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Anti-Semitism at My University, Hidden in Plain Sight
(New York Times) Benjamin Gladstone - Last semester, a group came to Providence, R.I., to speak against admitting Syrian refugees to the U.S. As president of the Brown Coalition for Syria, I jumped into action with my peers to stage a counterdemonstration. But I quickly found myself cut out of the planning for this event: Other student groups were not willing to work with me because of my leadership roles in campus Jewish organizations. Also last semester, anti-Zionists at Brown circulated a petition against a lecture by the transgender rights advocate Janet Mock because one of the sponsors was the Jewish campus group Hillel. Anti-Zionist students would not allow a Jewish group to participate in that conversation. My fellow activists tend to dismiss the anti-Semitism that students like me experience regularly on campus. They don't hear students accusing me of killing Jesus. They don't notice professors glorifying anti-Semitic figures such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt or the leadership of Hizbullah, as mine have. They wrongfully dismiss attacks on Jews, who are the most frequent targets of religiously motivated hate crimes in the U.S. They don't take issue with calls for the destruction of the world's only Jewish state.