Mick Hartley

Back to the old "Jews are white and privileged" line:

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating a complaint alleging that Jewish students enrolled in Brooklyn College’s graduate mental health counseling program have been subjected to anti-Semitic harassment from professors and peers.

The complaint, filed on behalf of two Jewish students in the master’s program, alleges that professors in the program “have maligned Jews on the basis of race and ethnic identity by advancing the narrative that all Jews are white and privileged and therefore contribute to the systemic oppression of people of color.” It also alleges that Jewish students have “been bullied in class discussions and on social media by student peers who target Jewish students using the same ethnic stereotypes, antisemitic tropes and divisive concepts that faculty members promote in their courses.”

The complaint, which comes at a time of rising anti-Semitism on American college campuses, alleges that Jewish students who pushed back or expressed distress “were met with further harassment and intimidation from faculty and administrators, who told students to ‘get your whiteness in check’ and to ‘keep your head down’ rather than challenge the status quo.”

It's noteworthy that antisemitism at UK campuses is focused very much on Palestinian rights and BDS and "Zios", while in the US – as well as all that – there's the added bonus of this Jews as kind of super-whites view: that Jews are whites but more so because they're super-powerful and super-privileged. I don't think we get that here…yet. Either way, though, it's the same "oldest hatred".

“When someone would say for example, ‘I’m Jewish,’ professors would say, ‘No, you’re not, you’re white, and you don’t understand oppression and you need to sit down and you need to be quiet and you need to let the Black people in the program speak about their experiences’ and wouldn’t allow us to speak about ours,” the student said.

The complaint describes a number of alleged incidents during the fall 2020 semester centering around questions of Jewishness, whiteness and privilege. In one described incident in August 2020, Doe 2 attended a class where the professor allegedly stated, “In sum and substance, that Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to America have become part of the oppressors in this country.”…

Denise Katz-Prober, director of legal initiatives for the Brandeis Center, said that at Brooklyn College and elsewhere, “Jews are being relegated to this category of white privileged oppressors in a way that not only invokes dangerous age-old antisemitic stereotypes about power and control but denies Jewish history, the complexity of the Jewish experience, as well as erases Jewish identity.”

The case at Brooklyn College bears similarities to complaints filed last year by two members of Stanford University’s Counseling and Psychological Services staff alleging anti-Jewish bias in a diversity, equity and inclusion program. The complaints alleged that the DEI program for Stanford’s counselors, intended to help them better serve a diverse group of students, “engages in intentional racial segregation through race-based affinity groups” and “relies upon racial and ethnic stereotyping and scapegoating by describing all Jews as white or white-passing and therefore complicit in anti-Black racism.”…

Doe 2, the complainant who identifies as both Jewish and Hispanic, decided to leave Brooklyn College’s master’s program in mental health counseling because of the climate.

“I just started to not want to be around these people, to feel scared, really just like I was walking on eggshells,” the student said. “It’s not a mentally healthy place for somebody to be, especially as a person of color. It’s not like I don’t know what discrimination is, and now to be told all of those experiences don’t matter and your skin color doesn’t matter because now you’re essentially white and privileged because Jews are white and privileged, which negates all of the history of the Jews, and on a personal level it completely erases my lived experience, and for it to be fortified by the students and the teachers—it’s crazy-making.”