This week the United States House Committee on Education & Workforce released a bombshell report, titled “How Campuses Became Hotbeds” of antisemitism. The Committee’s findings were blunt and jarring: university leaders and professors repeatedly “caved to the radical demands of faculty and students [and] are legitimizing and amplifying antisemitism.”

The University of California system, generally considered the most prestigious public university system in the US, was tagged by the Committee as a “hotbed” for antisemitic hostility. According to the report, UC Berkeley Professor Ussama Makdisi “normalized antisemitic violence online, in the classrooms, and with administrators.” Nonetheless, UC Berkeley bestowed upon Makdisi the honor of serving as the inaugural Chair of its anonymously funded, $3.25 million, permanent Palestinian and Arab Studies Program, created in 2024 in apparent response to the anti-Israel “Free Palestine Encampment” leaders’ demands of University leadership.

For organizations like JIMENA, which documents and educates about the nearly one million Jewish refugees from the Middle East and North Africa who fled antisemitic persecution in the 20th century, these findings are deeply familiar. The Committee report’s examples of “anti-Zionism” taught on college campuses today echo the extremist ideologies and state policies that not long ago powered the discrimination, oppression, and ultimate displacement and ethnic cleansing........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)