Jews are seemingly never more secure than at a place like Washington University in St. Louis, where approximately 25% of the undergraduate population is Jewish. Along with being one of the most Jewishly populated universities in the country, WashU is also one of the wealthiest. The combination of significant collective voice, resources, and institutional support make WashU a home to thriving Jewish life.
At the same time, the concern for Jewish safety feels, to many, as critical as ever. The conspicuous density of Jews at a wealthy, predominantly white institution are grounds for the messy conflation of Jewishness, class privilege, and outsized power. Attempts to investigate or quantify the “reality” of Jewish influence at WashU are difficult because the elusive, paradoxical nature of antisemitism makes distinguishing between “actual” and “perceived” Jewish power and safety a hazy, fraught task. Additionally, Jewish trauma and internalized antisemitism make these discernments all the more challenging and emotional.
So, how do we talk about Jewish safety with specificity, context, and empathy? This is the question I pose in examining a particular case study of Jewish establishment: my own college campus.
A Supported Jewish Presence
A sizable Jewish student population at Washington University in St. Louis has existed for a long time, and has grown tremendously over the decades. In its earlier history, WashU was known mostly as a commuter school. As the university’s academic reputation became renowned, it began to attract a more national (and international) pool of applicants with a greater Jewish contingent. Jackie Levey, Executive Director of WashU Hillel and alumna of the university, remembers an already significant Jewish population during her tenure as an undergrad in the mid-90s, with many students hailing from the Midwest and Northeast.
“As the reputation built upon itself and the university became known as a really strong, vibrant community, more and more families saw it as an option,” said Levey, referring to both the academic reputation– and the Jewish one.
These days, WashU continues to pull students from geographically specific, wealthy zip codes in New York, Boston, Los Angeles/Bay Area, Chicago –hubs of Jewish population concentration.
Observant and secular Jews alike come to WashU because it has infrastructure to support flourishing Jewish life on campus. While all Jewish students might love and appreciate a widespread celebration of Jewishness, observant students depend most on an institution to facilitate halakhic lifestyles. WashU is certainly up to snuff on this account. Dining Services has operated a kosher kitchen in a main dining hall since 2010. The Residential Life program is familiar with conversations about “shabbos keys” for Shabbat-observant students who require non-technological access to their rooms on weekends. There is a Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies department for students who wish to pursue Jewish studies in their academic coursework. Last spring, the administration rescheduled the dates for fall course registration for the entire student body after being made aware that the original timing conflicted with Pesach. Jewish life doesn’t merely exist on campus; it is actively supported by the institution.
As a non-sectarian university, WashU provides a welcome and receptive vessel for Jewishness. Jewish religious life mostly occurs in two off-campus organizations: WashU Hillel and Chabad on Campus. Chabad and Hillel foster ritual and community and work with the university to advocate for Jewish students. Without their partnership, much of the official university infrastructure for Jewish living would not exist.
In February, Assistant Director of WashU Hillel Tony Westbrook spoke to me about Hillel’s influence on campus culture and its unique positionality to affect change at the institution. “Jewish students are roughly one quarter of the total undergraduate population and as a result, we have collective power and voice that other minority groups don’t necessarily possess,” Westbrook wrote in an email. “We have a seat at the table and use that position to advocate for the needs of Jewish students, for example, expanding Kosher dining options across campus.”
This unusual strength in numbers makes Washington University an environment where Jewish life thrives distinctively. At the same time, “The fact that there is a big Jewish community doesn’t protect me from worrying about antisemitism on campus,” said Stephanie Berger, ‘22.
How can both of these statements be true? To approach the paradoxical subject of Jewish safety, we must understand more about the nature of antisemitism, or anti-Jewish oppression.
More Visible, More Vulnerable
Antisemitism is a chameleon. It can be difficult to identify because it necessarily works differently from other oppressions. As Ben Lorber recently described, unlike “the grinding daily reality of structural race and class oppression the Left is used to understanding,” anti-Jewish oppression flourishes with subtlety. According to the leftist pamphlet The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere by April Rosenblum, “the point of anti-Jewish oppression is to keep Jewish face in front,” allowing Jews to be criticized and targeted for exploitations perpetuated by the (non-Jewish) ruling classes. Antisemitism thrives when Jews appear to wield power, making it precarious when Jews actually do hold some amount of power. Antisemitic narratives depend on Jews appearing to wield conspiratorial control. Therefore, success (capitalistic, hierarchical success) and visibility for Jews is a double-edged sword.
