2022 Recap: CAMERA on Campus’ Top Ten Articles of The Year

On the morning of October 27th, the Hadash and Balad chapters at Tel-Aviv University held a protest in support of the Lion’s Den terrorist group, recently apprehended in Nablus. This Palestinian militant group has been responsible for the recent shooting attacks in Israel and, after emerging in August of 2022, has become wildly popular among young Palestinians in the West Bank.  During the protest Hadash and Balad members were seen chanting in support of the Intifada, and called the Lion’s Den members martyrs (Shaheedim). Their chants honored the terrorists and the students declared that they would continue to fight the ...

Would you appoint an arsonist as fire chief? Well, That is precisely what City University of New York (CUNY) – the city’s publicly run university system with 243,000 students spread over 25 campuses –  did when they hired a former employee of the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to lead an investigation into alleged antisemitism aimed at a Jewish faculty member at Kingsborough Community College. The decision was controversial due to the history of anti-Israel activity at CAIR, including accusations by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that CAIR’s senior leaders have used “inflammatory anti-Zionist rhetoric” that have “veered into antisemitic tropes.” ...

Following sharp criticism from concerned community members, Wellesley College’s student newspaper Wellesley News claims to have reversed its endorsement of The Mapping Project, but the paper has little to show for its alleged disavowal. As of November 22nd, 2022, Wellesley News continues to feature an editorial penned by the paper’s editorial board that spreads libels about the Jewish state and New England Jewish community. It is appalling that the Wellesley News would falsely accuse members of the Jewish and pro-Israel community of harming Palestinians and engaging in “settler colonialism” when Jews are indigenous to Israel because of their deep cultural ...

On September 14th, 2022, a banner was hung across from Cornell's Center for Jewish Life with the message “Burn Prisons. Free Them All. From Attica to Palestine.” This attempt to conflate prison reform in the US with the detainment and imprisonment of terrorists by Israel is the latest ploy by anti-Zionist extremists to prey upon the sensibilities of socially conscious college students. Someone also drew an image in the dirt not far from the banner that equated the Star of David with a Nazi swastika, further demonstrating their actions as a deliberate effort to target the Jewish community. In light ...

A few months after Duke University’s Student Government (DSG) scandalously vetoed the recognition of a pro-Israel group on campus, they have managed to outdo themselves by funding a known antisemite speaker. Earlier this year, DSG rescinded its recognition of Duke's SSI (Students Supporting Israel) chapter after the Duke SSI Instagram page rebutted a student who posted that the group “promotes settler colonialism.”  After a long battle between various student groups, DSG & Duke President Vincent Price and Provost Sally Kornbluth, Duke SSI was reinstated. Most recently, DSG allocated $5000 to an event featuring antisemitic speaker & Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd ...

A recent Case Western Reserve University Observer editorial accuses the university’s President Eric Kaler of promoting “falsity” and being “misinformed” about the BDS resolution recently adopted by the Undergraduate Student Government (USG). We agree that facts must be central to any discussion of the resolution and the conflict in general. This is why we’re disappointed at the editorial board’s silence over the basic factual errors and egregious omissions in the USG resolution itself. To apply the editorial board’s own words, the resolution “did not even pretend to acknowledge both sides of what, in the end, is a very nuanced situation.” Here are just ...

"Appropriation occurs when the appropriator is not aware of the deep meaning of the culture he is appropriating." – Amanda Stenberg Cultural appropriation and dispossession have been present for many centuries in our history. More recently, discussions of heritage have focused on appropriation in the context of mainstream popular culture. For example, the appropriation of Native American designs in high couture clothing or the theft of musical forms of native and marginalized groups. The Arch of Titus monument in Rome is one of the oldest symbols of cultural appropriation. It depicts the Romans taking a Menorah (Jewish candlestick) from Judea ...

On March 27, Kennan Institute scholar Izabella Tabarovsky led a discussion at the University of Miami concerning the Soviet roots of modern anti-Zionism sponsored by CAMERA on Campus, Canes for Israel, and UM Hillel. As Tabarovsky writes in an essay for Fathom, the Soviets’ overtly antisemitic campaign “succeeded at emptying Zionism of its meaning as a national liberation movement of the Jewish people and associating it instead with racism, fascism, Nazism, genocide, imperialism, colonialism, militarism and apartheid”. Not surprisingly, students on college and university campuses across the country often hear similar, if not identical claims from anti-Zionist groups like Students ...

Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi’s tenure at San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the department for Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) has been rife with antisemitism. She has attempted to connect students to terrorists, supported antisemitic activism, propagated antisemitic conspiracies about Jewish power, and unrepentantly compared the Jewish indigenous civil rights movement (Zionism) to white supremacy. Her recent department-hosted open classroom, which is still posted on the university’s official Facebook and YouTube pages, titled “Who Owns Jewishness?” gave this writer a first-hand experience of Abdulhadi’s misuse of her academic position. The disingenuous question was posed to a panel of ...