Here's why campus anti-Semitism isn't being addressed.
In her article on the Antisemitism Awareness Act hearings, Caroline Glick notes the bizarre appearance by Pamela Nadell, who heads the Jewish Studies Association.
On Tuesday the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2016. The bill is intended to facilitate the fight against antisemitism on campuses by requiring university authorities to refer to the State Department’s definition of antisemitism when they consider whether harassing acts were “motivated by antisemitic intent.”
Pamela Nadell, director of the Jewish Studies Program at American University and the president of the Jewish Studies Association, argued that while there are acts of antisemitic harassment on campuses, these acts have not “created a climate of fear that impinges upon Jewish students’ ability to learn and experience college life to the fullest.”
Rabbi Cooper had some blunt words of his own.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper and the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt fired shots at Trachtenberg and at Pamela Nadell, the president of the Association for Jewish Studies, saying that academics were not in the trenches. Cooper chided the committee for inviting them.
“It’s like inviting people from the Flat Earth Society to a hearing about NASA,” he said.
Pamela Nadell's full testimony is truly surreal.
Aside from a brief mention of Israeli speakers being shouted down, the only anti-Semitism she acknowledges comes from neo-Nazi type groups. And while that's an issue. It's far from the only issue. Not only does Nadell not acknowledge the anti-Semitic rhetoric of SJP or MSA, but she goes out of her way to emphasize an anti-Semitism grounded only in one political pole.
She also quotes the Stanford "survey" by anti-Israel activists as evidence that campus anti-Semitism isn't an issue. She doesn't mention its partisan nature. But the fact that she views it as reliable testifies to her own views.
And, Nadell claims, "When these students experience discomfort as Jews, they trace it to the stridency of both sides of the Israel-Palestine debate on campus."
In her only real mention of the issue, Pamela Nadell blames pro-Israel and pro-terrorist activists equally for making life uncomfortable for Jews on campus.
The strangest and most inappropriate part of Nadell's testimony comes at the end. Her specific example of campus anti-Semitism instead involves a Confederate flag and a black nationalist.
You may have heard that recently on my own campus, Confederate flags affixed with cotton stems were posted on bulletin boards at the same moment that American University History Professor Ibram X. Kendi was launching our new Antiracist Research and Policy Center. You may not know that several of the flags were affixed to the bulletin board of our Center for Israel Studies,
What do Confederate flags and cotton have to do with Jews? Nothing.
But it's the only specific example of campus bigotry that Nadell finds worth mentioning. And that says it all.