Jewish Students Say Community Activists Exaggerating Threat of Anti-Semitism. Activists Say Students Are Ignoring Real Dangers.
Imam Amir Abdel Malik Ali at UC Irvine in 2007. By Kelly M. Ramsey.
"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?
Students debate following Malik Ali's address. Image by Kelly M. Ramsey.
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.”
Peace and Justice (209.208.200.xxx) 2008-05-08 09:04:12
You write:
"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."
What rhetorical sophistry you engage in when you transition between these two paragraphs. You rightly call out the virulent anti-semitic speech of Ali, and the very first sentence of the next paragraph implicitly associates said offensive speech with pro-Palestinian activism! Such a relation on your part, especially as just a subtle slip of diction, is disingenuous and offensive to your readers' reason and to the cause for peace and justice for the Palestinian people. Ali does not mention anything about Palestine! Only conspiratorial hate speech spews from his mouth! If you are linking such speech to pro-Palestinian activism, you must logically think that such activism is inherently anti-Jewish. Absurd conflations like this does not do service to any cause, especially the righteous ones of Palestinians and people all around the world who call for an end to the occupation and the abuses of innocent people.
You're intentionally misreading the text. Ali appeared at UCI in the context of a pro-Palestinian protest. The writer is simply setting up the quote that follows, in which a professor says that the same individuals who spoke at pro-Palestinian protests at UCI did so at neighboring schools.
I don't think "Peace and Justice" has misread the text. The sentences in question are examples of flagrant editorializing, a cardinal journalistic sin if there ever was one. To claim that the two sentences were "setting up the quote that follows" is either disingenuous, or shows ignorance of simple journalistic convention. If you were setting up the quote, you'd mention that it was the professor saying it. As it stands, you're making a pretty outrageous generalization about palestinian solidarity being anti-semitic across the country.
The article is in fact rife with editorialized statements, some very bizarre. For instance: "Chowdry doesn?t believe Israel has a right to exist, but she also doesn?t seem to be an anti-Semite." She's just said that calling Jews "bloodsuckers" should be interpreted "in a political context" ? which to me sounds like crude apologetics for racism ? but you're immediately willing to exculpate her of anti-semitism!
This subject is quite important, and it's disappointing to see such a narrow treatment ? essentially framing it as debate between far right wing Jewish groups and more centrist-to-ring-wing campus Jewish groups, and throwing in an egregious racist (Malik Ali) as a flogging horse. Maybe the debate is always this skewed in the US (I'm writing from Canada). But I think the reason for claims about enormous increases in campus anti-Semitism are founded on an illegitimate conflation of criticism of Israel state policy with anti-Semitism. There's an obvious correlation between awareness about the Israeli military occupation is increasing, more open criticism of Israeli policy, and increased "anti-Semitism."
I think this happens for cynical, tactical reasons ? it's very easy to smear critics of Israeli state policy by claiming their anti-Semites. The Anti-Defamation League are pros at this. In Canada, we have Bnai Brith. But then there are also sincere, understandable confusions among Jewish people, which are of course cultivated by right-wing Jewish organizations, about the difference between anti-Semitism and critical attitudes about Israeli treatment of Palestinians.
People concerned about the fate of Palestinians and Israelis ? and Jews in the Diaspora, who are undoubtedly harmed by Israeli actions committed in their name ? should carefully draw the line between legitimate political discourse and what lies beyond the pale. Malik Ali types should be condemned and marginalized by any movements who claim to be working for justice for Palestinians; anything else is a disservice to them. And Jews should open their eyes to Israeli persecution of Palestinians, underwritten by their government.
You kept telling me that your cell phone battery was about to die every time you were concluding our interviews. Naughty, naughty!! So, the "hanging up after I spat into the phone" bit was a touch melodramatic. Not my style. You exagerated just a weeeee bit.
Next time try not to do an interview when your shopping at Costco!!!
When I was at Brandeis, the Zionist Organization of America intruded into campus more than once to declare that Brandeis was betraying the ideals of its namesake by inviting such-and-such a speaker, hiring a certain Palestinian professor, etc.
It seems that a similar issue is occurring at UC-Irvine. If colleges and universities cannot have a free exchange of ideas (even unpopular ones) without outside activist organizations coming and trampling over the work that students on campus are doing, then where can free speech find sanctuary?
These outside organizations are doing a disservice to the students at UC-Irvine by treating them as incapable of standing up to anti-Semitic or controversial speech about Israel on campus. College is the time for students to learn and grow, not to be manipulated by outside organizations who know next to nothing of the campus context in which those students are living.
