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Source: https://nypost.com/2026/04/22/opinion/uclas-antisemitism-continues-with-hostage-debacle/
UCLA Student Council Condemns Event Featuring Israeli Hostage
(New York Post) Arielle Ravanshenas - Who would oppose a former Israeli hostage speaking to college students about his experience? On April 14, the UCLA Center for Israel Studies, together with the Hillel Jewish students' association, hosted an event featuring Omer Shem Tov, 23, who was abducted by terrorists from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, and held captive by Hamas for 505 days. One week later, UCLA's Undergraduate Students Association Council released a statement condemning the event, claiming it "advance[d] incomplete and harmful representations of ongoing violence." The student council condemned an event featuring a young person, just like them, who had survived in the clutches of internationally recognized terrorists. During my four years at UCLA, as an Iranian American Jew, I know, painfully, how often Jewish students on that campus have been asked to justify their identities, swallow their grief, or prove that their belonging does not come at someone else's expense. As a freshman, I sat down at a communal table near the dorms and saw the words "Hitler did nothing wrong" etched into the surface. In the years that followed, swastikas appeared across UCLA and other UC campuses. I was told my solidarity was "not welcome" when I showed up for other marginalized communities. UCLA had an antisemitism problem when I enrolled, and it had only become worse by the time I graduated. The message being sent is chilling: Jewish pain is political. Jewish grief is suspect. Jewish survival is provocative. And Jewish students may participate in public life only if they accept that their trauma will be debated, minimized, or condemned. A campus that cannot make room for the testimony of a freed hostage is a campus in moral crisis. The writer is a former president of UCLA's Undergraduate Students Association Council (2017-2018).