By Stacey Dresner

AMHERST, Massachusetts – When Noam Borensztajn began attending the University of Massachusetts Amherst two years ago, he was looking forward to having interesting and thoughtful discussions with people who have different opinions on different subjects.

But he has found that having thoughtful conversations about Israel and antisemitism hasn’t been that easy.

“I really thought I would come to college and people would be open and you know, empathetic, and it’s just not the case,” Borensztajn said.

Last month Borensztajn, now president of the Student Alliance for Israel (SAFI) and fellow student Ben Alvarez Dobrusin wrote a letter to UMass’s Daily Collegian to reflect on the atmosphere at UMass one year after the word “Palestine” was spray-painted on the UMass Hillel building on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“The rising tides of hate on college campuses and in society must be addressed,” they said in the letter. “One year since the vandalism at Hillel, the Jewish community at UMass still feels afraid of rising antisemitism. While we greatly appreciate the university administration speaking out against this hatred, we need tangible actions to help Jewish students feel safe.”

Just one week after their letter was published, messages like “From the River 2 the Sea” – a slogan known to be a call for the destruction of Israel – as well as “Palestine will be free” were spray-painted on a tunnel on campus.

StopAntisemitism.org posted photos and a video of graffiti found inside and outside of the South Tunnel student walkway. In both places, the slogan was accompanied by a drawing of the Palestinian flag.

StopAntisemitism.org said “dozens” of Jewish students at the university contacted them “out of safety concerns” after seeing the graffiti. 

The graffiti was painted over and the vandalism is being investigated, according to UMass administration.

UMass Hillel posted a statement on Facebook regarding the vandalism.

“While we support free speech, we condemn the use of inflammatory language and the defacement of public or private property. And we continue to call for a constructive approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through promotion of dialogue, working for peace and affirmation of the humanity of both Israelis and Palestinians.”

While calling for dialogue and peace is important, Borensztajn told the Jewish Ledger that he and many Jewish students at UMass are concerned, if not down-right afraid, when it comes to these incidents, which they see as not only anti-Zionist, but also antisemitic. 

“I’d say it’s a combination between fear and anger, because we’re not sure what the next thing is going to be, or when it’s going to come. But we know that it’s going to happen. And we don’t feel like there’s anything really being done to stop it and I think that makes us very nervous,” he said. “At the same time, all of these things have been sort of a rallying cry and I think the Jewish community has also come together, and we want to be active and do something about it.”

Defining antisemitism

Besides the vandalism at Hillel last Yom Hashoah and the most recent incident this April, some events at UMass have also given the Jewish community pause.  

In May of 2019, UMass hosted a pro-Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) event with BDS supporters musician Roger Waters, Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour and Prof. Marc Lamont Hill. Another event “The Attack on BDS and Pro-Palestinian Speech” was held last November. 

That same evening, the campus Jewish community, parents and other supporters held a march on campus, “End Polarization- Promote Peace.” After the march, the crowd gathered inside The Newman Center and attendees discussed among other things, promoting respectful dialogue about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. 

Some members of the local Jewish community who attended both BDS events, however, reported experiencing hostility from other members of the audience for things like wear a kippah or not standing and applauding the speakers. 

Some Jewish students have also met with disapproval from fellow students on campus for having ties to Israel.

“I have this Jewish identity, which is an amazingly complex identity and a huge part of that is being from Israel,” said Borensztajn, who was born in Jerusalem and came to the United States when he was two years ago. “So when I see this stuff exists all over campus, it makes me nervous to, for example, tell people my name. My name is an Israeli name and when people ask me where I’m from, I feel like I can’t even tell them because who knows what kind of reactions I’m going to get.

“I’ve had bad experiences where people decide to just walk away and not talk to me anymore. It just makes it harder for me to be a student on this campus because I can’t just say who I am without it having this added political connotation.”

Tamar Stollman, a rising senior at UMass, will serve as vice president of UMass’s J Street club next fall. She is also the founder of “Jew Talk,” a club where Jewish students get together “to talk about Jewish life and being Jewish.”

Stollman describes herself as progressive.

