Antisemitism is “in the air” at Stanford University, according to a report that accuses school officials of “indifference” toward the “normalization of antisemitic and anti-Israeli speech on campus.”
A 148-page report created by then-Stanford President Richard Saller and released by a Stanford committee says the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks against Israel has set off a wave of antisemitism on U.S. college campuses.
“Our Subcommittee reached this unanimous conclusion: antisemitism exists today on the Stanford campus in ways that are widespread and pernicious,” the report read.
The document continued:
Some of this bias is expressed in overt and occasionally shocking ways, but often it is wrapped in layers of subtlety and implication, one or two steps away from blatant hate speech. Antisemitism and bias against Israelis as a nationality group are not uniformly distributed across campus. We found schools, departments, dorms, and programs that seem largely unaffected, where Jewish students, faculty, and staff did not report issues with bias, harassment, intimidation, or ostracism. But a few portions of the campus appear to have very serious problems that have deeply affected Jewish and Israeli students. The most succinct summary of what we found is in our title, “It’s in the air.”
The report, which examined “many months” of “the social climate in the undergraduate and graduate levels and in diverse schools, programs, departments, residences, workplaces, and physical spaces at Stanford University,” went on to say, “We learned of instances where antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias reached a level of social injury that deeply affected people’s lives.”
The document added that students have had to move out of their dormitories due to “antisemitic acts or speech,” and have been “ostracized, canceled, or intimidated for openly identifying as Jewish, or for simply being Israeli, or expressing support for Israel, or even for refusing to explicitly condemn Israel.”
Students also “fear” to “display Jewish symbols or reveal that they were Jewish for fear of losing friendships or group acceptance,” the committee found.
The report also cited an incident in which an 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 “and moving it to the edge of the room “while the student was turned around and looking out the window.”
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“He blamed Israel for bringing the attack upon itself, citing dubious news sources, including a network affiliated with Hamas,” the document noted, adding, “The instructor went around the room asking students where they were from, and then labeling them ‘colonizer.'”
The instructor also minimized the deaths of Jews in the Holocaust by asking a student how many Jews had died in the Holocaust. When the student answered, “Six million” the instructor reportedly said, “Yes. Only six million.”
The instructor reportedly added that more people have died from colonization than from the Holocaust, and that the Palestinian experience had been one of colonization.
The instructor was later suspended, but more than 1,700 students signed a petition supporting him. Notably, Stanford has an undergraduate population of roughly 7,800.
The authors of the report noted that they cited this example because it “embodies several features of the current predicament facing Stanford and other universities.”
“Jewish students feel singled out, intimidated, and harmed solely because of their identities as Jews,” the report stated, adding that Jews “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.”
Notably, the report also pointed out that it recognizes there exists bias against Arabs, Palestinians, and Muslims.
“While this report focuses on how to begin to heal the community using the lens of antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, we acknowledge that there is bias against Arabs, Palestinians, and Muslims more generally, and we recognize that these forms of bias should be redressed as well,” the report stated.
“If a similar standing advisory committee is appointed to advise on meeting the needs of the Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Communities, we hope the two committees will meet with one another from time to time,” it added.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
