Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), representing over 2,500 traditional, Orthodox rabbis in American public policy, today thanked the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and its Chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC), for the committee staff’s detailed, comprehensive 325-page report on “Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed,” and called to “clean house” in American higher education. The report determined that “so-called university leaders intentionally declined to express support for campus Jewish communities” lest they offend antisemitic faculty and students, ignored their own rules and policies to give antisemitic vandalism and harassment a free pass, and often did so due to intervention by faculty to preclude meaningful discipline.

“To call the committee’s findings appalling is an understatement,” said CJV Southern Regional Vice President Rabbi Moshe B. Parnes. “Thanks to this report, we now know that university administrators were not naive or clueless, but made a premeditated decision to offer no support for Jewish students targeted with genocidal hatred. These same university heads routinely rush to back students of any other minority after a perceived ‘microaggression.’ The bigotry of this double standard is self-evident, and constitutes a tacit endorsement of anti-Jewish hatred on campus.”

The House Education Committee investigation found that universities permitted antisemitic students to wantonly violate school policies and even the law, while faculty members acted to thwart meaningful discipline. Northwestern, the report claims, put “radical anti-Israel faculty” in charge of negotiating with students to get them to take down their encampment, while at Harvard, both President Claudine Gay and Provost (now President) Alan Garber strove to avoid labeling “From the River to the Sea” antisemitic, though it is a call for ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel, as that might imply Harvard would impose disciplinary consequences. The universities also responded with hostility to this investigation on behalf of Jewish students, entirely at odds with their reactions to investigations of bigotry against minorities, LGBTQ advocates, and others.

“To understand how we got here, one must recognize that university humanities departments have become antisemitic indoctrination centers, and have been for years,” observed CJV Vice President Rabbi Dov Fischer, “where students learn a revisionist history about an ‘Israel-Palestine’ conflict which ignores the military agenda and unified hatred of the Arab League, erases Jews from their history in their homeland, and whitewashes the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab states after 1948. A series of academic disciplines, including history, anthropology, religion, and more, have been discarded in the pursuit of hate. To call this ‘higher education’ is ludicrous at best, and explains why students now believe that rape, beheading, and kidnapping are acceptable ‘resistance’ tactics as long as the victims are Jews, and university presidents can say without sarcasm that whether this violates school policies depends upon ‘context.’ These schools must clean house if they wish to recover a semblance of legitimacy.”

Photo Credit: Joe Catron on Flickr.