Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Last winter, I attended the second Occupy Oakland port shutdown, along with hundreds of other students. At a midday rally, Angela Davis, one of my greatest heroines and a professor of my alma mater, addressed the crowd. My heart soared as she spoke of the “wins” of the first port shutdown. However, my beating pulse…
I came to the J Street Conference looking for allies. As a queer Jew who is sternly critical of Israel, but still a staunch Zionist, I was looking forward to meeting some like-minded folks. Folks who can’t help but discuss privilege, minorities, and oppression. Folks who are obsessed with identity politics. Folks who face the…
Just after the “Bringing Women to the Fore and Advancing Peace” session, an elderly woman approached me to respond to a question I had asked about intersectionality, a term used in modern feminist theory to describe how all forms of oppression are connected. The idea is that you can’t eradicate racism without getting rid of…
Before the conference began, David blogged about “Israel-haters” at J-Street. He wrote that they’re here, and that’s okay. We have room to discuss their one-state solutions in the in-betweens, walking out from the plenaries and schmoozing. This place is the only place where “Israel-haters” can still feel like Jews. So I asked a couple people…
The federal investigation of anti-Semitism at UCSC
This was originally published in the Winter 2011 issue of the Leviathan Jewish Journal, the 40-year-old Jewish undergraduate publication at the University of California, Santa Cruz. New Voices has re-published as a supplement to a new op-ed by the author on the same subject.
This version of the article concludes with a section on new developments since article’s original publication. A fully footnoted version is available at the Leviathan.
This op-ed was co-published by New Voices and The Jewish Daily Forward. Last year, the author wrote a longer article, originally published by the Leviathan Jewish Journal, detailing the ongoing struggle over the Title VI Civil Rights complaint filed at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which can be read at New Voices.
Last spring the United States Office of Civil Rights opened an investigation into allegations of anti-Semitism at my school, University of California, Santa Cruz. The investigation was prompted by a Title VI complaint filed by my own Hebrew teacher, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin. She complains that UCSC has violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act because it has failed to address what she alleges to be university-sponsored anti-Semitism. The investigation is a waste of time — but worse than that, it’s also damaging UCSC’s Jewish community. I have seen friendships fall apart during arguments over the investigation as this situation has turned Jew against Jew. So as a Jew and a Zionist, one of the very students Rossman-Benjamin claims to protect, I have a few complaints of my own.