The grilling of student Rachel Beyda over whether she was unqualified to join the UCLA’s student judicial board, merely because she Jewish, shocked people with its blatant display of anti-Semitism at one of the nation’s most liberal schools. 

“Given that you're very active in the Jewish community, how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?” Fabienne Roth, a member of UCLA’s Undergraduate Student Association Council, asked her. After Beyda left the room, another member of the council opined, “I don't know. For some reason I am not comfortable. I just don't know why. I can definitely see she's qualified. I am just worried about her affiliations.”

The remarks made during her questioning are disturbing, as is the fact that these under grads appear to be oblivious to how anti-Semitic they sound. (The council passed a resolution condemning anti-Semitism last week in response to the uproar over Beyda’s confirmation, after the writing was already on the wall, as it were.)

What’s even more frightening is that Beyda’s case was nothing new, a run-of-the-mill example of the suspicions and hostility directed toward the Jewish community at some of the most socially progressive campuses across the country.

A majority of Jewish college students, 54 percent, reported being subjected to or witness to anti-Semitism on campus during a six-month period, according to a 2014 survey published by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Trinity College. Not only was this survey undertaken before the violent summer conflict in Gaza, which researchers Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar said led to a “worldwide flare-up in anti-Semitism,” but they also noted that the “data suggest there is an under-reporting of anti-Semitism through the normal campus channels.”

Even more disturbingly, students reported that they often felt universities did not take their concerns about anti-Semitism seriously. “The response of many university faculty and administrators to Jewish complaints and outrage often shows that their threshold for the definition of the existence of the crime of anti-Semitism is set ridiculously high,” write Kosmin and Keysar.

At schools where students strive to protect the rights of ethnic and racial minorities, stomp out sexual and gender discrimination, and regularly remind people to “check their privilege,” hate speech against the Jewish community has become a pernicious problem.

“We still find anti-Semitic slogans written on bathrooms. We see swastikas on doors still, but they’re kind of dismissed. They’re painted over because there are just so many things that happened,” says Ori Herschmann, a senior at UC Berkeley who serves in the student government. “A lot of students find swastikas and come to me. [They see it] on dorms, on bathroom stalls, just random places on campus.”

Continue reading

Originally appeared at the Daily Beast