Should outsiders step in to address campus antisemitism? The question is dividing Jews at the U of Washington.
The only Jewish studies professor on the school’s task force quit, saying he thought “real conversation and discourse” was lacking
Aerial photo of the University of Washington in Seattle. (Getty Images)
(JTA) — As a pro-Palestinian encampment settled in on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus this spring, Jewish studies professor Devin Naar was doing something he’d never done before: teaching a class on antisemitism, the first offered at his school in more than a decade.
“It was the hardest class I’ve ever taught, and maybe the most rewarding,” said Naar, a historian of Sephardic Jewry. He described a class where Jews who attended Hillel and Chabad events conversed with Jews who hosted encampment Shabbat services. The environment was civil, he said, and moved “beyond slogans” to feature guest appearances from local activists and Jewish community leaders.
Midway through the semester, Naar received an invitation to join the public university’s antisemitism task force. As at other schools gripped by toxic climates since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, the university’s task force was charged with diagnosing the extent of the antisemitism problem on campus and coming up with possible solutions. It would be made up of faculty, staff and students, mostly Jews, and would work alongside a parallel task force on Islamophobia.
The timing felt fortuitous. Naar agreed to be the faculty representative, as well as the only task force member to hail from a Jewish or Israel studies department. He invited his fellow members to sit in on his class and see how the students themselves were navigating their thoughts on antisemitism in real time; one did.
But Naar wasn’t part of the finished product when the task force concluded in its final report this month that antisemitism at the university “is widespread, systemic and institutionalized.” He had resigned three weeks before. In part, he said, he left because it seemed like the task force wasn’t interested in the kind of “real conversation and discourse” about antisemitism that his class engaged in.
“I wanted to bring the approach that I developed in the classroom to my task force work, and I don’t feel that approach was embraced,” he said. “And in that regard, it was a lost opportunity.”
Naar’s decision to step down meant he wasn’t privy to one of the task force’s more contentious recommendations: that the university “immediately” form a committee to review quarterly reports of antisemitism on campus.
This committee, the task force said, should be made up of both university representatives and outside Jewish organizations — including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the pro-Israel activist group StandWithUs.
The details stood out to some on campus. Two years ago, StandWithUs was active in a Jewish donor’s decision to pull a $5 million grant to the university’s Israel Studies department after objecting to its endowed chair signing a letter critical of Israel. The donor reportedly redirected the grant to StandWithUs.
Now, the same group — which had helped facilitate the loss of a major endowment and contributed to a public-relations nightmare for the university — was being recommended as one that could help the school fight antisemitism.
Naar, who declined to comment on what he witnessed while serving on the task force itself, wasn’t the only Jew at the university to object to the task force’s work. More than 150 Jewish faculty, staff, students and alumni have signed onto an open letter criticizing the report and its conclusions.
The letter challenges the task force’s methodology for assessing sentiment on campus. It also specifically objects to the suggestion to involve outside groups, saying the move would “erode shared governance by giving inappropriate influence to external organizations that do not represent the values or diversity of views of Jews at UW.”
In interviews, some of the letter’s organizers questioned how StandWithUs wound up in the report so soon after roiling the school — and whose agenda the recommendations serve. Pointing to language in the report they viewed as specious, they speculated that StandWithUs or other groups played a hand in writing the report itself. While an initial list of task force members was made public, the final membership, after Naar left, was not.
“Whoever wrote the report seemed very willing to accept that, indeed, these organizations represent the Jewish community,” said Liora Halperin, the professor at the center of the 2022 donor controversy.
But, the dissenting Jewish faculty maintains, groups like StandWithUs and the ADL don’t represent everyone. Fellow faculty member Jessie Seiler described them as “outside, politically motivated groups” whose presence in the report pointed to a “lack of understanding of the community of subject-matter experts we have on campus.”
The group also leveled some now-familiar progressive critiques of university responses to antisemitism, including that the report inappropriately conflates it with anti-Zionism; that it’s a thinly veiled smokescreen for attacking diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, known as DEI; and that it will threaten academic freedom.
