CST report: I am constantly amazed by the bravery of Jewish students

In the past week, CST revealed a 22 per cent rise in university-related antisemitic incidents, days after a King’s Counsel detailed the harassment and discrimination Jewish students endured within the National Union of Students. Reading both reports together, the interplay between antisemitism in student politics and incidents on campus becomes clear.

When pernicious conspiracy theories and crude stereotypes go unchallenged within supposedly mainstream organisations, there is a trickle-down effect in individual universities. In my foreword to the report, I considered the malign worldview that some academics and students spread.

To the cranky conspiracist, Jewish students are homogeneous and threatening. Their rich cultural, political, and religious diversity is but a shrewd diversion. They sing in unison; innocuous and coincidental links are evidence of a masterplan. It’s all connected in the minds of antisemites who draw diagrams to advance the absurd argument that Jewish students are somehow culpable for a conflict three and a half thousand miles away.

In this perverse alternative reality Jewish students are cast as the agents of a foreign power. Their individuality is erased, and they are reduced, to a part of a powerful collective. Age-old tropes about money, power and control are repackaged into pithy tweets. Against this backdrop, Jewish students’ complaints of antisemitism are viewed with suspicion and the cynical manoeuvring of an astute political operator.

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UJS president Joel Rosen interviewing Jeremy Corbyn at the Cambridge Union in June 2021 (Photo: courtesy)

In many campuses Jewish students feel alienated and left behind when they need to be heard, supported, and protected. Rebecca Tuck’s report into NUS suggests that Jewish students make up 0.12 per cent of the wider student population. The nine thousand Jewish students across the UK and Ireland I am privileged to represent make up a fraction of the population of some individual universities.

That’s why the partnership between the Community Security Trust and the Union of Jewish Students is so vital. Together, we are there for Jewish students, visiting campuses across the country and supporting them in the good times as well as the bad. I have seen first-hand the care and dedication of the CST and its many volunteers working in partnership with our JSocs on the ground. This report is the latest example of the professionalism and thoroughness that characterises the organisation.

Rabbi Sacks Z’tl, in his viral video entitled ‘Why I am a Jew’ explains that antisemitism does not make him Jewish: “What happens to me does not define who I am: ours is a people of faith, not fate.” In my job I often meet with students scarred by the bigotry they’ve endured. I’ve heard from freshers living away from home for the first time who have been trolled online, and from Jewish activists who have been doxed and the victims of physical attacks. I am constantly amazed by the bravery of our community’s next generation. Even when antisemites succeed in dampening our youthful idealism, they can never rob us of our resolve or Jewish pride.

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Joel Rosen (back row, second from left) with the Union of Jewish Students team (Photo: courtesy)

The students I meet as I travel around the country are refreshingly diverse, we don’t agree on everything, but we are united by our commitment to Jewish life on campus. Together, we’ve established new Jewish societies and are reinvigorating established ones. I’ve often thought that what we have as a community is so beautiful, it is surely unknowable to those who would tear it down.

I remember in my final year of university joining a motley group of students in Trinity College’s Wren Library on Shavuot as we read from a 14th century Yemenite Torah scroll. There was an indescribable buzz in the air, and I feel something similar each time I sit down for a potluck Friday night dinner or visit a JSoc social or one of the hundreds of lunch and learns. Jewish life on campus is thriving and that’s thanks to the work of UJS and CST but also because of an inspirational community of students who celebrate their Judaism in whatever way is meaningful to them.

Last Thursday, when the Tuck Report into antisemitism in NUS was published, was a bit of a blur. We spoke to MPs, journalists and student unions - running from W1A to Portcullis House to Sky News. My first meeting on Friday meeting was with a Jewish student looking to establish a new JSoc. It seemed like the right response to the report published the day before.

Joel Rosen is the President of the Union of Jewish Students

Topics:

Universities

Antisemitism

Union of Jewish Students