If there were a survival handbook for Jewish students at the universities of Europe, it would probably begin with this:
- Tell no one that you’re Jewish.
- Condemn Israel as a terrorist, genocidal state.
- Get used to it.
This, at least, has been the experience of students at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, according to recent reports and an eye-opening
interview with a Jewish student leader there.
But students at universities in Belgium, France, and the UK have faced similar forms of antisemitism on campus. A press outlet in the UK
declared last month that “antisemitic abuse on university campuses has reached record levels” — a full 59 percent higher than in 2020. One student at Glasgow University was encouraged to “go gas herself,”
according to the Times; another was sent a photoshopped image of her head in a guillotine.
And it’s not just students. As one professor at the University of Maastricht
told a Jewish colleague, “If you want to keep your job, don’t tell anyone that you’re Jewish and that you support Israel.”
Speaking to the Dutch online newspaper Israel Nieuws, Maastricht student Ethan Gabriel Bergman described dozens of incidents at the school, including the administration’s decision to ignore International Holocaust Remembrance Day on the school calendar, noting only “Chocolate Cake Day,” which falls on the same date. This past May, as anti-Israel demonstrations rocked Europe, protesters at the university carried banners claiming that “all [Israel] wants to see is blood. Arab blood, as much as possible — blood, the more the better — blood, the main thing is that Arab blood is spilled,” as others repeated anti-Israel chants in Arabic.
Yet when a Jewish student wrote despairingly of this in a student Facebook group, the
replies that came in were anything but supportive. “Filthy cancer-Jew, I hope that they turn the gas chambers back on,” one person wrote, and another: “your stinking people will be destroyed.”
Seeking disciplinary action, the student, who remains anonymous, reported the incident to university administrators. The response: Don’t you think you deserved it for being so unfriendly?
(full article online)
If there were a survival handbook for Jewish students at the universities of Europe, it would probably begin with this: Tell no one that you're Jewish. Condemn Israel as a terrorist, genocidal state. Get used to it. This, at least, has been the experience of students at the University of...
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