Let me tell you about a place where a professor got his classes boycotted, his mezuzah ripped off his office door, and death threats sent to his home with his address attached. A place where Jewish students were afraid to walk to the dining hall. Where they were interrogated, “Are you Jewish? Are you a Zionist?” and shunned if they gave the wrong answer.
This isn’t 1930s Europe. This is Haverford College, a fancy liberal arts school outside Philadelphia, in the year of our Lord 2024.
Professor Barak Mendelsohn is an Israeli American political science professor there. After Oct. 7, when Hamas slaughtered more than a thousand Jews, the campus didn’t rally around its Jewish students. It turned on them. Mendelsohn was investigated by his own college for daring to suggest on social media that anti-Zionism and antisemitism might be related. He was chased by a mob after giving a talk at nearby Swarthmore. He received messages calling him a “filthy Jew” and wishing him a “Happy Holocaust Day,” with his home address included. His children, all under six, couldn’t play in their front yard.
Bless their hearts, the administration was real helpful. When Jewish students complained that posters for a Shabbat dinner had been torn down, they were told “the wind had blown down the posters.” The wind. At a college that prides itself on intellectual rigor, that’s what they went with.
Libraryisme (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsPresident Wendy Raymond attended an event where protesters blocked students from entering, and she took no action. It took her more than two years to meet with Club Chai, the Jewish student organization formed after Oct. 7. Two years. You can get a degree in that time.
And then there’s the DEI coordinator, the person whose entire job is to make sure students feel safe and included. When Jewish students came to her begging for help, she told them that racial minorities have never felt safe at Haverford and Jewish students shouldn’t expect anything different. If they wanted acceptance, they needed to condemn genocide.
Let me pause here. A diversity officer told Jewish students to condemn genocide as the price of being treated like human beings. At a school