This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
Last year, as I was applying to college in the fraught months after the Oct. 7 attacks and amidst the anti-Israel protests roiling campuses, I shared with JTA readers my criteria for picking a school. I explained how I was looking for campuses where students felt safe to be proudly Jewish, and where weekly Shabbat dinners and other gatherings were signs of Jewish vitality.
When I committed to Western Washington University in Bellingham, I had already decided that my best choice, given campus protests, was a school close to my home in Oregon. WWU’s active Hillel and Jewish Student Union reassured me that I would be able to find a community of Jewish students when I needed one.
Unfortunately the Jewish community is a small safe haven in a school where Jewish concerns about antisemitism are ignored.
A few weeks after I committed, I discovered that WWU had its own pro-Palestinian encampment. While I couldn’t find much mainstream media coverage of the situation, I received the campus-wide emails from the university president which, I later learned, significantly downplayed the situation.
[In a statement on May 31, 2024, WWU president Sabah Randhawa wrote that he “heard from many other members of the university, including some from the Jewish community, who have felt unsupported and unsafe during this time. The safety and well-being of all our students, faculty and staff is my first responsibility.” Read the whole statement here. — Ed.]
At the time, I assumed the encampment had been fully condemned by faculty and was going to be quickly shut down. Eventually, I would learn that hundreds of faculty signed on to a letter supporting the encampment.
Within the first week of arriving in Bellingham, about six hours from my hometown, I saw anti-Israel stickers on campus and at local music events. I disconnected myself from Jewish life almost immediately. This campus and city culture made me feel that I couldn’t be openly Jewish if I wanted to make friends. I did not attend any Jewish events. Before we even hit the six-week mark, a person I was just introduced to found out I was Jewish. They “just felt like they can’t trust Jews anymore,” they told me to my face.
In late November, after keeping my head down and dealing with antisemitism from my peers for weeks, I finally began going to Shabbat dinners at Hillel and eventually started attending Chabad and Jewish Student Union events. When I began connecting with other Jews on campus, I learned what I didn’t know when I made my college decision: WWU has a history of antisemitism.
One notable incident occurred on Yom HaShoah of 2023, before Oct. 7. About 60 members of the Ethnic Student Center student boards protested against the Jewish Student Union joining the ESC, claiming the Jewish group created an “unsafe” environment for Palestinian students by “denying their existence and fundamental rights.” The protesters read their demands and yelled “free Palestine” at members of the JSU board as they left an ESC meeting.
During the campus Yom HaShoah vigil, one student began asking why Jews needed space in the ESC — an organization intended to serve “historically underrepresented BIPOC students and allies,” according to its mission statement — if they could just hide their Stars of David and no one would bother them. That student almost lost her position as a result and subsequently began saying that Jews were trying to make a Black woman lose her job.
In 2017, a task force was created to combat antisemitic hatred after several campus incidents. Sadly, it seems as though the university is no longer upholding the findings and recommendations in the task force report. On May 5, the faculty senate voted to approve the American Association of University Professors’ national recommendations in response to President Trump’s executive order threatening to deport non-citizen students involved in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses.
While even some Jewish groups have criticized the president’s order, AAUP went further, ignoring Jewish concerns about antisemitism. AAUP has courted controversy in recent years for, among other things, loosening its opposition to academic boycotts, apparently in response to calls for boycotts of Israel. Among other things, the AAUP recommendations call on universities to reject the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism — a standard adopted by the United States, Canada, and many European Union member states — because it has “been utilized to silence and censor supporters of Palestine.”
The faculty senate also demanded that the university refuse to adopt rules that deem terms ike “genocide,” “intifada” or “from the river to the sea” as “per se” discriminatory.
My fears around going to a school where faculty wouldn’t protect Jewish students and would actively contribute to the harm were fully realized.
Following the passing of the resolution, I emailed the Faculty Senate and expressed my concerns. The response I got from the senate president left much to be desired. He began by trying to prove his allyship, saying that he shared his concern about campus antisemitism and mentioning that he put himself on the line to speak to the press about potentially antisemitic vandalism that happened in the fall. This does nothing to change the fact that Jewish students are now left without a definition or framework of what counts as antisemitism and what is worth reporting.
On May 19, I and two other students spoke to the senate on behalf of Jewish students, asking them to consider the impacts of this resolution on Jews on campus and providing proof that there was already significant and sufficient protection for academic freedom. While many members seemed receptive, the president of the senate had to ask the senators to be respectful before we spoke. Additionally, in the discussion period after, a representative for the United Faculty of Western Washington University became defensive, accusing me of asking for disciplinary action for a professor I mentioned in my statement who had denied the rape of Israeli women on Oct. 7 and suffered no repercussions. I only brought up the professor’s name to demonstrate that free speech is already well protected on campus.
Every time a hostage poster was ripped down, or when the administration sent out an email downplaying antisemitic graffiti, or when a member of faculty denied my own perceptions of what was and wasn’t antisemitic, it occurred to me that the only place I could escape campus antisemitism would be Israel.
While my first year of college has given me the opportunity to meet wonderful people through Hillel, Chabad and JSU, I am not able to participate in other aspects of campus life and other areas of activism because of the antisemitic ideology that has infiltrated progressive spaces. Rather than continuing to be ignored by campus administration while ill-intentioned students and student groups are enabled, I plan to attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem-Rothberg International School beginning next fall.
Being close to home does not mean that I am safer from antisemitism. To prioritize my education over the exhausting work of fighting administrative failures, I have to go somewhere even further.
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