Nathaniel Rodwell-Simon
Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.
As Jewish voices warned about the dangers of skyrocketing anti-Jewish hate crimes last year, the unregistered, unofficial ‘UChicago Jews for a Free Palestine’ group released a detailed piece on why this alarming statistic should be ignored.
The piece addresses Congress, levies accusations at a range of national and international organizations, and closes by labeling political actions in defense of Jewish people as “performance of concern over antisemitism.” The crux of the article dismisses all accusations of Jew-hatred as “phantoms of violence they project onto our words.” The only thing missing from this statement is any mention of the actual incidents of Jew-hatred perpetrated by their ideological accomplices on campuses over the past year.
In November of 2024, two Jewish students at DePaul University were assaulted on their campus for showing support for Israel. It might be claimed that this incident clearly targeting Jews has nothing to do with recent protests, if not for the fact that pro-Palestinian student groups quickly moved to support the assault and accuse the victims of “crying crocodile tears over safety and supposed antisemitism.”
That same week, protesters unaffiliated with DePaul University used fake names to disrupt a private event and vandalize a synagogue during a protest supported by Students for Justice in Palestine.
Despite the wildly disturbing nature of these incidents, some might attempt to characterize them as low-stakes, even unimportant relative to international events. If life-and-death stakes are what is required for Jew-hatred to be taken seriously, there are unfortunately a great many of those as well.
Earlier in November, a visibly Jewish man was shot while walking to synagogue, and the perpetrator was charged with a hate crime. Even still, some might argue that these incidents are isolated, that they are not part of a trend, or some other dismissive response.
Again that same week—in the Netherlands this time—Jewish soccer fans were hunted down in the streets. Was this provoked? No, it was clearly premeditated in a group chat with Palestinian flags in its name, aimed at planning the “Jewish hunt.” Days later, we saw copycat crimes in Belgium and thugs boarded a bus and pelted Jewish children with rocks in England, shouting “f– Israel.”
The global rise in Jew-hatred is lethal, and the permissive attitude of our institutions is, at the very least, conducive towards the further enabling of violent and disruptive protests that leave Jewish students isolated and unsafe.
On our own campus, President Alivisatos said that “despite the obvious violations of policy,” the encampment would be allowed to remain. Emboldened, protesters repaid our President’s indulgence by hanging and destroying an effigy of his likeness outside his house, throwing objects at police, and allegedly shouting slurs at Jewish students. All the while, they occupied the Institute of Politics—in a flagrant violation of school policy—next door to the UChicago Hillel and near the Rohr Chabad Center.
The breaking of school policy to accommodate the violence and disruption brought on by pro-Palestinian students has unquestionably made our community unsafe.
Concern with international politics is important, but I would remind my peers that they are students at this school, in Hyde Park, in Chicago.
Friday night dinners at Chabad are my favorite part of the week, but a conversation with a second-year student earlier this year broke my heart. To my mentioning that I have become distanced from my non-Jewish friends in light of all this, she replied “I never got the chance to make non-Jewish friends.”
Our communities have become insular because the institutions that are supposed to protect us have instead decided to give an unjust exception to a small portion of students, allowing them to disrupt our classes and speaker events, assault our officers, and disrupt our convocation.
This letter raises the question: what exactly are these disruptions intended to achieve? The protesters did not end the war in Gaza. They have not influenced politics at either a local or national level in their favor. Our school administration has yet to acquiesce to any of their discriminatory demands. Their only achievement so far has been making campus unsafe for their Jewish classmates.
Clearly, these protester groups flatly deny their deep-rooted Jew-hatred regardless of any evidence to the contrary. This means that they aren’t interested in having a genuine conversation. You will only find baseless accusations, repetitive slogans, and pedantic excuses.
Instead of following their advice to ignore our pleas, I ask you, reader: please do not become desensitized. Jewish students being assaulted on our campuses is not normal. Pogroms across Europe should not, and cannot, be normal. The national rise in anti-Israel Jew-hatred should not be tolerated.
I have loved my time at the University of Chicago. The Jewish community here is dear to me and it wounds me deeply to be unsafe here.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Joachim Sciamma is a third-year in the College and a 2024–2025 fellow for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) on campus.