[Ed. Note: To read the entire editorial and view the list of colleges, please click here.]
Of all the great and varied challenges we face as editors of a Jewish publication, one that stands out in particular is the troubling experience — dare we say the plight? — of Jewish students on many North American college campuses.
Two recent studies, one by researchers at Brandeis University and the other by counterparts at Trinity College, found, respectively, that an astronomical 54% and 75% of Jewish students said they had witnessed or experienced antisemitism during the time period surveyed. Campus watchdog AMCHA Initiative released a report showing that the bulk of antisemitism occurs on campuses with significant Jewish populations, and that there is a strong correlation between hostility to Israel and antisemitism.
The Algemeiner‘s extensive coverage of the issue, enhanced this year with the opening of our newCampus Bureau, effectively gave us a front-row seat in this arena, enabling us to witness and report on the breadth and extent of the phenomenon.
We wrote about the admiration for Adolf Hitler voiced by students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and we covered the violent anti-Israel protest at a movie screening at UC Irvine. We interviewed Hindu student leader Milan Chatterjee, who was hounded out of UCLA because he failed to support the boycott of Israel, simply aiming to keep his student government neutral. And we were the first to report on a course offered at UC Berkeley exploring how the Jewish state might be dismantled.
Our efforts to expose and highlight this shameful state of affairs led us to compile this first annual list of the “40 Worst Campuses for Jewish Students” in the United States and Canada. Inclusion on this list by no means stands as an indictment of the Jewish resources and often fine work being done by Jewish groups on many of these campuses. It indicates rather that these are the schools where antisemitic and anti-Israel hostility and intimidation have been greatest in frequency and intensity, posing the strongest challenges for Jewish students and faculty.
It’s also important to note that antisemitic incidents are by no means limited to the schools that made our top 40. Among the many other campuses that have seen notable incidents this past year are CUNY Kingsborough, University of Missouri, Western Washington University and Toronto’s Ryerson University.