Students Say Activists Exaggerate Anti-Semitism At Irvine

 Jewish Students Say Community Activists Exaggerating Threat of Anti-Semitism. Activists Say Students Are Ignoring Real Dangers.

  “Michelle Eshagian!” Ted Bleiweis spat into the phone, shortly before hanging up on me. “Always Michelle Eshagian and Isaac Yerushalmi! What makes you think they know what they’re talking about?”

A Jewish community activist in Southern California, Bleiweis is a co-founder of the Orange County Task Force on Anti-Semitism, an independent investigative committee that, in February, published a report on anti-Semitism at the University of California-Irvine. If you’ve followed the sprawling “campus anti-Semitism” story at any time in the last five years, you’ve heard Irvine cited as a special case, a place where Jewish students are particularly unsafe. The Task Force’s report reaffirmed those warnings, citing supposed instances of violence against Jewish students and making the controversial recommendation that “[s]tudents with a strong Jewish identity should consider enrolling elsewhere until and unless changes are made.”

Michelle Eshagian, co-president of Irvine’s Hillel, didn’t recognize the campus described in Bleiweis’ report. So she got together four other Jewish student leaders, including Isaac Yerushalmi, the head of the campus pro-Israel group, and the presidents of the campus’ Jewish fraternity and sorority. Together, they issued a press release in late March titled “Jewish Student Life Thrives on Campus, Despite Misinformation from Outside Organizations.” While the student leaders acknowledged that there was “verbal anti-Semitism” on campus, they maintained that it did not interfere with daily Jewish life.

In the following week, the authors of the release were roundly criticized by activists all over the web, who said that the students didn’t know what they were talking about. They were attacked for disputing the report, and for their apparent implication that “verbal anti-Semitism” wasn’t so bad, after all.

The fight continued, with press releases and angry phone calls. Now, Jewish newspapers across the country are carrying the story, citing no fewer than three separate groups as the legitimate representatives of the Jewish community on campus.

As national Jewish organizations descend upon Irvine, there are more questions than answers. Who is the legitimate representative of the student body? Who decides what makes Jewish students feel physically insecure? And, perhaps most importantly, who should respond to anti-Semitic speech at Irvine?

Student Voices Silenced

When Michelle Eshagian was a freshman at Irvine, she had an Israeli flag hanging outside her dorm room. One day someone drew a swastika on it. She complained to her Resident Assistant, but he didn’t know what to do.

“So I dropped it,” she said. “Not because I was scared, but I didn’t see any point in following up on it. I just said, ‘Damn, that sucks,’ and moved on with my life.”

Soon after the incident, Eshagian was contacted by Susan Tuchman, head of the Zionist Organization of America’s Center for Law and Justice. Tuchman wanted to use Eshagian’s case as an example in a lawsuit her organization was bringing before US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that the UCI administration had infringed upon Jewish students’ rights by failing to address campus anti-Semitism.

“I’m not really sure how she heard about it,” Eshagian said. “I didn’t tell her. She must have heard it second, third, fourth-hand. But I said, ‘Sure, you can use it.'”

A few weeks later, though, Eshagian discovered that her experience was being misrepresented in the lawsuit.

“[The ZOA] was using my example to prove that the administration had ignored anti-Semitism,” she said. “But the administration didn’t even know it had happened. They just hadn’t heard about it, because I hadn’t made any sort of official complaint.”

Eshagian says she tried to share those concerns with Tuchman and the ZOA, but was ignored. “They weren’t interested in hearing it,” she said.

The ZOA lawsuit was dismissed after a lengthy and, some argue, somewhat spotty investigation. (Three Republican senators from the Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter, John Kyl, and Sam Brownback, issued a press release disputing the dismissal). Three years later, the controversy has refused to die down.
 
This winter, Isaac Yerushalmi, the head of the campus pro-Israel group, stood up at a ZOA-sponsored event marking the end of the Task Force’s investigation to say that “there’s anti-Semitism at UCI, but it’s not as bad as the organizations are making it out to be.”

