Tammi Benjamin
A soft-spoken lecturer in Hebrew, Tammi Benjamin finds herself living and working in one of the nuttiest places in America: the University of California, Santa Cruz. It’s the sort of campus where Lenin Peace Prize-winner Angela Davis was an esteemed professor in the “History of Consciousness” department, despite her unusual past of fleeing from federal charges that she murdered Judge Harold Haley.
The campus is gorgeous, set amidst towering redwoods. But it incubates the ugliest sort of anti-Semitism, thanks to radical tenured faculty who use the public university to promote their pet ideological hatreds.
For years, Tammi Benjamin has meticulously recorded and politely protested each instance of officially sanctioned Jew-hating. She’s documented the professors who recruit students for anti-Israel demonstrations and who soil their syllabi with hysterical, evidence-free accusations of massacres committed by Israeli troops.
She’s carefully noted the more than a dozen events since 2001 dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, each sponsored by multiple academic departments. In her words, “[a]ll of them have been biased against Israel, often using highly tendentious and unscholarly rhetoric which demonizes Israel and encourages members of the audience to engage in actions to harm Israel.”
She’s catalogued the harassment of Jewish students in classroom and researched the administration’s refusal to respond to anti-Jewish graffiti defacing student dormitories.
And, finally, in 2009, she filed a landmark complaint with the federal government, the first of its kind, charging that the Santa Cruz campus had become a hostile environment for Jews.
In March 2011, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights agreed to launch a major investigation into Benjamin’s allegations.
“Such activism has made Rossman-Benjamin, 55, something of a pariah on campus. Not a single member of the Santa Cruz faculty has endorsed her read on the situation — save for her husband, professor Ilan Benjamin, who chairs the chemistry department,” writes San Francisco’s Jewish News Weekly.
But Tammi Benjamin presses on, co-founding AMCHA, which battles anti-Semitism throughout the University of California system. She spearheaded a letter signed by over 5,200 people to UC President Mark Yudof, urging him to address the problem of anti-Jewish bigotry on UC campuses forcefully, publicly, and promptly.
Yudof, who likes to claim he’s a proud Jew and supporter of Israel, ignored and then dismissed the letter. But Tammi refuses to be deterred, writing back, “Please understand that the Jewish community will not remain silent while Jewish students are being intimidated and harassed at the University of California.”