“I was pretty involved with progressive student groups on campus until I started to feel like I was unwelcome because I was Jewish. It was just very uncomfortable to be a Jew in a progressive space,” she said. “I’m not directly offended by this graffiti, but I feel that it is also a bigger picture of what it means to be a Jew on a college campus. It’s just uncomfortable and unsafe. 

“It is okay to be anti-Zionist and respectful of Jews, but I think the line is really thin, and it has crossed the line very often on college campuses because I think students just are not the most well-versed in Jewish history.”

And when the line is crossed and discussion about the subject gets heated, that’s when antisemitism sentiment grows on college campuses, including UMass.

“The more intense it gets,” Stollman said, “the more antisemitic it gets as well.”

Stollman was one of the students who helped to organize an April Zoom meeting of various representatives of UMass.’s Jewish student community and the Student Government Association (SGA) focusing on antisemitism. The meeting was open to the public and members of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) joined the Zoom event.

The conversation did not go well, Borensztajn said. 

“We wanted to have a conversation about antisemitism generally and talk about how we can combat antisemitism at UMass. And we were explicitly not just talking about Israel. Israel was a part of it, but we also wanted to talk about swastikas that had gone up on campus before and Jews not feeling safe on campus. And some of the SJP students came on and basically said ‘we can’t have this conversation on antisemitism unless you acknowledge that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are different.’ It was super frustrating for non-Jews to come in and say that they should be able to define this conversation on antisemitism. It sort of derailed from there.”

“Jews should be deciding what antisemitism is,” Stollman said. “You never see any other marginalized group not deciding what their oppression looks like. So, it is like a slap in the face to have people who don’t experience antisemitism come and say, ‘well this isn’t antisemitism’ – to say, ‘we don’t believe Israel should exist, but that isn’t antisemitism. It’s not antisemitism because I said it’s not antisemitism.’ That’s not how it works.”

That very principle – who should define antisemitism – was up for discussion at a webinar panel concerning antisemitism on campus held in March in the Greater Hartford area. 

In his talk, Ethan Felson, executive director of A Wider Bridge, an organization that works to create equality in Israel by expanding LGBTQ inclusion in Israel, noted that “White people don’t get to define racism, men don’t get to define sexism and people who are not Jewish don’t get to define antisemitism. We need to be able to do that and to insist that Zionism is not separated from Judaism. “Our self-identity is linked to our right to self-determination. That’s a positive value, that’s a progressive value, self-determination. We need to be able to stand for that,” he said.

That webinar was presented, in part, due to a series of antisemitic incidents at the University of Connecticut in the fall of 2020 and into 2021, including swastikas drawn inside residence halls and on academic buildings. Dori Jacobs, president of UConn Hillel spoke about efforts by students to nudge a response to the antisemitism from UConn’s administration, who were slow to act. Students staged a rally attended by Jewish students as well as representatives from a number of diverse student groups, who spoke out against the antisemitism and in support of UConn’s Jewish students.

Two weeks ago, Kristopher Peiper, a UConn student from Enfield, was arrested and charged with a hate crime for spray-painting a swastika on the UConn chemistry building on the first day of Passover.

One of the steps UConn Hillel took in battling antisemitism on campus was working with the UConn student government on legislation officially adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

Borenstzajn and Dobrusin’s letter concerning UMass also supported adopting the IHRA’s definition of antisemitismm – “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Borenstzajn said that working to have the UMass student government and the administration vote on and pass a resolution adopting the IHRA’s formal definition of antisemitism will be SAFI’s main goal next fall.

“That’s something that started brewing this semester and we’re hoping to find an opportunity in the next semester to really pick it up. I think that is a good first step in really addressing the crisis,” he said.

SAFI has also been connecting with Jewish groups from other universities to seek ways to fight antisemitism on the UMass campus.

“Like rallying support through petitions, making sure you can line up votes in student government, trying to sit down and have conversations with people,” he said. “I think the main thing that we want to do is also just make noise. Make it known that this is what we want and draw attention to it.”

Main Photo: Anti-Israel graffiti found on the campus of UMass (Courtesy of StopAntisemitism.org)