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. 

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.