Rutgers University sits behind only the University of Florida as the public college with the highest Jewish population in the United States. The school also has an anti-Semitism problem. And I was not surprised to hear that university administrators there thought they could simply fix it with DEI “training” that taught school officials or student leaders not to be anti-Semites.
Of course, DEI—the Orwellian “diversity, equity, inclusion” race-based protection racket that privileges students based on skin color and whether they belong to an identity group that is popular among university bureaucrats—is the cause of a fair amount of the anti-Semitism on campus. So that DEI training session made the problem even worse.
The incident in question happened last month, according to the school newspaper: Resident assistants (RAs, the dormitory hall monitors) walked out of an anti-bias training session about anti-Semitism. The walkouts went running into the arms of Students for Justice in Palestine, the primary organizer of anti-Jewish events on campuses across the country. According to the Algemeiner, SJP put out a statement that said, in part: “The mandated training program organized by the Office of Residence Life requires RAs to learn about DEI, restorative justice, community engagement, and more — all of these are inspired by Indigenous practices meant to unpack systems of white supremacy. On the contrary, this specific session worked to perpetuate Zionism, racism, and white supremacy.”
According to DEI, Jews are considered “adjacent” to whites and therefore cannot be beneficiaries of “anti-discrimination” programs.
If there is any good that can come of this, it’ll be the emergence of a wider understanding that DEI cannot be fixed. Indeed, it would be ironic if SJP made its first and only positive contribution to society by accidentally condemning DEI to oblivion.
But another comment by one of the walkouts is much more illuminating about the motivations behind campus anti-Semitism. This RA said: “One of the facilitators even identified as ‘Israeli’ and made mention of this multiple times. He justified his authority on the topic by citing his 12 plus years spent in ’48 Palestine, going so far as to call ‘Israel’ [sic] a ‘beautiful land.’”
Let’s just state this as plainly as possible: the Jewish person facilitating the anti-bias training exists, and his existence bothered Rutgers RAs so much they refused to be in the same room with him.
There’s no reason to pretend that taking offense at the word “Israeli” to describe a person from Israel is anything other than Jew-hatred. This idiot at Rutgers is very young, but he has accrued a lifetime’s worth of bigotry in his rotted brain even if he is just regurgitating SJP propaganda. His use of the term “’48 Palestine” to describe Israel, combined with his offense at the word “Israel,” is an expression of nothing more profound than blood-and-soil nationalism.
It is also a reminder that the debate over Israel long ago ceased being about Israel. Over the weekend, at the Venice film festival, a filmmaker named Sarah Friedland gave an acceptance speech in which she said: “As a Jewish American artist working in a time-based medium, I must note, I’m accepting this award on the 336th day of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and 76th year of occupation.”
Seventy-six years of occupation? Seventy-six years ago was the founding of the Jewish state, of course. When anti-Israel activists mention “the occupation,” they mean Jewish sovereignty of any kind—Tel Aviv as much as any outpost in the Jordan Valley.
DEI is unsalvageable because it cannot reconcile itself with Jewish rights of any sort. And too many universities will be unsalvageable if they cannot face up to what their anti-Zionist hordes actually believe, starting with the unwillingness to share a room with a Jew.
