Submission: UCLA campus must take action to address anti-Semitism
A foul odor is in the air. Lest we have any doubt about it, The New York Times has caught a whiff of it, reporting in its Thursday edition on the Rachel Beyda case at UCLA. Simply put, we are in the throes of another version of the infamous Jewish Question here on campus.
From the time of the 18th-century Enlightenment, European society has posed the Jewish Question in various guises: Do the Jews, the classic “other” in medieval Christendom, belong in our domain? Do they owe loyalties to their home countries, or rather to their narrow group interests? The question has arisen in this country as well, though in recent decades, many had come to conclude that Jews could operate in American society without aspersions cast on their loyalty.
Not so fast. Sadly and remarkably, the Jewish Question is resurfacing in the most progressive of venues: college campuses. Last week at the University of Chicago, anonymous postings on the secret-sharing site Yik Yak and a “UChicago Secrets” Facebook page were riddled with anti-Semitism. One posting claims that “a bunch of butthurt Jews cry and scream ‘anti-Semitism’ to their media mogul daddies.” The most shocking of posts expressed the wish that the “final solution had worked.”
And of course, we have our own local outbreak of the Jewish Question: the case of Rachel Beyda, whose qualifications for a position on the Undergraduate Students Association Council Judicial Board were challenged by a number of councilmembers because of her Jewish religious background. Fortunately, USAC reversed its earlier decision to deny Ms. Beyda a spot, and the four board members who voted against Ms. Beyda in the first round have issued an apology for suggesting that the candidate’s religion might incline her to bias.
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