In 2020, the vice-president of the University of Southern California’s student government resigned after being subjected to constant anti-Semitic abuse. The school’s president, Carol Folt, responded by launching a “Stronger Than Hate” campaign, which, Jonathan Marks writes, “addresses anti-Semitism only as one among a grab-bag of other hatreds, . . . and recognizes only one kind of anti-Semitism, the right-wing kind.”
But another anti-Semitism scandal has recently prompted Folt to issue a very different kind of statement:
[This] statement was occasioned by the social-media pronouncements of an engineering student, who said, among other things, “I want to kill every motherf**cking Zionist” and “yel3an el yahood” (curse the Jews). Perhaps the “Stronger Than Hate” campaign, looking solely to its right, didn’t reach this particular student who was serving as “diversity, equity, and inclusion senator” for the engineering school’s Graduate Student Association.
President Folt says that USC will now form a new Advisory Committee on Jewish Life to “review a number of proposed actions to tangibly support Jewish and Zionist students, faculty, and staff.” . . . USC’s belated move to include anti-Semitism among the affronts to campus values it aims specifically to address is laudable. One applauds, too, Holt’s recognition that “Zionist students, faculty, and staff” have confronted hostility—in one instance, in a statement released by an academic department—on campus.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/jonathan-marks/a-long-overdue-response-to-campus-antisemitism/