‘Campuses are not on fire,’ says one expert, yet incidents mount.

Campus Anti-Semitism on the rise

The “Jews Die” graffiti was the first provocation to appear over a several-month period last year in and around the University of Michigan. The hate message was spray-painted at a skate park near the Ann Arbor campus.

Then, a swastika was discovered scrawled in a bathroom stall at the Big Ten school. And soon after, the U of M student government passed an anti-Israel divestment resolution (that was subsequently rejected by the university regents).

The anti-Semitic and anti-Israel trifecta painted a picture of a hostile atmosphere for the school’s Jewish students and supporters of Israel.

But a Jewish student at U of M paints an entirely different picture.

“I wear a kipa daily on campus and am vocally a supporter of the Jewish democratic state of Israel,” Alex Harris, a sophomore at the school, told The Jewish Week. “I do not feel physically threatened to be Jewish or ‘pro-Israel’ on campus.”

Yet Harris, an active member of the U of M Jewish community who participated in anti-BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) lobbying, added that he does occasionally feel himself “the target of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiment when the discussion of Israel enters the conversation.”

Harris’ double-sided portrait mirrors the conflicting narratives of several recent national surveys about campus-based anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activities. And they come as a Pew poll from 2016 found that among millennials, sympathy for the Palestinian cause jumped from 9 percent in 2006 to 27 percent a decade later, while support for Israel fell from 51 to 43 percent over that 10-year period.

“There is an unacceptable level of [ campus anti-Semitism ] on college campuses today. And this anti-Semitism tends to grow wherever BDS activists and their allies are actively demonizing the Jewish state… But we shouldn’t exaggerate it either. Even campuses facing serious anti-Israel efforts are far from being ‘no-go zones.’” – David Brog, Maccabee Task Force Executive Director

On one hand, recent reports by the Anti-Defamation League and the Amcha Initiative, which studies anti-Semitism on college campuses, contain troubling findings.

According to the ADL’s Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, in the first nine months of 2017 there were “a disturbingly high number of anti-Semitic and bullying incidents in K-12 schools and college campuses across the U.S. … Anti-Semitism continues to be a serious concern on college campuses [where] a total of 118 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in the first three quarters of 2017, compared to 74 in the same period of 2016.”

Read More: Times of Israel