Soon after, he was fired from his position with the national Israel advocacy organization StandWithUs; in the email exchange, one of the reasons cited for his dismissal was his statement that there “was no anti-Semitism at UCI.”

“And I understand why that would make them upset,” Yerushalmi said. “Except, it wasn’t what I said.”

In his write-up of the event on the conservative blog RedCounty, Philip Schlesinger, a former UCI student who spoke at the event, claimed that Yerushalmi had lied at the event, claiming that he had said that “he was basically not aware of any anti-Semitism at UCI.”

Yerushalmi thinks that Schlesinger or one of the ZOA activists present at the event sent the words he didn’t say to his bosses at StandWithUs. He says he doesn’t blame them for firing him, given what they knew.

“If StandWithUs heard something like that,” he said, “I totally understand why they would make that decision. But I am angry at people at these organizations who aren’t listening to students, slandering the students, when we’re the ones on the ground.”

Why Irvine?

Somehow, UCI became and has remained a flash point for international arguments about American campus anti-Semitism.

The local chapter of the Muslim Student Union is frequently blamed for this. More than once, it has invited to campus a controversial imam named Amir Abdel Malik Ali, who is on record as having called the Jews “bloodsuckers” who caused the war in Iraq. He has also opined that “the Israelis were in control of 9/11,” which “was staged to give an excuse to wage war against Muslims around the world.”

But the pro-Palestinian activism at UCI is not fundamentally different from the activism across town at UCLA or up the coast at UC Berkeley. Or, for that matter, at any number of other schools across the country.

“The speakers the MSU invites come here one day, then go to UCLA or Berkeley the next,” said Daniel Schroeter, a professor of Jewish Studies at UCI. “It’s not like what they say here is unique.”
 
And yet, it is made out by advocacy organizations to be unique and extreme, and UCI garners press attention that other universities do not.

“Why UCI?” said Kevin O’Grady, Orange County Regional Director of the Anti Defamation League. “That, I think, is the $4,000 question. It might be because UCI is a stereotypically suburban, essentially non-political campus. This sort of activity gets lost on the campuses at UCLA,  Berkeley, but at UCI, it really becomes a spectacle.”

“I think part of the reason it’s such an issue,” Schroeter said, “is the outside organizations, on both sides, reaching in and making it one. A whole lot of allegations get blown out of proportion.”

Bleiweis thinks it’s much simpler. “If the administration officials and the community organizations, like Hillel and the Federation, had done their job, none of this would have gotten as bad as it has.”

A Call for Censorship?

“You’ll notice when I talk to you about anti-Semitism,” Ted Bleiweis told me, “the one thing I won’t talk about is the Muslims. That’s because I don’t get up in the morning and worry about anti-Semites. They’re out there, but I don’t care. I worry about my community’s failure to do something about it.”

The Task Force report saved much of its vitriol for “community organizations” and the UCI administration. It accused the former of not speaking out enough against hate speech on campus. It stopped short of calling for the MSU’s speakers to be barred from campus, but it asked that the UCI chancellor “publicly identify and denounce hate speech when it occurs.”

“We understand that the MSU has a First Amendment right to say what they say,” Bleiweis told me. “But [UCI Chancellor Michael] Drake also has a First Amendment right to condemn them.”

Of course, it isn’t so simple. The decision to condemn one particular statement as hate speech would imply that everything else had UCI’s tacit endorsement.

“This, certainly, is Drake’s concern,” O’Grady said. “We think it would still be worth it for him to speak out. But certainly, I would not like to be in his position.”

It is hard not to wonder if the Task Force’s proposal is actually a call for censorship. The ZOA, for one, has a long history of trying to silence organizations it disagrees with. Recent examples include its unsuccessful attempt to get the Union of Progressive Zionists thrown out of the Israel Campus Coalition over the controversial “Breaking the Silence” tour, which brought former Israeli soldiers around the country to speak out against the occupation.

