Responding to the Tufts Community Union Senate passage of an anti-Israel boycott resolution on the eve of Passover, the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV) asserted today that Tufts is “fostering an antisemitic environment” and placing individual Jewish students at risk. The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Tufts, a student group whose invited speakers glorify the genocidal Hamas terrorist organization and openly support racism and violence against Jews, proposed the resolution during the week prior to Passover, such that the vote took place when many Jewish students had traveled home to observe their holiday.

“In October of last year,” explained Rabbi Yaakov Menken, Director of the CJV, “Tufts administrators denounced posters attacking SJP’s support for Hamas as evidence of ‘Islamophobia,’ taking sides in a manner that neatly inverted the haters and the hated. Administrators thus directly contributed to the environment which led to the grotesque and underhanded passage of this anti-Semitic resolution, proposed by the same SJP hate group. While Tufts opposed an academic boycott of Israel and says it is ‘concerned’ that the TCU Senate considered this item immediately before Passover, this is hardly sufficient to defuse the situation the administration helped ignite.”

CJV Senior Rabbinic Fellow Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer added, “how ironic it is that a liberal arts university, which is supposed to foster an atmosphere and mindset of tolerance and openness, has instead resorted to the promotion of bigotry and hatred.”

Amcha Initiative, a California-based non-profit dedicated to investigating and combating antisemitism at institutions of higher education, demonstrated in groundbreaking annual surveys the close ties between anti-Israel activities and antisemitism on campus. This is true both nationally and specifically at Tufts University, where false accusations of Israeli “apartheid” circulate along with swastikas on vehicles and explicit calls for a ban against individual “Jewish Israeli artists and scholars,” asserting that they are “deployed as weapons.”

“If a Jewish student at Tufts is the target of antisemitic expression,” said Rabbi Menken, “he or she should promptly sue the university, as it is unquestionably creating the right environment for anti-Jewish hatred to fester.”