Two Jewish students involved in task forces on antisemitism at their respective schools urged trustees at California State University to better understand their experiences. In fact, their comments at a Jan. 27 meeting of the board were the third time the two seniors have addressed custodians of the public system.
“This is our place to really raise antisemitism to them and to remind them that this is an ever-happening issue on our campuses that is not just resolved because there’s no more encampments,” Maya Gerassi, 21, a senior at San Diego State University majoring in economics, told JNS. “It is still going on, and it is still pressing.”
The San Diego State task force on Jew-hatred, on which Gerassi serves with staff, faculty, community organizers and other students, got the public university to acknowledge that anti-Zionism is “an act of discrimination that goes against SDSU’s policy” and to fund Jewish Heritage Month programs, she said. She added that the panel vets potential speakers “who might be antisemitic.”
The other student who spoke at the board meeting, Leora Feinsmith, also 21 and a senior studying public health at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, told JNS that she is one of two students on her school’s antisemitism task force.
That panel, she said, is working on “fully-fleshed out” advice for the school’s president, which it intends to deliver in the spring.
Both students told JNS that Cal State should have a university-wide task force on Jew-hatred and should define antisemitism specifically. Gerassi thinks that it ought to adopt the widely used International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.
At San Diego State, being targeted for small things has been “a pattern in your life,” said Gerassi.
“A professor teaching a Palestinian liberation poem while making a face at a Jewish student wearing a Magen David,” she told JNS. “It’s a Jewish student getting spit on. It’s the Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) house getting vandalized. It is different groups on campus saying hurtful things that I don’t agree with about Israel and about Jews.”
Such repeated behavior “subtly” hits students until they become “numb to it,” according to Gerassi.
“You just say, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s just another antisemitic thing happening on campus,” she said in the general attempt people make to brush it off. “Although none of it is large enough to reach the media, it hits the students and makes them wary of antisemitism at all times.”
Many San Diego State students feel safe wearing Stars of David on campus, she said, and “there is confidence to be Jewish” at the school, she believes, which “has worked hard to make Jewish students feel safe on campus.”
‘We still have issues within the history department’
As for Feinsmith, she said that there hasn’t been much Jew-hatred at Cal Poly in the past year, and that the school president, Jeffrey Armstrong, has been an “amazing ally to the Jewish students and Jewish people in the community.”
A campus teach-in on “Palestine” scheduled for January 2024 was postponed for several months after Feinsmith and community members asked that the program be more balanced, and in the end, it was, she told JNS.
However, an incident of violence did happen during an anti-Israel protest outside a school career fair that same month: Eight anti-Israel protesters were arrested for reportedly trying to break into the fair, per student media.
“Several protesters at a planned event became violent, and the Cal Poly Police Department requested immediate assistance from the San Luis Obispo Police Department,” the department said at the time. It added that an “officer was forced to protect himself when a protester attempted to take one of his weapons.”
Feinsmith told JNS that the school has taken action to counter Jew-hatred after the Cal Poly president testified before Congress last May. Almost a year later, “we still have issues within the history department,” she said, though the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter on campus has been quieter this year.
Gerassi told JNS that she wants more students to speak at university trustee meetings. Students “have the chance to really share our voice with the trustees beyond emails and beyond letters and beyond just theorizing what students want,” she said.
“This isn’t about to become a backburner issue,” she wants the trustees to know about what’s been happening on campus, not just since the terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, but even before then. “This is a repetitive thing that has existed for many years,” she said
“Oct. 7 made it bubble over in a way that it never had before, but the problem’s not going away,” Gerassi told JNS. “If they don’t do something now, it is just going to get worse, and students are going to be fearful to be a part of the CSU.”
