Antisemitic hate crimes on US college campuses have doubled since the 2014 Israel-Hamas War, according to a report by the pro-Israel American campus group AMCHA Initiative, which claims its findings expose a never-before-revealed campus trend.
Threats against Jewish students were reported at 60 out of 100 colleges surveyed with sizable undergraduate Jewish populations.
Harvard, the University of Chicago, Tufts, UCLA, and Rutgers saw the highest number of incidents, according to AMCHA’s findings.
The survey found that attacks on Jewish students were three to seven times likelier at institutions where faculty members supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Additionally, 20 percent of threats to Jewish students occurred at gatherings hosted by academic departments.
“The threats to Jewish student identity come from their peers, professors, and even school administrators, and reach every corner of campus life—the quad, classrooms, dorm rooms, student newspaper, social media platforms, student government, and more,” the report states.
Nature of Attacks
According to the survey, incidents vary from direct assaults on Jews to attempts to silence pro-Israel views and prevent Jewish students from joining college organizations.
For example, George Washington University’s Hillel building, a hub for Jewish life, was covered in fliers that read, “Zionists Fuck Off.” At Cornell, a talk advocating “understanding Zionism as a project of racial capitalism” was part of a departmental event.
Further, “calls to rid the campus of Zionism increased more than six-fold, and attempts to cancel Israel-related events, programs, classes, and trips increased nearly five-fold” since 2014. Attempts to coerce Jewish students into declining trips to Israel have also increased more than 20 times.
Director of AMCHA Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told the Washington Free Beacon that these incidents continue to affect Jewish students long after graduation, and “more and more Jewish people drop pieces of their Jewish identity to keep safe.”
