Nine different law student groups at California's Berkeley Law School began the new school year by amending its constitution to ensure that it never invites speakers who support Israel or Zionism, Neokohn told American lawyer Kenneth L. Marcus on JNS his writing.
It's been a century since Jewish-free zones first spread in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to the author, this step is scary.
Berkeley law students are not the first to expel Zionists. At the State University of New Paltz in New York, activists expelled two sexual assault victims from a survivor group because they were Zionists. At the University of Southern California, the vice president of the Jewish student government, Rose Ritch, was ousted from office, threatening to "impeach her Zionist ass." At Tufts University, they tried to oust Max Price, a member of the Student Judiciary Committee, from the Student Government Judiciary Committee because of his support for Israel.
According to the author, these exclusions reflect the changing face of anti-Semitism on campus. The most high-profile incidents are no longer just about speech that poisons the university environment. Now anti-Zionist groups are directly targeting American Jews, the article notes.
"Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Like other forms of anti-Semitism, it is an ideology of hate that treats Israel as a "collective Jew" and smears the Jewish state with similar slanders that have been used to denigrate individual Jews for centuries.
This ideology creates a conspiratorial worldview, sometimes including substitution theory, which occasionally manifests itself in violence, including mass shootings. Moreover, Zionism is an integral part of the identity of many Jews," the article reads.
The entire article Neokohn.hu .
Photo: Reuters / F. Bensch