The fact that Jewish success is simultaneously antithetical to Jewish survival makes it more challenging to take the temperature of anti-Jewish sentiment in society. After all, The Past reminds its readers that Jews were thought to be most safe and “well-integrated” in their societies on the brink of historic episodes of violence, expulsion, and genocide. Because antisemitism necessarily affords Jews some social/economic mobility, it can seem as though antisemitism is “over,” or at least dormant. Antisemitism performs the best ‘disappearing trick’ of all, constantly convincing the members of a given society– including Jews themselves– that persecution has faded, that Jews are secure.
Because of this, Jews are constantly engaged in the inherently flawed task of evaluating their own safety, of trying to discern “actual” from “perceived” threat. Jews constantly question what may be helpful or harmful to Jewish perception and reputation. It’s for these reasons that the conflation of wealth and Jewishness can be particularly harmful, and why Jews may be both appreciative and skeptical of conspicuous Jewish presence or power.
I am cognizant of using Rosenblum’s words in The Past to communicate an understanding of antisemitism that emphasizes the middle agent theory, which Rosenblum recently affirmed is not most central to her work, and can be misquoted in approaches that are not intersectional or uphold class bias. My intention here is not to let unchecked classism lie, but to investigate how theories about Jewishness, class privilege, and power play out on a specific college campus.
Conspicuous Jewish wealth
“A lot of what I might define as Jewish culture at WashU might just be white upper-middle class culture,” reflected Jesse Strod ‘21 on the phone in December.
If you’re walking around on campus on a sunny afternoon, you might see a dozen students wearing Blundstones walk by. There will likely be a frisbee game happening on Mudd Field. Are these things Jewish? Are they rich white people things? Both?
A culture of wealth, a culture of whiteness, and a healthy dose of Jewish culture(s) all coexist at WashU. Of course, assuming all Jewish students are wealthy is a falsehood. As both co-director of Chabad Chana Novack and recent graduate Max Klapow ‘21 reminded me in our respective conversations, the intra-Jewish presumption of class privilege is particularly alienating for working class and low-income Jews. Neither are all Jews white– at WashU or anywhere in the world; we know that lumping diverse Jewish existences in with a white, Ashkenazic narrative is a demon for American Jewry. Given the pervasiveness of both whiteness and wealth among the general student body though, and the high proportion of Jews among those students, it is fair to say that the Venn Diagram of these three factors has significant overlap.
The collision of Jewishness, whiteness, and wealth often surfaces in conversations about geography. Jokes about how many students are from Westchester, or New Jersey, or outside of Boston, or about New Yorkers who show up to lecture wearing expensive winter coats; these are WashU archetypes that hint at the nexus of Jewishness and wealth.
“There is a certain sense that Jewish population is a ‘majority minority’ on campus and people are very aware of that minority. The Jewish voice outperforms its size, and a lot of Jewish people are wealthy,” said Strod.
I discussed the relationship between Jewishness and socioeconomic elitism at WashU with Julia Robbins ‘24, who affirmed that class plays a noticeable role in the broader perception of the Jewish community on campus.
“There are definitely a lot of free things that are given out at Hillel and Chabad– a lot of free food, Shabbat dinners, gifts like picnic blankets,” said Robbins.
The most familiar way in which the wealth of the Jewish community is accessible to WashU students are weekly Shabbat dinners. Jewish underclassmen– and many of their non-Jewish friends– typically flock to Chabad and Hillel here for the excitement of a free meal with friends. “People at WashU definitely know that Shabbat exists,” Strod joked. Having funding enough to provide free meals to students allows Hillel and Chabad to be welcoming organizations and build community. At the same time, free is a conspicuous indicator of wealth.
“It definitely makes me a bit uncomfortable when my non-Jewish friends are seeing the amount of wealth that [Hillel and Chabad] seem to have,” Robbins said.
Robbins remarked that this kind of critique of the wealth of WashU Jewish organizations might be acceptable in Jewish circles, but could have dangerous implications when picked up by the wider, non-Jewish WashU context.
“It’s one thing if someone’s been in a Jewish community their whole life and this isn’t their first exposure. But then it’s another if their first exposure to Jewish community is, like, the immense amount of wealth that Jewish clubs on campus seem to have,” she repeated.
Last year in an anthropology course, I conducted a project on the kosher food program at WashU. As I was embarking on my research, my professor gently prodded me to think about what the existence, visibility, and cost of upkeep might signal about the voice of the Jews in campus life.
