JNS.org – There has been no shortage of anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses during the past academic year, especially within the 10-school University of California (UC) system. As Jewish students deal with Holocaust imagery and student governments taking issue with their Judaism, UC Riverside (UCR) is offering a class cited by 20 watchdog and advocacy organizations as meeting the US State Department’s definition of antisemitism.
The UCR Spring 2015 listing of student-initiated courses (“R’Courses”) includes a class called “Palestinian Voices” that critics claim deceptively shows both the Israeli and Palestinian flags. Opening the course syllabus reveals a different title: “Palestine & Israel: Settler-Colonialism and Apartheid.”
“The course schedule is filled with egregiously one-sided, anti-Israel readings and films that falsely paint Israel as a settler-colonial and apartheid state, hold Israel to a double standard to which no other democratic country is held, vilify and demonize Israel and Israel’s supporters, and argue for an end to the Jewish state; these tropes are all considered antisemitic according to the US State Department’s definition of antisemitism,” wrote the 20 organizations in a letter to UCR Chancellor Kim Wilcox.
“Antisemitism on California’s campuses is escalating rapidly and those of us who care about the safety of Jewish students are gravely alarmed. And now we discover that UC Riverside is offering an antisemitic course taught by a student leader (Tina Matar) of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group dedicated to the elimination of the Jewish state and activities our government calls antisemitic,” Tammi Rossman-Benjamin—co-founder of the AMCHA Initiative, an organization dedicated to combating campus antisemitism—told the Haym Salomon Center. “This class was approved by the university review board. How does this happen? Disturbingly, this is only the latest incident of antisemitism at UC Riverside. “
Originally posted at Algemeiner.com