Learning lessons: the articulation of antisemitism on campus.

AuthorElliott, Cathy

We need to understand the forms antisemitism takes, and the ways in which it exceeds, as well as intersects with, debates about Palestine and Israel. A failure to listen attentively to reports of antisemitism is partly produced by a polarised and moralised discourse, in which Palestinian activism becomes a focal point of anti-racist campaigns in general. An antagonistic approach to Jewish voices can mean that the pain of antisemitism becomes unhearable in certain spaces. This is not inevitable, and must be addressed by resisting the binaries this discourse produces, and working patiently to respond to and resist antisemitism.

Every day that I have spent writing this article there have been stories about antisemitism in British politics in the headlines. No doubt they will still be in the news as you read this. Antisemitism appears to be on the rise both globally and nationally, recently provoking what may yet be a realignment in centre-left politics. (1)

It is, then, not coincidental that universities, student unions, students and teachers are also currently grappling with antisemitism and the myriad issues that come with it. Despite popular concerns both within and outside universities that students need to learn more about 'the real world', we know that universities are already part of that 'real world': the world of work, citizenship, living alongside other people, of unequal power, conflict, racism, the world still suffering and reeling from colonialism and the Holocaust. Presumably this is why the national media cares so much about campus politics. (2) There are many lessons about the real world that universities teach our students, not all of them entirely conscious or deliberate, and many lessons that students learn despite what we hoped to teach them. It is right that policy-makers and the general public care about this. (3)

UCL, the university in which I teach, is currently debating the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. (4) This move, which is by no means popular with everyone, follows on from a rejection of the same definition by the student union (SU). (5) In response, the university's Jewish Society (JSoc) put out a poll simply asking members about their experiences of antisemitism. Within a couple of hours, 78 students (between a third and a half of all our Jewish students) had responded, and 72 per cent of them reported that they had experienced antisemitism on campus. Forty-six students provided descriptions of their experiences, which included racial slurs, antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories, hurtful remarks and 'jokes' about the Holocaust and Nazis, remarks about their appearance, and physical and verbal aggression and bullying.

We cannot accept this.

Antisemitism - like other oppressions - has its own language, tropes, code words and dog whistles. (6) One of the problems in tackling it, which is partly what the IHRA definition attempts to address, is that it is not always immediately obvious what antisemitism is, or why certain tropes or conspiracy theories are antisemitic. Therefore, academics need to learn as well as teach, as we work with students to challenge racism and enable the difficult conversations that it is our core business to engage in.

This work is often painful, as I have discovered in the last couple of years, since volunteering to run a small research project with three of my Jewish students to find out what life is like for them. The project originated as a response to specific difficult events, but as a non-Jewish tutor who teaches qualitative research methods, for me this was initially an opportunity to teach a small group of students some principles of small-scale interpretivist research. (7) My three bright and eager students interviewed twenty-six of their fellow Jewish students, thinking carefully about issues of informed consent, anonymity, sampling, reflexivity and systematic analysis. They recorded, transcribed and coded the conversations thematically and we made a podcast series about it together to disseminate our findings, which was warmly received by colleagues and students. (8)

This kind of work is a useful complement to large scale survey-based studies, such as that conducted by the National Union of Students in 2016/17.9 Their study reported concerning findings about Jewish students' perceptions of antisemitism on campus at a national level. However, surveys do not allow us to go into detail about the stories behind the numbers. A small-scale but intensive, interview-based project like ours - which listened to a wide range of Jewish students from different years, departments and denominations, including those who do not get involved with religious or Jewish Society activities and would not be reached by JSoc - is able to provide a rich contextualisation and explanation of those findings. (10) It is of course limited by the fact that we were working with students from just one university, but as we have one of the larger Jewish student populations in the UK, it should offer some indications about how antisemitism operates in universities. (11)

We were deeply troubled by our findings and I have continued to struggle with how to think about antisemitism, as well as how we engage with conflicts that intersect with much larger national and international flows of power, when they emerge at the scale of our own work and lives. We found ample evidence of familiar forms of antisemitism that were not related to Palestinian activism operating alongside a polarised and moralised discourse about Palestine-Israel, which made it difficult for real and painful discussions about antisemitism to take place. (12) This problem was exacerbated by the particular form of debates about freedom of speech and how they intersect with concerns about antisemitism. This context makes it both urgent, and yet also difficult, to disentangle and address antisemitism

Antisemitism on campus

All the Jewish students interviewed in our small project agreed that our university is, by and large, a safe and pleasant place to study. It is difficult to draw conclusions from this finding: people often play down deep injuries, since talking about them is painful. Nevertheless, most students only had one or two upsetting incidents they wanted to tell us about, and whilst they did so with the vividness that characterises unhealed wounds and ongoing vigilance, they did not seem to be experiencing harassment as a daily experience. This is important to say, because it is not helpful to alarm (prospective) students.

The second thing to say is that much of the antisemitism we learned about had nothing explicitly to do with conversations about Israel or Palestine, which seems to run counter to claims about that a 'new antisemitism' is currently circulating. The proponents of the discourse of 'the new antisemitism' claim that Israel attracts disproportionate criticism not levelled at other states, in ways that are linked to hatred of Jews. (13) Critics of this position counter that allegations of antisemitism are used in bad faith to silence legitimate criticism of Israel. This highly polarised debate is well known to students and, of course, forms the politicised backdrop of any discussion about antisemitism. This matters, but not quite in the...

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