An open letter from the mom of Jewish college students

There is a lot of conversation right now about antisemitism on college campuses and what needs to be done to stop it. But as the mother of two Jewish college students I don’t think any of these conversations are working to make my children safer, or anyone else’s children for that matter.

Well. Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest.

While the encampment protests started at Columbia, Boston has been a focal point of the absolute chaos that has descended on college campuses throughout this academic year. My office is just a few blocks away from Emerson College, where 118 protestors were arrested last week, and a vigorous walk away from Northeastern University, where about 100 protestors were arrested shortly after that.

None of these arrests have made me feel any better about the safety of my kids on their respective campuses. In fact, most of the national conversation about antisemitism - or even the conversation within our own Jewish community - hasn’t made me feel any better about their safety. This past week has made me feel like the pit at the bottom of my stomach has taken up permanent residence. I might as well give it a name.

So what will make me feel like the world is a safer place for my Jewish children, who are just a few short weeks away from graduating and emerging into adulthood?

Let me back up by several months. After 10/7, when things started to get very tense on multiple college campuses, one of my children had an experience that has stayed with me ever since. Some students staged an action that had some very problematic language, and not only was the action shut down but the entire student group was banned from campus. To be clear, I do not equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and I worry a great deal about the larger Jewish institutions that do, but some of this language absolutely crossed a line. I also don’t want to minimize the real and dangerous rise of antisemitism in this country, particularly as we see Nazis marching through the streets of so many communities - including Boston. But my child’s response to the incident was a real teaching moment for me. My child knew the students involved and had some thoughts about what conversations needed to happen in the aftermath. But these conversations became very hard to have as the story hit the news. Once the incident was a part of the national discourse, the focus became shutting the group down. I worried that a real opportunity was missed to address harm, unpack the differences between criticizing Israel vs. saying hateful things about Jews, and have some process that might have actually brought some healing.

But instead, the group was banned from campus. And this approach seems to have carried on since in many of our institutions of higher learning. I have real concerns about this from a democracy and free speech perspective. I am also left wondering where this leaves students who could truly benefit from deeper learning and difficult conversations about Israel/Palestine, antisemitism, AND Islamophobia. Because while the laser focus has been on antisemitism - and mind you, this focus has come without the benefit of a shared definition of what antisemitism actually is - Islamophobia has also been on the rise. More on that in a bit.

If college campuses are to become safer places for Jewish students we have to have the hard and messy conversations that elicit both learning and healing after an incident that causes harm. This is particularly difficult right now because even in the Jewish community we don’t have consensus on what is, in fact, harmful. Which behooves us to talk more about antisemitism in a way that acknowledges multiple perspectives and places of disagreement. This is very hard to do in an atmosphere where groups are thrown off campus and conversations are completely shut down. That’s what I saw happen on my child’s campus and that just didn’t feel right to me.

There was a really interesting piece in the Boston Globe recently by Maya Steinitz, a law professor at Boston University who wrote about the importance of encouraging more speech about antisemitism, not less. She had this to say: “Education about antisemitism and the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs to be mainstreamed throughout a school’s curriculum. Providing information about these issues is not enough. Knowledge acquisition needs to be coupled with skill development, specifically a refocusing on facts-based argumentation (as opposed to feelings-based argumentation); the ability to distinguish high-quality sources from low-quality sources and misinformation; and a shift away from black-and-white thinking and toward an ability to grapple with nuance and complexity.” I would love to see more of this kind of learning, but as the level of conflict rises on campuses throughout the country this kind of critical analysis of complex issues seems less and less possible.

Another aspect of the current campus climate that is making me feel more worried for the safety of Jewish students, not less, is the laser focus on antisemitism. Yep, I know that sounds counterintuitive but hear me out. Only focusing on antisemitism at the expense of addressing other forms of hate, or without an analysis of how hatred of Jews fits into larger dynamics of oppression, extremism, and white supremacy - ultimately hurts Jews too. It’s also just wrong. I have real concerns about campuses (and Jews!) enforcing punitive measures for antisemitic acts while allowing other forms of discrimination to go unchecked. For example, the same university that banned a student group from campus for hate speech against Jews reinstated a suspended athletic coach in spite of a history of anti-Black racist behavior. I can’t imagine how this makes students of color on that campus feel. What message does that send about whose safety is valued on that campus?

