The Recent Surge of Antisemitism in the Education System

• According to a 2023 report by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), 89% of U.S. Jews see antisemitism as a problem and 82% have noticed an increase in antisemitism in the past five years. The same report noted that nearly 40% of Jews changed their behavior within the past year out of fear of antisemitism.

• 55% of Jewish students in a 2022 survey by Watchdog StopAntisemitism reported experiencing antisemitism on campus and 72% reported that they did not feel like their university administration takes antisemitism seriously.

• Since 2015, the monitoring NGO AMCHA Initiative has documented over 5,000 cases of antisemitism on U.S. college campuses. From 2020 to 2021, Hillel International documented nearly 500 cases of antisemitism, an 82% year over year increase.  

• The rise in antisemitism on college campuses coincides with a general rise of antisemitism in the United States. The Anti Defamation League (ADL) reported the highest amount of overall incidences of antisemitism in 2021 since they began tracking them in 1979. This included 2,717 cases of assault, harassment, and vandalism. In 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) reported that 63% of religious-based hate crimes were targeted at Jews, despite them being 2.4% of the population.

Below are some selected examples of antisemitism in the higher education system:

• In January 2023, StandWithUs filed a Title VI Complaint on behalf of several Jewish and Israeli students who were targeted by Lara Sheehi, a professor at George Washington University (GWU). This included consistently attacking their Jewish and Israeli identities and inviting a guest lecturer who invoked antisemitic tropes about Jews and accused Israel of testing missiles on Palestinian children. When students complained to the university administration about Sheehi’s deferential treatment of Jews, she retaliated against the most vocal students by slandering their reputations to other faculty members. Jewish students were then allegedly warned by faculty that they were in danger of receiving a “permanent negative mark” on their records. 

• In the Fall Semester of 2022, a bylaw was passed at the law school of University of California Berkeley that banned Zionist and pro-Israel speakers.

• In December 2021, a student of the State University of New York was kicked out of a sexual assault awareness group she cofounded after posting on social media that Jews are “an ethnic group who come from Israel.” 

• In early 2021, the Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) began an investigation into Rasha Anayah, a teaching assistant at Johns Hopkins University. Anayah created a Twitter poll asking her followers whether she should fail her “Zionist student.” Anayah additionally targeted Jewish pro-Israel students with other tweets that were later deleted. To date, Johns Hopkins has failed to take any public action.