The antisemitism and Islamophobia task forces conducted a joint campus climate survey of around 6,700 total students, staff and faculty, asking them a range of questions including their views on Israel and how welcome they feel expressing them on campus. Respondents had the option to self-identify as Jewish or Israeli; around 1,200 did so.
The report’s survey results paint a damning picture. Jewish students reported being spat on, harassed, blocked from some parts of campus, followed by “hostile individuals,” or skipping classes completely because of safety concerns. 65% of the survey’s Jewish respondents said they felt compelled to hide their Jewish identity; 95% of Israelis said the same about their Israeli identity.
Out of a campus Jewish community that Hillel International estimates at 2,500 students, plus many more faculty and staff, only 35 total Jews participated in focus groups with the task force. This is a much smaller number than the Jews who participated in “listening sessions” and roundtables at schools with comparable Jewish populations, including Harvard (more than 500), Columbia (around 500), and Stanford (more than 300), as per their respective task forces. Not every university task force has utilized the focus group technique: the University of California, Los Angeles relied entirely on survey data.
The focus groups were a key element of the pushback to the report, as critics alleged that broad conclusions were being drawn from a tiny sample of Jews who don’t reflect the university’s range of Jewish views. “You need more than a few dozen students,” Halperin said. Others lambasted the task force for holding one of those sessions at Hillel, which has rules against accommodating anti-Zionist programming.
Organizers of the dissenting letter said they were not opposed to the idea of a task force looking into antisemitism on campus after Oct. 7. Seiler described meeting with Jewish students “who came to me and expressed discomfort or fear or concern or anxiety.”
Yet this group also believed the real problem for Jews on campus wasn’t that they were being targeted, but that they disagreed with each other. Jewish Studies professor Sasha Senderovich downplayed a recent divestment protest, one that shut down a university regents meeting and caused several local Jewish communal leaders to flee for their safety.
“We know that there were also Jewish students in that group of protesters, right? So they are erased from that story,” he said. Seiler, who had participated in encampment Shabbats, also suggested that their school’s diversity office should be “keeping the focus where we know it needs to be in the United States, which is on anti-Black racism,” rather than expanding its focus to antisemitism, a goal many Jewish activists across the spectrum have pushed for.
This is hardly the first time since Oct. 7 that Jews have fought over their university’s antisemitism task force. Others at schools such as Harvard and Stanford came under fire from pro-Israel Jews for what they perceived as their members’ criticism of Israel, even as both task forces ultimately issued damning reports of their schools’ failures to contain campus antisemitism. Northwestern University’s antisemitism committee disbanded over anger at their president’s handling of the school’s encampment movement.
Meanwhile, a group of dissenting Jews at Columbia University also opposed their task force’s conclusions from the left.
But such disagreements carry extra weight at Washington, one of only a few public universities to have initiated such an effort to address antisemitism. Another, UCLA, released the results of its own report last week.
The Washington task force’s co-chair told JTA that the school’s very status as a public university was what led them to recommend the formation of an outside committee.
“The inclusion of these outside groups, the reason they are there, is for accountability,” epidemiologist Janet Baseman said. “As a public university, we have to be accountable to the public.”
Baseman was the most senior Jewish member of the task force; her co-chair was a non-Jewish dean who also oversaw the Islamophobia group. She agreed to take part, she said, because antisemitism at Washington seemed to be getting out of control. Activists were targeting both Jewish students and faculty with intimidation campaigns, and the university’s bias reporting office seemed ill-equipped for processing antisemitism-related complaints. Multiple Title VI civil rights investigations have been opened against the school.
“I had witnessed firsthand some of the issues going on on our campus, and it was unacceptable to me,” Basemen said. A campus climate survey seemed to her a meaningful way to get at the problem that played to her strengths as a researcher.
While declining to comment on Naar’s departure or the pushback from other Jewish faculty, Baseman defended the task force’s methods and said many of the criticisms were unfounded. She chalked up the small number of focus groups to resource constraints. To help offset this, she noted, the surveys included room for open-ended responses.