Bleiweis isn’t too concerned about the First Amendment rights of the MSU’s speakers. “Those speakers are inciting jihad. They’re inciting martyrdom. Now, you won’t deny that even Muslims that aren’t religious have blown themselves up. And some MSU students are very impressionable. They pray several times a day. I’m not criticizing them for that, that’s fine, but hate speech is unrelenting.” (Asked if he was implying that MSU students would “blow themselves up” at UCI, Bleiweis said he couldn’t speculate about the future, but he certainly hoped not.)

For his part, Bleiweis thinks that Eshagian and Yerushalmi had been spun by Hillel and other community organizations in an attempt to “cover up their inaction on this issue.”

“Those students talk about misinformation?” Bleiweis asked me. “Well, the only people misinformed are the ones who wrote that press release. I’m not saying they don’t believe what they say, or that I don’t respect them. I’m saying their own leadership is misinforming them.”

“You don’t know us!”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Nida Chowdry said, “for someone walking around campus to say of me, I’m a Jew-hater. It’s not in our faith to hate people. I just want to say, ‘You don’t know me! You don’t know us!'”

Chowdry is the spokesperson for the Muslim Students Association at UCI. A transfer student from Orange Coast College, she took the position at the beginning of the semester.

“I’m glad you’re talking to me,” she added. “Most people write about the MSU without talking to the MSU. They just think we’re haters.”

Given all of the press about the threat posed by the MSU, it comes as a surprise that the organization isn’t all that big. Chowdry says they have about 120 active members on a campus of 25,000, about half of whom can be counted on to come to events. Daniel Schroeter, the professor of Jewish Studies, thinks even that is an exaggeration. The organization, he says, is lucky to get 30 participants to an event.

I asked Chowdry if “haters” wasn’t a fair description, given the sort of speakers they invite, such as Malik Ali.

“Let me tell you,” she said, “I actually never heard Amir Abdel [Malik Ali] before I came here. I would hear so much about him. I would hear this is so anti-Zionist, he hates Jews. I was really against this man. We had an event with him, and I had to force myself to his speeches. And when you listen to what he’s saying, it is so different from the way that he’s painted. I have no idea how to even explain that. I was so amazed that I was able to hate somebody, and discredit everything that he said, without having even heard him.”

And when he calls the Jews “bloodsuckers”?

She paused. “I think he meant that in a political context. Don’t get me wrong, he’s critical (that’s a light word) of Israel and the Israel lobby. But he’s not anti-Semitic. But it’s interesting that there’s only one or two speakers that people know we bring. It’s not as if we just bring this one man with this one view. We’re bringing many people with many different solutions.”

Chowdry doesn’t believe Israel has a right to exist, but she also doesn’t seem to be an anti-Semite.

I asked her if she believed there was actually genocide going on in Gaza.

“Well, we create those titles to be inflammatory, to catch people’s attention,” she said. “Then they’ll come talk to us about it, and we can have a dialogue.”

I asked her if, in the interests of dialogue, the MSU had any regular contact with Hillel or the pro-Israel groups on campus. She seemed confused by the question.

“I mean, that’s existed in the past,” she said, “but now…”

Students Turned Off

“We’re here trying to build Jewish life on campus,” Yerushalmi told me, “and we have other organizations out there saying that UCI is not a safe place for Jewish students and that we’re suffering.

“And we’re not! We’re not! And we’re here, and they’re there, and they don’t listen, they’re not interested. Who knows what’s happening here better? Obviously, the ZOA thinks they do.”

“When the rockets are flying,” Tammy Shapiro, director of the Union of Progressive Zionists, told me, “Jewish organizations are great, absolutely great, at standing together. But that means we’re much better at defending students than probing our community and asking some of the deep questions that need to be asked.”

Those students won’t be students forever. And if the message they get is that for the Jewish community, they’re just proxies in grown-up infighting, they’re going to walk away. And that’s a shame, because the ones who will be disillusioned are going to be the ones smart enough, and interested enough, to ask the deep questions that Shapiro refers to.

“The kids I run into on campus are a lot more open to asking questions than I’ve ever seen,” Shapiro says. “They’re a lot more open to questioning what they’re told about Israel. If we tell them that those questions aren’t allowed to be asked, they’re not going to stop asking them. They’ll just stop asking us.”

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