At the time, this comment startled me. There was no ill intent behind this suggestion. My professor was merely hoping that I dig a little deeper, because the kosher station is not an obvious investment. After all, it serves fewer students at a higher price, as kosher ingredients cost more. WashU chooses to invest in this specific subset of its undergrad population because there is institutional support for Jewish infrastructure (however, according to Chana Novack, most of the cost of the kosher program is “passed on to the students” through higher prices, which observant Jewish students agree to pay because kosher food is necessary).
Even though I know my professor meant nothing by this comment, as a Jew, my alarms tend to go off when even a breeze connects the words money, power, and Jewish. I remember feeling flushed, on-edge.
To Robbins’ point, who gets to make these criticisms and where the line falls between truth and stereotype can feel extremely blurry. Although this suggestion about Jewish influence made me nervous coming from a non-Jewish professor, I have heard similar comments from inside the Jewish community itself. Chana Novack said that despite its higher cost, “the University realizes that the kosher meal plan is more valuable than the dollar amount,” because of the message of Jewish safety it sends to “parents and grandparents” who will potentially enroll their students, or donate to WashU. Such a comment implies that the promise of Jewish intergenerational wealth was baked into the calculus of the kosher plan’s existence.
I have talked around Jewish safety for a while now, but it’s time to name the reason why Jewish safety is such a critical concern: Jewish trauma, the cultural and emotional force shaping most conversations about Jewish life.
Jewish safety, trauma, and internalized antisemitism
Jewish trauma– including internalized antisemitism– is the elephant in the room wherever Jewishness is concerned. Any conversation about Jewish existence must include the knowledge that many Jewish perspectives are informed by a constant concern for Jewish safety. Our many Jewish histories, liturgies, and traditions, as well as our very bodies and epigenetics, reinforce vigilance and remind us of a constant theme of thousands of years of persecution.
In every interview I conducted with a Jewish student, I noticed manifestations of internalized antisemitism. Most often, these tendencies appeared in the form of cynical generalizations about Jews and wealth, concerns with how Jews might be irresponsibly stewarding their image of wealth or be perceived by non-Jews, and a desire to “check” outsized Jewish voice at the university.
I myself was motivated to write this article by my own internalized antisemitism. I needed to reconcile the simultaneous joy of living Jewishly with my discomfort about the “bloated” influence and resources of the Jewish communities at WashU. I felt (and sometimes still feel) that perhaps we don’t deserve to flourish or thrive in a place so explicitly, so obviously, as Jews.
When I felt flushed and nervous at hearing my professor’s comment, that was part of an unconscious, embodied trauma response to perceived antisemitism. Afterwards, I felt embarrassed, ashamed at myself for overreacting and reading in to a comment which didn’t hold any antisemitic water. This vicious cycle of overreaction and self-flagellation is a cycle that is perpetuated when we don’t apply the language of trauma.
If Jewish trauma is present in our bodies, it is most certainly present in our institutions. Many Jewish campus organizations, including Jewish Greek Life and Hillels, were created because of antisemitic exclusion and with the intention of fomenting Jewish life in future generations. Without this understanding, we miss a crucial aspect of how these Jewish organizations understand their own roles in sustaining Jewish communities.
Each year, WashU Hillel hosts an annual “welcome” Shabbat dinner for new students and their families before the start of orientation. Since the start of Jackie Levey’s 12-year tenure as Executive Director of Hillel, the Chancellor of the university has spoken annually at this Shabbat dinner. For a Chancellor to speak at a private Jewish event is highly unusual, even for other universities with large Jewish populations.
“Having the Chancellor speak at our Shabbat dinner sends the message that Jewish students are welcomed, valued, and are a part of the larger WashU campus community,” affirmed Tony Westbrook in an email.
Other prominent Jewish (and non-Jewish) board members, administrators, and deans come to this Shabbat dinner, whose attendance is “an important part of reflecting that we’re a part of the fabric of the university and the undergraduate experience,” said Levey.
“We ensure that certain members of our board, various administrators or staff or faculty at the university are there that evening to help cement for these families that the students have this community. You know, if God forbid something happens, or they need a resource, Hillel will always be there for them,” Levey told me.
