GENEVA – On the sidelines of the 56th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council on Wednesday, the World Jewish Congress organized a side event discussing the rising antisemitism across universities since October 7th.
Jewish students have faced physical and emotional abuse throughout all areas of university life, including classrooms, extracurricular activities, and on the main lawns. Under the guise of the right to freedom of speech, these hate crimes have manifested themselves in encampments, calls for administrations to divest from Israel, and federal investigations that sometimes lead to lawsuits.
The event was opened by Daniel Radomski, Head of WJC Strategy & Programs and Executive Director of the WJC Jewish Diplomatic Corps, who described the importance the WJC gives to young leaders and our initiatives to equip them with tools and resources during these challenging times.
The main part of the program featured firsthand testimonies from students from a prestigious university in France, the College of Europe in Belgium, and Wellsley College in the United States. The students described the ordeals they’ve endured on campus in the past academic year, including physical attacks, how they were bullied and excluded from different student events, marginalized on campus, exposed to old and new antisemitic tropes, and spoke of the ambivalent stance of the university administrators and their professors, who failed to take a strong stand to protect them.
Concluding the panel, Ron Stern, Vice President of the European Union of Jewish Students, presented a recent EUJS report on antisemitism on-campus and discussed antisemitic incidents on campuses in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.
The event also featured statements from the floor by the Ambassadors of the United States and Israel, who expressed their solidarity with the students and decried these abhorrent events.
Before closing the discussion, Dr. Leon Saltiel, WJC’s Representative to the UN in Geneva, reiterated the value of the IHRA non-legally binding working definition on antisemitism as a useful tool to identify and address contemporary forms of antisemitism by university staff, police, the judiciary, the media, and others.