She also strove to include a diverse range of Jewish perspectives, which she said is why the task force did not attempt to impose a single definition of antisemitism, and also why it included the perspectives of anti-Zionist Jews and other Jews who are deeply critical of Israel, some of whom are quoted verbatim in the report.
And Baseman forcefully denounced one major allegation the report’s Jewish critics have leveled — that any one of the outside groups recommended by the report, particularly StandWithUs, may have played a hand in its creation.
“The suggestion that StandWithUs wrote or worked on this report is outrageous and has no basis in fact,” she said. She had included the controversial group, she said, because “to me, StandWithUs is a group that fights antisemitism through education.” Baseman declined to comment on the group’s donor controversy, saying she didn’t know enough about it.
The directors of the school’s Hillel and the Seattle Jewish Federation, two other outside organizations named in the report as potential partners, both said they welcomed its conclusions and urged the university to take the report seriously.
A review of five other task force reports found that some offered similar suggestions as Washington’s, though without naming nearly as many outside Jewish groups. Committees at both UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania said their schools should be doing more to support their campus Hillel, with UCLA’s adding that the school should consult “Jewish and Israeli stakeholder groups” when implementing any new attempts to address antisemitism. Penn’s also supported beefing up the school’s Jewish Studies department.
Stanford’s committee said the school’s community standards office should undergo an “independent evaluation,” without specifying who would run it. Representatives from Hillel and Chabad, both unaffiliated with universities despite often working closely with them, are named as having aided the task forces at Stanford, Penn and others.
Outside commentators in the academic space have also questioned some of the fuss over the report. “To be perfectly honest I found the critique to be churlish, even petty, clearly partisan in its motivation, and ultimately not at all compelling,” David Schraub, a Jewish law professor at Lewis & Clark College, wrote on his blog about the Washington pushback to the task force.
Schraub noted that the task force had uncovered troubling data about the mindsets of both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian respondents. One chart in the report shows that each camp overwhelmingly believes that their own perspectives are not tolerated on campus, while believing the other side’s are — a difficult psychological problem to overcome.
And Schraub said critics of the report had not sustained their allegations that the task force was biased or influenced against a particular group of Jews. “It seemed to me that the critics came in spoiling for a fight and made a series of tendentious or stretched inferences to justify picking one,” he wrote.
How seriously the university is taking the report seems to be an open question. The Office of Educational Assessment, a department at Washington that handled the data collection for both task forces, has not shared the raw findings with the public. The office did not return a request for comment.
And the university is not commenting on any plans for the report. A spokesperson for the university said in a statement, “The work speaks for itself and the findings and recommendations are now in the hands of UW leadership to determine next steps.”
Randy Kessler, executive director of StandWithUs Northwest and a Washington alum, said in a statement that the group “agrees with the report’s conclusion that the University of Washington has become a hostile, exclusionary, and unsafe environment for Jewish students.” Kessler added, “We appreciate StandWithUs’ inclusion as one of the organizations that can contribute to finding solutions.”
When asked by the student newspaper about the Jewish dissent to the taskforce report, the university’s president, Ana Mari Cauce, responded, “I would suggest to everyone to take the reports seriously as they are, but to also look at the numbers and think about it.” Cauce, who plans to step down at the end of the academic year, added that the university would begin to implement some of the report’s recommendations “probably very soon.”
It was evident that tensions on campus over Israel remain raw. During Cauce’s annual president’s address last week, as she brought up the effects of the Israel-Hamas war on campus, she was interrupted by a pro-Palestinian protester calling her a “liar” and shouting about “a year of genocide in Gaza.” A university official announced that the protester was “violating state law and policy” and “engaging in conduct that prevents our community from working towards collaborative solutions.”
“The conflicts abroad do affect us right here,” Cauce remarked. Later, responding to a question about whether the university can “prevent anti-Israel demonstrations on campus,” the president responded, “Simply, no… We are a public university. Our spaces are open to the public.”
Hours later, the task force released its report.
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