Congress Summons the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn To Explain Rising Antisemitic Rhetoric on Campuses

“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” of antisemitism on college campuses will soon be under scrutiny at Capitol Hill, where leaders of elite universities are set to testify on the anti-Israel abuse roiling their institutions. Next week, the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania will testify at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses. Civil rights advocates are lauding the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, headed by Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, for holding accountable college officials who have been slow to stop anti-Israel harassment.“College administrators have largely stood by, allowing horrific rhetoric to fester and grow,” Ms. Foxx said in a statement. She asserted that “now is not a time for indecision or milquetoast statements. By holding this hearing, we are shining the spotlight on these campus leaders and demanding they take the appropriate action to stand strong against antisemitism.”While university leaders have released statements condemning the surge in antisemitic incidents on their campuses since Hamas’s attacks on Israel, they’ve been criticized for failing to discipline those engaging in such behavior. This is “adding insult to injury,” Rabbi Gil Leeds, who works at the Chabad student center at the University of California, Berkeley, tells the Sun.“We’re being felonized and portrayed as the aggressor,” Rabbi Leeds, whose campus is now the target of a federal lawsuit for allegedly enabling antisemitism in violation of civil rights protections, says. “A lot of the students that I know are hiding their Jewish identity, putting their Jewish stars away, not coming out to participate in Jewish events because they’re intimidated.”Nearly 73 percent of Jewish college students have seen or been the victim of antisemitism since the start of this semester, according to a survey published Wednesday by the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish campus organization, Hillel International, and an analytics company, College Pulse. By comparison, 44 percent of non-Jewish students have experienced or witnessed such acts in the same time period. “There’s very little awareness about how serious and pervasive this problem is,” the chief executive officer of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement to the Sun. “In fact, non-Jewish students are largely blind to it.” The ADL survey discloses that only 33 percent of Jewish respondents now feel emotionally safe on their college campuses, marking a drop from 66 percent before the war.The hearing next week, Mr. Greenblatt said, is a step in the right direction. “College leaders are not doing enough to address this very real and serious problem,” he asserted. “So, putting them under oath will help bring awareness to this issue and hopefully bring us another step closer to eradicating this hate from our college campuses.” A Penn spokesman, Ron Ozio, tells the Sun that “President Magill understands the critical importance of fighting antisemitism and other forms of hate on Penn’s campus and looks forward to sharing the actions Penn is taking at next week’s hearing.” MIT’s president “welcomes the opportunity to engage with the committee members,” a university spokeswoman, Kimberly Allen, tells the Sun. Harvard’s press office did not immediately respond to the Sun’s request for comment.“Too often, university leaders live only within a narrow echo chamber in which they hear the same progressive truths repeated over and over again,” the founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, Kenneth Marcus, tells the Sun. “It will be a healthy antidote for these university presidents to be accountable in the court of public opinion when they’re hauled before the U.S. House of Representatives.”While the charge of rooting out antisemitism has been largely taken up by Republicans, like Ms. Foxx, Mr. Marcus says he “was heartened to hear sympathetic comments and questions coming from some Democratic members” when he recently testified on the issue of antisemitism before the House Education and Labor Committee. “I’m very pleased,” he says, “to have friends within the United States Congress.”Yet Rabbi Leeds asserts that the pernicious problem transcends partisan politics and is “a clear case of darkness versus light, good versus evil.” He urges administrators to “have the moral strength and courage to do what’s right,” even when it’s not popular in the echo chambers of ivory towers. “This,” he says, “is the call of the hour.”

Congress Summons the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn To Explain Rising Antisemitic Rhetoric on Campuses

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