Commentary: Let’s reassess campus responses to antisemitism

August 11, 2024 1 min read

Glenn C. Altschuler and David Wippman
The Hill

Excerpt: Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has spawned hundreds of campus protests and a series of widely publicized incidents that left many Jewish students feeling unsafe. These include an online threat to assault Jewish students at Cornell University; a Jewish counter-protester whose nose was broken while he was trying to stop the burning of an Israeli flag at Tulane; pro-Palestinian students pounding on the doors of Cooper Union library with Jewish students inside; the violent occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University; and statements by student organizations at Harvard and faculty members at Yale, Columbia and Cornell appearing to justify Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.

How accurate are claims that campus antisemitism is pervasive? The reality is more complicated than critics admit, and the result is often a mismatch between problems that actually exist and the responses that are emerging.

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