Hillel Takes Proactive Stance on Hate Acts

Sue Fishkoff
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

SAN FRANCISCO

Stanford University's Jewish community celebrated the first night of Sukkot eating the traditional festive meal inside the sukkah they put up every year.

The next morning, on Oct. 3, a student walked into the sukkah to discover that it had been vandalized: Someone had spray-painted large phalluses on the entrance flaps.

Campus police were called, and the offensive marks were covered with tapestries. Hillel alerted the entire campus with an e-mail blast.

Though the attack may have been shocking and upsetting, it was not unprecedented.

Along with sukkah vandalism, college campuses in recent years have been hit by a wave of anti-Semitic graffiti, from swastikas painted on dorm walls to anti-Israel slogans scrawled on the sides of buildings.

This is taking place within a growing atmosphere of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic activity on North American campuses, documented in the revised edition of The UnCivil University, a publication of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco.

Co-author Aryeh Weinberg said that while violence against Jewish students has abated a bit since 2005, when the book's first edition was published, anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic rhetoric on campus "has risen to a crescendo -- the amount of background noise keeps the debate vitriolic."

Universities don't always work effectively to defuse dangerous situations, he said, and the Jewish community is often loath to respond, feeling that it's up to national organizations like the Anti-Defamation League or Hillel to take the lead.

What has happened in the past year or two is that Jewish students themselves -- faced with anti-Semitism or vandalism -- have come up with some creative responses that involve the entire campus community, instead of retreating into fear and isolation.

Responses to recent cases of vandalized sukkahs are a prime example.

In the fall of 2008, the sukkah at the University of Montana in Missoula was so badly vandalized that it had to be taken down two days into the holiday. But in 2009, Hillel moved the sukkah to a more secure location and put out a campus-wide call for volunteers to sleep in it overnight to discourage attacks.

Unexpected Show of Support
At Stanford -- in an unexpected show of support that poured in after Hillel sent out its notice -- administration, faculty and students inundated the Hillel office with e-mail and phone calls in response to the attack.

Christian, Muslim and Hindu student groups offered their condolences, said the Palo Alto school's Hillel rabbi, Mychal Copeland, adding that a Muslim group suggested raising money from all the campus faith-based groups to buy another sukkah.

"We were saddened that such an act would be carried out on Stanford's campus, a place that we generally assume is above such acts of hate and intimidation," wrote Abdulkareem Agunbiade and Mohammad Ali, presidents of the Islamic Society of Stanford University and the Muslim Student Awareness Network.

Overwhelmed by the show of support, Jewish Student Association president Jeff Gettinger invited the entire campus to join Hillel for Sabbath dinner in the sukkah. Sixty people crowded into the makeshift structure that night to eat and celebrate.

One was Anand Venkatkrishnan, head of the campus interfaith group Stanford FAITH.

"The vandalism of a holy structure is unacceptable to me as a person of faith," he wrote Gettinger earlier in the week. "The duty of an interfaith leader is not only to condemn an attack on another, but to prevent it from occurring."