Fresno State U to consider renaming library honoring Nazi sympathizer

By Maya Mirsky

(JTA) — Administrators at California State University, Fresno, announced last week they would consider renaming the school’s Henry Madden Library, after a professor at the university shared with students that Madden, a longtime librarian at the school, was an antisemite and vocal Hitler supporter.

“First and foremost, I want members of our Jewish community to know that we stand with you and against both the historic and ongoing antisemitism that remains all too present in our society,” the university’s interim president Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval said in a Nov. 29 email sent to faculty, staff and students about the renaming.

“I’m very glad the university is quickly addressing this,” said Rabbi Rick Winer of Fresno’s Temple Beth Israel, who serves on an advisory council on Jewish life at the school.

The development comes amid a national reckoning on names and monuments honoring figures who expressed racist views, a movement that has seen the University of California-Berkeley law school renamed, highways in northern Virginia bearing the names of Confederate generals rededicated to honor abolitionists, and a proposal to replace more than 40 San Francisco public school names because of associations with racism.

The Madden issue at Fresno State came to light because of research by Bradley Hart, a professor in the school’s Media, Communications and Journalism Department and the author of a book on American supporters of Hitler and fascism. He praised the administration for the announcement.

“I think they acted with great sense of purpose,” he said. “Obviously they take it seriously.”

Hart’s book, “Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States,” was published in 2018 but, according to university spokesperson Lisa Boyles Bell, the school was only made aware of Madden’s views after Hart lectured on the material in a class on Nov. 17.

“The topic only came up right at the end,” Hart told J., describing the class. He said students caught the small reference to the school’s librarian and asked Hart about it.

“There was quite a bit of shock,” he said.

Madden was librarian at the school from 1949 to 1979, and the university’s central library was named for him in 1981. He donated his papers to the library, including private correspondence, but they were sealed until 2007.

According to local news station ABC 30, in the book Hart quotes a letter from Madden: “Whenever I see one of those predatory noses, or those roving and leering eyes, or those slobbering lips, or those flat feet, or those nasal and whiny voices I tremble with rage and hatred. They are the oppressors. … Whom do I hate more than the Jews?”

The university confirmed it had copies of Madden’s antisemitic writings in its collections.

“The views attributed to Dr. Madden are more than allegations; they are reflections of his beliefs as captured in his own words, and in documents he curated and donated to the Library before his passing,” Jiménez-Sandoval’s email said.

A task force has been announced to rename the building.

Winer, a member of the task force, said the issues surrounding Madden’s views reach beyond the small Jewish community in Fresno, a city of about 500,000 with three synagogues and a Jewish federation.

“While the Jewish community is extremely small, the community of people of color and the community of religious minorities is very substantial,” he said.

A version of this story was first published in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is republished with permission.

Report: Student gov’t BDS resolutions at US colleges spiked last year

Bu Shira Hanua

(JTA) — Student governments considered resolutions to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel at 17 college campuses in the United States during the 2020-2021 school year, according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League.

The watchdog group, which released the data Wednesday as part of its annual reporting, called the BDS resolutions a “cornerstone of anti-Israel campus activity during the last year.”

During a school year in which a May conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza was accompanied by widespread criticism of Israel on and beyond college campuses, the number of student governments entertaining BDS resolutions was not dramatically higher than in the recent past.

Of the bills supporting the Israel boycott, 11 passed, according to the report.

That was fewer than in the 2015-2016 school year, according to the ADL’s report about that year, when it documented 23 BDS resolutions, of which 14 passed. The following year, student governments considered 14 BDS resolutions, passing six; the year after that, five of 12 resolutions passed. (In the 2019-2020 school year, just four BDS resolutions came before student governments; likely a result of school closures caused by the pandemic.)

According to the U.S. Education Department, there are nearly 4,000 “degree-granting postsecondary institutions” in the United States, meaning that BDS resolutions were introduced at .425% of college campuses and passed at .275% of campuses last year.

None has been implemented and in some cases university presidents rejected the student government resolutions, noted ADL.

The ADL’s position is that not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, but that the BDS movement is. Its report concludes that anti-Israel activity on campus last year continued to “span from legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies to expressions of antisemitism from some activists.”

Student leaders at at least two universities, the report notes, faced “exclusionary calls because of their expressions of support for Israel and Zionism” and one of them resigned over it.

“As we saw acutely during the May conflict with Hamas, the anti-Israel movement’s drumbeat of rhetorical attacks on Zionism and Zionists can truly hurt and offend many Jewish students, leaving them feeling ostracized and alienated,” the ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement accompanying the report.

In a different report released this fall, the ADL found that one-third of Jewish college students said they had personally experienced antisemitism in the last year.

USC president responds to faculty demanding censure of student’s hate tweets  

By Shiryn Ghermezian

(JNS) In a letter to faculty members, the president and provost of the University of Southern California wrote that legal considerations prevented them from discussing what, if any, actions were taken against a USC student who posted antisemitic and anti-Jewish tweets online, including one that mentioned wanting to “kill” the Zionists.

“As I am sure you are aware, we are legally required to protect student privacy and cannot discuss university processes or actions with respect to a specific student, much less denounce them publicly,” wrote USC president Carol Folt and provost Charles Zukoski, according to the online publication Insider Higher Ed.

That letter was in response to a Dec. 1 open letter—signed by 64 USC faculty members—asking the university to “voice a public, explicit and specific condemnation” of Yasmeen Mashayekh, a student in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, who posted the tweets.

On Nov. 22, the watchdog group Canary Mission posted a video on Twitter highlighting tweets by Mashayekh, which were uploaded between May and June as Hamas fired more than 4,000 rockets at Israeli population centers. In her tweets, Mashayekh wrote: “I want to kill every motherf***ing Zionist,” “Curse the Jews,” “Israel has no history just a criminal record” and “Zionists are going to F***ing pay.”

She also tweeted: “I f***ing love Hamas.”

Folt and Zukoski said they learned about the social-media posts by Mashayekh over the summer, prompting her removal from a “paid mentoring position” at the engineering school.

Mashayekh confirmed that she was fired from her campus job and taken off the Viterbi Graduate Student Association website, where she was listed as a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion senator, wrote The Forward.

The USC administrators also criticized the involvement of an “outside organization” in reviving the tweets.

“Just before Thanksgiving, the deleted tweets were republished by outside organizations, which urged supporters to protest by writing to the dean of the school, who had no control over either the original tweets or the student’s election to the student organization,” said the USC administrators. “Nevertheless, the Viterbi School quickly issued a public statement denouncing these hateful statements as being contrary to our university’s values. … It is appalling that anti-Semitism continues to exist as a scourge across the nation and the world, and we will continue to work tirelessly with you and others to stamp it out.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and director of global social action for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told JNS on Tuesday, Dec. 7, that the administration’s response to faculty did not go far enough and will be included in the Wiesenthal Center’s annual list of the “Top 10” worst antisemitic incidents.

Cooper noted that last year, Folt came out strongly against racism and announced measures the university would take to combat it on campus. By contrast, he said, this letter “about an overt Jew-hater, which sounds like it was reviewed by lawyers, is an outrage. Jews deserve the same treatment and protection promised to all.”

“There is one question the university and its leader have to answer,” he said. “If [similar] comments were made about black students, what would the school’s response be?”

Main Photo: Gwynn-Wilson Student Union at the University of Southern California.