And again, when we attend to one form of hate to the exclusion of others, it jeopardizes justice for all of us. Much has been written about how our safety is in our solidarity. In an interview given shortly after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Ilana Kaufman of the Jews of Color Initiative spoke about what we can do to combat white supremacy. She reflected: “…the most important strategy we can develop is to come together to develop friendships and trust and relationships so that when we need each other as neighbors and as friends, and when the white supremacists come knocking on our doors or when they come marching down our streets, that we know each one of us is going to come out of our houses to support the other, that we will not question who needs this kind of advocacy, but it becomes part of our culture as a nation and as a people.” I truly believe this. I try to live this in my coalition building work. But I don’t believe these core values are guiding our efforts to address antisemitism on campus right now. I just don’t. And without engaging in the hard and messy work of figuring out how to be in solidarity with communities that have experienced discrimination, who have been subject to hate in dorms and on college greens, we are missing the mark. Ultimately, we are hurting ourselves as well. Creating a safer world for Jewish students will only happen if we work to create safety for other targeted communities as well. Remember, the folks that are coming for Black students and trans students and so on are the same folks who don’t like us Jews either.

I truly believe that creating safety for my Jewish students will only come if we center hate and extremism as a whole, and address antisemitism as a pillar of that hate. If we enter every conversation centering antisemitism, I worry that we will alienate other communities that could and should be allies in this work. I worry that we will lose sight of forms of hate, give other kinds of discrimination a free pass, if we focus all our efforts solely on antisemitism. That isn’t building the kind of solidarity that Ilana Kaufman sees as the antidote to the emboldened white supremacy in this country.

As we see a concerning rise in Islamophobia, I also hope we will earnestly advocate for the Muslim community. I hope we will push college campuses to address Islamophobia right alongside antisemitism. Safety for us only comes if there is safety for all. When I see three Muslim students shot in Burlington, Vermont, this makes me worry about all of our students - Jewish, Muslim, students of color, LGBTQ+, etc. - in a country with every increasing hate and ever increasing access to guns.

No form of hate exists in a vacuum.

There’s another issue I want to address, one that is so thorny and hard and I worry about whether I will even begin to find the right words. Even within the Jewish community, we do not have a shared definition of what we actually mean when we talk about antisemitism. I think this lack of consensus, this inability to hold the continuum of responses to Israel/Palestine held by our Jewish youth, is tearing us apart. We have Jewish students who feel profoundly unsafe on campus and we have Jewish students who are actively leading protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza. And we have Jewish adults who are creating rigid definitions of acceptable beliefs and behaviors amongst our youth. And that worries me terribly. No matter where our youth fall along the spectrum of feeling threatened by antisemitism or feeling horrified by the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza (or some combination of all of the above), I want us to remember that they are all ours and we have to care about the wellbeing of each one of them. We should want them to be safe, whether they are sleeping tonight in a college dorm or in a tent. Because they are all feeling the pain of a very broken world with a great deal of trauma. They are calling for peace and security in a world that has given them COVID and active shooter drills and a climate crisis and now this very horrific war. These are all our kids. These are my kids.

So if you ask me if my kids feel safe on their college campuses (and a lot of people have) I will tell you yes and I will tell you no. I will tell you that my kids are very aware that many things need to change to create real and lasting safety on college campuses - for them and for all the other students they care about. What needs to change? We need to have the hard conversations, engage in deep learning, address harm, commit to showing up for each other, make space for different approaches to being Jewish, and acknowledge that even within our Jewish community we have different thoughts about the war. We need to admit that we ourselves don’t have a shared definition of what antisemitism is and is not, which makes it incredibly hard to address. We need to loudly proclaim that every person and every community has a right to be safe. And we need to acknowledge that both Israelis and Palestinians are experiencing a great deal of trauma. This is the hard and messy work of building coalition. I believe all those things are absolutely necessary if we want college campuses to be safe places for my kids and your kids are everyone else’s kids.