'Virulent' Antisemitism at University of California

From WJD:

Imagine being a student at a university where professors claim that Israeli soldiers routinely rape pregnant Palestinian women as part of their "colonial" campaign.

Such an atmosphere exists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where a Jewish professor and students have brought a federal complaint alleging anti-Jewish racism.

Writing in the Forward, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer in Jewish and Hebrew Studies, provides the following examples.

1) A conference titled “Alternative Histories Within and Beyond Zionism” took place at UCSC ... The five talks were replete with lies, distortions and gross misrepresentations of the facts, including claims that Zionism is racism; Israel is an apartheid state; Israel commits heinous crimes against humanity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing; Israel’s behavior is comparable to Nazi Germany, and Jews exaggerate the Holocaust as a tool of Zionist propaganda. All five speakers agreed that Israel should be dismantled as a Jewish state.

2) A UCSC community studies class designed to train social activists was taught by a professor who described herself in her online syllabus as an active participant in the “campaign against the Apartheid Wall being built in Palestine” and used her class website to encourage students to protest Israel’s “destructive actions“ outside the Israeli consulate in San Francisco. The professor’s course readings, chosen to incite hatred of the Jewish state, contained unreferenced statements such as the following:

“Israeli massacres are often accompanied by sexual assault, particularly of pregnant women as a symbolic way of uprooting the children from the mother, or the Palestinian from the land.”

“We define Zionism as a settler-colonial political movement that seeks to ethnically cleanse historical Palestine of the indigenous population and populate it as a Jewish-only state.”

Rossman-Benjamin goes on to say that these acts and others clearly meet the definition of antisemitism adopted by the U.S. Department of State. The federal complaint alleges that universtity adminstrators have not done enough to counter the anti-Jewish racism. The Department of Education is currently investigating the complaint.