Peace and Justice (209.208.200.xxx) 2008-05-12 10:38:10
Josh,
Please do not insult my intelligence and claim to know what I was or was not doing, even worse imply that my argument derives not from logic but from literary manipulation (probably in your mind b/c of allegiance to a certain cause)...
Reread the first three paragraphs under the heading "Why Irvine?," specifically what precedes Ali's quotes:
"Somehow, UCI became and has remained a flash point for international arguments about American campus anti-Semitism."
There is no reason to assume Ali's following quotes took place at a "pro-Palestinian" protest (whatever "pro-Palestinian" means). The writer of this article shamefully linked Ali's hate speech to "Palestinian activism," and instead of recognizing the journalistic and moral flaws with such a connection you choose to attack my reason. Unfortunate...
The basic question is one of jewish pride. If Jewish students at UC-Irvine accept anti-Semitic incidents and if Palestinian fanatics are sanitized because they are equal opportunity Israel blashphemers, then we have a problem of Jewish pride. If a Muslim rejects the State of Israel that is essential to Jewish consciousness, yes she is an anti-Semite - that is,if we have any pride.
Transpose these examples to members of the black, gay and women's movements as a litmus test of what would be considered racist, homophobic or sexist. They still retain their pride. Too many Jews don't and are willing to grasp any any straw to justify their unwillingness to stand up for Israel, in a generic sense, and for their heritage.
Isaac Yerushalmi and Roz Roths (207.200.116.xxx) 2008-05-23 17:45:41
Dear Editor,
A few days before this article about UC Irvine was published, StandWithUs met with UCI's Anteaters for Israel and determined together how to respond to the Muslim Student Union- UCI's "Never Again: The Palestinian Holocaust" week which was held May 7-15. Together, we created posters and flyers to counter the anti-Israel speakers including Norman Finklestein, Ilan Pappe and Rachel Corrie's parents presentation. AFI and SWU staff handed out the flyers before each talk and carried the poster, "Caution: Hate Speech Zone Ahead" behind Mohammad Al-Asi and Amir Abdel Malik Ali as they spoke. SWU and AFI also took out a full-page advertisement jointly, in the UCI paper, New University, explaining how the MSU is failing Muslim students and calling on the administration to provide more guidance. StandWithUs and AFI are pleased that as always, an outside organization working with students on the ground produced the needed response. In addition, StandWithUs supported hundreds of campuses, including UCI students, with their proactive celebrations around Israel at 60. We just wanted to make it clear that StandWithUs is considered by the pro-Israel community of students at UC Irvine to be one of our most important partners as we work hard to educate the greater student community.
Isaac Yerushalmi, President,
UCI Anteaters for Israel
and
Roz Rothstein
Founder and CEO
StandWithUs
Susan B. Tuchman (67.103.9.xxx) 2008-06-12 07:51:26
There were several falsehoods in Saul Elbein?s article about UC Irvine (?Students Say Activists Exaggerate Anti-Semitism at Irvine,? May 5, 2008), that could have been avoided with some simple fact-checking. Two students wrongly disparaged the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and me, and Elbein simply accepted what they said as true, never contacting me or anyone at the ZOA to verify their stories. One of the students, Michelle Eshaghian, accused me and the ZOA of impropriety in connection with the legal action that the ZOA took on her behalf and on behalf of other Jewish students at UCI. I have detailed notes of my communications with Ms. Eshaghian, as well as our e-mail exchanges; rather than disclose that information, I will simply say that it saddens me to think that Ms. Eshaghian has been pressured or influenced to distort the truth. As to the other student, Isaac Yerushalmi, he well knows that he did not speak up at a ?ZOA-sponsored event.? It was an event sponsored by Temple Bat Yahm, in Newport Beach, CA, and I was invited by the synagogue to speak there. Mr. Yerushalmi neglected to mention that he interrupted the event, and violated the protocol for asking questions that had been established by the synagogue. The ZOA had nothing to do with Mr. Yerushalmi being fired by the advocacy group for which he worked; none of us even knew that he worked there. It was irresponsible for Mr. Yerushalmi to suggest, without any facts to support it, that the ZOA played a hand in his firing, and even more irresponsible for you to disseminate the falsehood.
So what, obviously there is not physical threat to Jews in Irvine. Just an anitsemitic nest.
Also, look here http://samsonblinded.org/blog/doing-right-by-going-left.htm for Jewish right-wingers adopting antisemitic rhetoric.
.jpg)
Features 
