Fighting antisemitism on campus

Congressman Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ Dist. 5) and Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY Dist. 21), who is leaving Congress at the end of the year, announced the launch of a new bipartisan caucus to combat antisemitism on college campuses.

The two made the announcement at Vanderbilt University in Nashville earlier this month, during a panel discussion about combating campus antisemitism while protecting free expression. Vanderbilt’s chancellor Daniel Diermeier and university leaders from the University of Kentucky, the University of Texas at Austin, Dartmouth College, the University of Alabama, and Washington University in St. Louis also participated.

The caucus “aims to hold colleges and universities accountable for protecting Jewish students, faculty, and staff,” according to a statement Mr. Gottheimer’s office issued on September 8. It will serve as a forum for Congress to coordinate oversight of how colleges and universities respond to antisemitism; press institutions to protect Jewish students, faculty, and staff, and enforce their own anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies; advance federal legislation targeting campus antisemitism and BDS-driven discrimination; and share best practices across campuses nationwide.

Mr. Gottheimer has met with Jewish students on college campuses in New Jersey and with Jewish students who attend universities all over the country, he said in a telephone interview last week. “And what I’ve heard overwhelmingly from them is that they’ve personally witnessed or experienced antisemitism. It’s been an issue for them personally. So it’s not just numbers. These are young people that I represent in my district.

“And the numbers are staggering,” Mr. Gottheimer continued. “Incidents on campuses spiked more than 300% since the October 7, according to the Anti-Defamation League, and many Jewish teens on campuses have been harassed and intimidated and made to feel like strangers, even in their own schools, in their classrooms, in their dorm rooms.

“I’ve talked to so many students who just don’t feel welcome. And so a part of this is to make sure that we make it clear to universities that every student, regardless of their faith and their background, should feel welcome. Jewish or Muslim or Catholic, it shouldn’t matter.”

One of the campuses Mr. Gottheimer has visited more than once since October 7, 2023, is Columbia University. He recalled students at the Hillel there “telling me there was a lot of silent antisemitism, when they literally were just dropped from a list.” They had been part of a choir or a student newspaper, and they just stopped getting invitations to meetings.

Mr. Gottheimer stressed that the new initiative is not targeting free speech. “Freedom of speech, freedom of debate is at the core of who we are as a country,” he said. “There’s a way to have a constructive debate without people feeling they’re being targeted or unwelcome. There’s a civil way to have a debate. Not, ‘you have those views, you’re not welcome here.’ There’s a big difference.

“Constructive debate is completely welcome. That’s what’s great about our campuses. You want that academic freedom.” You just want to make sure that it applies “even if you don’t like what you’re hearing.

“There’s a difference between not inviting somebody to participate on the newspaper because of their views or making them feel unwelcome in the classroom because of their views” and having a constructive discussion about those views, Mr. Gottheimer continued. “There’s a line between a constructive debate and targeting someone because of their faith.”

Mr. Gottheimer does not see a problem on all campuses. Plenty of schools, including Vanderbilt, Washington University, Emory, Dartmouth, and the universities of Texas, Kentucky, Alabama, and Florida “are doing a great job and should be praised for the way they’re teaching their students,” he said. “I think they’re enforcing their nondiscrimination policies.” One of the goals of the caucus is to help other campuses learn from what these schools are doing right.

Colleges tend to have anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies, but “what happened after October 7 is suddenly a lot of colleges just didn’t enforce their policies,” Mr. Gottheimer continued. “That has been a very big issue on a lot of campuses for some reason since the 7th. They had a lot of these policies in place. They didn’t enforce them. Hate speech should be unwelcome on any campus.”

Expressing a different point of view “is not hate,” Mr. Gottheimer added. Colleges do not have to suppress protests but it is reasonable to impose time, place, and manner restrictions. “So they can say ‘You can put this over there on the lawn, and in that area, and you can hold those signs, but you can’t block a student from going to class because they’re wearing a kippah, you can’t spit on them or harass them or punch them.’ That’s not allowed. And that has been going on on a lot of college campuses since the 7th.”

These policies have to be applied without regard to content, he continued. “Every student, whether they’re wearing a kafiya or they’re wearing a yarmulke, should feel welcome to walk across campus and to walk into a classroom or to walk into their dorm room. They shouldn’t be blocked from going to an exam or a class.”

He sees the start of the school year as a “good time to remind colleges and universities of their responsibilities to enforce their nondiscrimination policies, to ensure that students who are showing up on campus feel welcome in the classroom, and in student groups, and in their dorm rooms.

“It’s important that they remember that they should be going out of their way to ensure that everybody, again, regardless of their faith, feels welcome.”

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