Tammi Rossman-Benjamin has spearheaded the fight against anti-Semitism on the University of California campuses. For the second time in 14 months, University of California administrators are being asked to take more forceful action against anti-Semitism on UC campuses and harassment of Jewish students.
In June 2010, leaders of a dozen prominent Jewish American organizations sent complaints to UC President Mark G. Yudof. This week, a new letter to Yudof contended that issues of campus anti-Semitism had not been resolved and urged him “to address this problem effectively and promptly.”
In the previous June 28, 2010 letter to U.C. President Mark Yudof, three faculty members, along with 12 Jewish organizations, admonished U.C.’s responses to acts of intolerance against Jewish students.
Those responses have been weak, the letter said, especially when compared to the university’s responses to discrimination against other minority students, such as two incidents this past school year at U.C. San Diego – the discovery of a noose hanging in the library and an off-campus party that allegedly mocked Black History Month.
“For years there have been issues creating a hostile environment for Jewish students that were not responded to with nearly the same speed, concern or sensitivity – if they were responded to at all,” said Tammi Rossman-Benjamin.
The letter was crafted and signed by Rossman-Benjamin, Leila Beckwith, professor emeritus at UCLA, and Roberta Seid, lecturer at U.C. Irvine. Twelve prominent national Jewish organizations also joined the letter: American Freedom Alliance, CAMERA: Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, The David Project, Israel Peace Initiative, Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism, Orthodox Union (OU), Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Stand With Us, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, and the Zionist Organization of America.
The letter cited what it said were increasing instances of bigotry on many U.C. campuses, including anti-Semitic graffiti, acts of physical and verbal aggression, and anti-Israel speakers, films and exhibits.
The letter also cited an online petition signed by 700 U.C. students and referenced some of their answers to a questionnaire. Jewish students described feeling “harassed and intimidated at U.C. Irvine, U.C. San Diego and U.C. Berkeley,” the letter stated.
The new letter just published on Sept. 23, 2011 was signed by about 5,000 Jewish lay and religious leaders, parents of UC students and alumni and is more of a grassroots effort than the previous one. “We are losing patience,” said Rossman-Benjamin.
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is lecturer in Hebrew at UC Santa Cruz. She has been involved with research on the Hebrew language and culture; biblical Hebrew syntax and semantics; the Hebrew Bible; Jewish thought; psycholinguistics; second language acquisition and bilingualism. In 2009, she published a study titled Anti-Zionism and the Abuse of Academic Freedom: A Case Study at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, No. 77, 1 February 2009)
Based on her study, she filed a formal complaint of anti-Semitic events on the campus with The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in June 2009. In March 2011, the Office finally acted and notified the university that it will be investigating allegations a series of “pro-Palestinian events” at the university crossed the line into anti-Semitism and created a hostile environment for Jewish students.
In her complaint, Rossman-Benjamin alleged administrators repeatedly failed to address concerns voiced by herself, and students, about academic departments and residential colleges at Santa Cruz sponsoring speakers and film screenings she described as “viciously anti-Israel” with campus funds. She also said some professors use their classes to promote an anti-Israel political agenda and failed to intervene when students were verbally harangued for defending the Jewish state.
“The impact of the academic and university-sponsored Israel-bashing on students has been enormous,” Rossman-Benjamin said. “There are students who have felt emotionally and intellectually harassed and intimidated, to the point they are reluctant or afraid to express a view that is not anti-Israel.”
Kenneth Marcus, a former director of OCR who now heads the anti-Semitism initiative at the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco, said investigations into anti-Semitism bias are rare. Regulations allowing such cases to be investigated as violations of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were suspended in the last years of the Bush administration, but revived and clarified in October of 2011, he said.