Gathering all these important university figures together for a big Shabbat dinner is as much an act of celebration as it is a protective display of strength and a move laden with concern for safety. As Levey wrote to me, WashU Hillel was established in 1946 as a place of refuge and community for Jewish students who faced explicit and implicit antisemitism. Over 70 years later, this protective mentality still exists.
Even in the most seemingly secure of circumstances, Jewish trauma and concern for safety always have us looking over our shoulders. How do we reconcile these very real concerns (antisemitism does exist) with the realities of resources and institutional support?
Zooming Out
For a minority facing hate because of conspiracies about money and power, critiques about Jewish student visibility and institutional support can feel uncomfortable, blurring the line between valid criticism and antisemitic canard.
Yet these critiques must be leveled because they contribute to a culture of critical thinking about who has a voice on campus, how, and why: other minorities on campus without such a critical mass or reputation of wealth do not operate with the same level of institutional support.
One of the most vibrant religious student communities at WashU is the Muslim Students Association (MSA). The MSA is an on-campus student group, led by a student exec board and funded entirely by the Student Union. Chabad and Hillel also have student clubs funded by SU (Chabad Student Association and Hillel Leadership Council among others), but these groups are also supported by external organizations with off-campus facilities. This past academic year, the debilitating restrictions on student activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic magnified these differences.
At the beginning of the year, WashU prohibited in-person student group meetings and the Student Union cut off funding to all student groups. These actions left the MSA high and dry, banned from convening in any official capacity and barred from the resources needed to plan events and build community in their usual ways. Co-president of the MSA Samra Haseeb ‘23 described how disappointing and “unfortunate” it felt not to be able to provide programming for new students in particular. Without funding, Haseeb said the MSA couldn’t even do usual, simple things like designing MSA stickers, let alone hold celebrations or communal events.
Meanwhile, as off-campus organizations with outside funding, Chabad and Hillel provided programming for Jewish first-year students and returning students all year long, including outdoor meals at their respective buildings on Forsyth Blvd, as well as a variety of events and free items, like Julia Robbins described. This did not go unnoticed by new students in the MSA, said Haseeb. “Some first-years were like ‘Oh, Hillel had these things for their new students’ and we were like, ‘Oh, we can’t because we don’t have the funding.’ ’”
Even in pre-pandemic times, Haseeb said that adequate funding can be difficult to secure. “I know there have been challenges in the past with getting enough funding for events we need to get approved because we really have to explain ourselves. People don’t really understand why the money is needed, and so more time and effort has to be spent to explain why we need the money that we do,” she described.
There is no specific faculty representative nor Muslim campus chaplain to advocate for the MSA, to barter with the university and explain the significance of certain Muslim celebrations or events. This job currently falls to the Reverend Callista Isabelle, head of the newly-established Office for Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life (ORSEL), created in 2019 in part to help to advocate for religious minorities on campus. (Full discretion: I work for Reverend Callista and ORSEL). “Reverend Callista helped organize nightly prayers during Ramadan and she was super helpful in all those regards,” said Haseeb. “It’s just that Callista isn’t specifically a Muslim chaplain or religiously trained in Islam, and so to there is only so much she can do for us.”
The phrase ‘only so much you can do’ surfaced several times in my conversation with Haseeb, who also used it in reference to the accommodations that Dining Services tried to make during Ramadan. This year’s Ramadan was especially tough on many students, falling during final exam season when people were far from home and isolated from their friends. WashU expressed that they wanted to help Muslim students, “but I know when the month started students didn’t really feel supported,” said Haseeb.
Haseeb remarked that in spite of the previous MSA presidents meeting with Dining Services, administrators made “empty promises”. Campus eateries that were supposed to be open later for fasting students remained closed; more “grab and go” options seemingly were not added. Dining Services was apparently particularly excited to offer Moonlight Breakfast (a late-night WashU tradition) during Ramadan, but its hours fell at an inconvenient time for the actual fasting cycle. “It was well intentioned, but it’s still hard because they can only do so much,” said Haseeb. Without a Muslim campus advocate, the well-meaning blunders of WashU officials felt frustrating but inevitable.
During Ramadan, WashU Hillel hosted a joint Iftar/Havdalah. Haseeb affirmed that she had a lot of fun at the event and that “Hillel hosted us very graciously.” Haseeb did also express that it surfaced some frustrations. Hillel, with its beautiful building, big backyard, and ample staff, hosted events for Jewish students all year. The MSA, impeded by COVID restrictions, had to convince WashU for the use of its important spaces, including Lopata Basement, a prayer/hangout spot where Jummah is held. “It just kind of felt like, I wish we had a space like that for community and to be able to give younger students a good experience during a pandemic year,” said Haseeb.
