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Well, Jews are not a race but a religious group, but that’s irrelevant here.

I saw students smile and cheer enthusiastically as a woman stood up and said the words, “I am ashamed to be a Jew.” The rhetoric I heard from students opposing Israel at this meeting could easily be equated to arguments that I have only seen in quotes at museums or mentioned in textbooks for their use in the justification of historical persecution of the Jewish race. I heard a senator-someone who is supposed to be my representative-say that people were only voting against this resolution because they were afraid of losing “Jew support.” I heard my peers laugh at the mention of terrorists hurling stones at the heads of Israeli civilians intending to kill them. In those eight hours, I was told that Jews control the government, that all Jews are rich, that Zionism is racism, that the marginalization of Jewish students is justified because it prevents the marginalization of other minority groups, that Israel sterilizes its Ethiopian women (this is obviously not true), and that Palestinians in America who speak out against Israel are sought out by the IDF and denied entrance into Israel (also a ridiculous conspiracy theory). I’ll excerpt just one paragraph to show the slurs that were raised by advocates for BDS:įurthermore, I am disgusted by the normalization of anti-Semitic language so casually thrown around at the meeting. The divestment resolution barely lost (12-12, with 5 abstaining), but Margaux Gundzik, a Jewish student who attended the meeting to oppose the resolution, wrote a letter to The Bottom Line (the UCSB student newspaper) detailing her experiences. The University of California at Santa Barbara’s student senate voted Friday on whether to join the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement against Israel, which aims to bring Israel to its knees-and, ultimately, to dissolve that state-with economic and social pressure. So here’s a real instance of hate speech from a college campus. (This, of course, is not to justify discrimination against anyone.) and Europe, there are roughly five times more committed against Jews than against Muslims.Īll of which is to say that while Islamophobia is used as a common epithet (especially in the atheist blogosphere), we don’t hear much about a genuine animus against individuals of another ethnic group: Jews. While accusations of Islamophobia are being bandied about, conflating dislike of Muslims with the real issue, dislike of the tenets of Islam (in particular, those tenets that are violent or oppressive), nobody’s much worried about a real phobia: “Judeophobia,” which I’ll coin as a neologism for what it really is: anti-Semitism.