Summertime worries

Marina Berkovich JHSSWF President

American students have wrapped up their school year. Summer vacations, trips across country or abroad, have long become a well-deserved and much expected reward after a hard year of academic studies. Yet this year, understandably, Jewish American parents are extremely concerned with the safety of their youngsters. From social media suggestions like “remove your yarmulkas and Stars of David,” to Columbia University rabbi’s letter advising Jewish students to go home, I see the repetition of the same historical pattern that preceded every pogrom.

As a former dean of administration of Bramson Ort Colleges of ORT America, I’ve been asking the hypothetical question, “What if I were still in charge?” During my tenure at Bramson, some of the future on-campus tensions already seeped through in NYC, where many Moslem students were educated in the formerly predominantly Jewish schools claiming entitlements to Jewish allocations.

It is now an outright hatred that has festered to unmanageable proportion. Since my 1980 admission to The City University of New York, when I chose Queens College over Columbia and then got a supplemental degree from New York University, Hillel was a vibrant part of campus life. The former USSR-ians laughed at some of its outright socialist activism. We thought it was the Jewish naivete, because when large numbers of Jews attain financial and societal acceptance into the upper echelons of any host country, Jewish people assume everything’s gonna be different this time. Wrong! Jewish history teaches us that no society and no country, except our own, wants and welcomes us unconditionally.

Our only course is uniting as one and openly fighting the battle against modern antisemitism that includes anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism. American antisemitism was fueled through rapid replacement of academic education standards with previously unacceptable lows. Twenty years ago, the U.S. was ranked No. 1 in high school and college education. According to Business Insider reports in 2018, the U.S. ranked only 38th in math and 24th in science, and that is largely because Asian Americans insist on prioritizing quality academic development of their children. Ironically, that led to discrimination of Asians by institutions of learning that are too heavily vested in the neo-Marxist ideology, pushing equity over equality or diversity over meritocracy. Replacement of societal moral values with mediocrity that rules over intellect in academia has destroyed the American education; it has filled the minds of graduates with nonsensical, experimental-agenda drop-down menus that most often opt them for “none-of-the-above” life choices.

A huge individual disillusionment is now a norm. Mass ignorance and hysteria exploded in late April 2024 in American campus war against Jewish students and professors. University of Florida, however, took a firm stand against pro-Palestinian on-campus demonstrators, declaring that consequences of breaking university rules would be imminently harsh.

There were 463 antisemitic hate crimes in FL in 2023, a 140% increase over last year, according to Anti-Defamation League, which has been monitoring these crimes since 1979. That is the fourth largest in the nation, an increase from 269 the previous year (Ryan Kruger, Fox 4). Palm Beach County had 84; the highest number in the state. Reported incidents in Collier County increased from one in 2022 to 10 in 2023. We live in scary times. Unite for the fight, or we will have nothing left to fight for.

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