When the primary associations with conspicuous Jewishness in a university context are wealth and power, it can feel difficult to discern truthful comments from harmful stereotypes. Yet it is crucial that class-conscious conversations about Jewishness, wealth, race, and power happen because there are truths about class privilege and voice that are critical to confront for any campus community that professes to value equity.
Moving Forward
WashU should be honored as a thriving home for Jewish life. If I haven’t said it explicitly enough: it’s truly wonderful that the hardworking folks at Chabad and Hillel support Jewish student life at WashU with so much care and intentionality. It’s amazing that Chabad has a chicken soup hotline for when students get sick, that Hillel brings sufganiyot and bagels to students living off campus during a pandemic. Both organizations care profoundly about helping students at both an individual level and a community-wide one. Both organizations and their incredible teams work tirelessly with the university to make the case for Jewish living and provide a home for so many students.
For me personally, coming from a hometown with a very small Jewish population, it feels affirming and exciting on a daily basis to be surrounded by Jews and feel myself represented in a way I had never experienced prior to college. I echo Julia Robbins when she said, “I am living more Jewishly at WashU than ever before. I feel very grateful to be Jewish on this campus.”
It’s not wrong that Jews at WashU have resources and support here. What’s needed is that other identity-specific groups on campus receive institutional attention and advocacy to ensure the same kind of student flourishing. We can celebrate the resources and support that WashU offers Jewish students while being reflective of the space and institutional authority a Jewish voice finds here relative to other groups.
There are people at WashU who are committed to having conversations about religion, race, ethnicity, class, and power. The Office for Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life was established after students like Ishak Hossain expressed the need for administration for religious minorities to have an institutional channel. Within the Jewish community, Tony Westbrook affirmed that part of Hillel’s role is to advocate for other marginalized and minority groups on campus. “We don’t limit ourselves to only serving the Jewish population on campus but work really hard to create an intentional space in which every person, regardless of race, creed, religion, etc feels welcomed,” wrote Westbrook. “Years ago we established a Black and Jewish dialogue group that actively worked together to address issues of racism and antisemitism on campus. Currently, we are organizing students to be in relationship with each other to address issues of antisemitism and hatred on campus.”
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We must be able to speak calmly and knowledgeably about Jewish power– and name the fact that Jewish vigilance and internalized oppression is a part of the equation when reacting and speaking about Jewish visibility and antisemitism– in order to have productive conversations about who has influence and how resources are distributed.
It is possible for Jews to have institutional support, numbers, and cultural cachet on campus and still grapple with Jewish safety. In fact, right now we are having a national and international conversation, from the left to the far right, about grappling with Jewish safety.
This has felt like an especially dizzying time to be publishing an article related to antisemitism discourse. From a Leftist perspective, the urge is never stronger to de-center this sort of discussion than it is right now. I’ve been writing this piece for months, and publishing it now feels both utterly untimely and never timelier.
Right now, we are weighing how we qualify, talk about, and notice antisemitism. Antisemitism is real and ongoing, with a reported rise in antisemitic rhetoric. The fire rages to “call out” antisemitism in ways that I find infuriating and counterproductive, like when the concept of antisemitism is used in bad faith to sow fear and distract from the most critical conversations about apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. There are also people doing good, critical work; a recent Jewish Currents article both recognizes truth and advises caution with how the recent increase in antisemitic activity is being reported. In some ways, this current moment proves my thesis that when Jews do hold power, the distinction between valid criticism and antisemitic speech is murkiest.
Now more than ever we need to continue uncomfortable conversations about oppressions and investigate the truths about who holds power and who doesn’t.
This moment should invite us to consider and contextualize antisemitism in our local, national, and historical contexts with specificity. There is an opportunity for our wealthy Jewish institutions and gatherings to have trauma-informed, class-conscious conversations about systems of power. An understanding that immense Jewish cultural trauma—on both collective and individual scales—is a player in these conversations should impel us not to turn away, but to lean in.
Above all, we must continue to leverage honest critiques about Jewish wealth and influence, about who has voice, with attention to internalized trauma as a player in this discourse. We must be aware that some of these conversations will actually toe the line of antisemitism and slip into it. This should not discourage Jews from continuing these conversations– in fact, this should be an invitation to take a deep breath, and continue to be curious.
