexity of issues that have swamped our campus and other campuses in the last six weeks,” he continued. 

Jonathan Levav, a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, called the campus climate “difficult.”

“Students are feeling a range from very fearful to uncomfortable,” he told JI. “I’ve heard from many students, ‘I don’t feel comfortable identifying as Jewish or pro-Israel.’” 

Levav called the administration’s response “flaccid and reluctant.” “Basically what they’ve done is like if they said after George Floyd’s death ‘all lives matter.’” 

“Nothing has been proactive,” Levav continued. “Anything they have done has been the result of prodding.” According to Levav, a pro-Palestinian protest has been allowed to continue on campus even without getting a required permit “because of the optics,” he said. “They care more about optics than enforcing their own rules, and in the meantime they are sacrificing the well-being of Jewish students.” 

“It’s odd we have a situation where Israel is at the center and we have so many Israelis on the faculty but no Israeli faculty members on the committee. The decisions are curious,” he continued, comparing it to “having a committee on race without any Black people. Who would do that?” 

“[Stanford’s administration] is going to marginalize the issue of Israel and act as if anything anti-Israel is not antisemitism, which is false,” Levav continued.