Combating Antisemitism

An education program aiming to stamp out antisemitism at UC Berkeley is finding a national audience, with help from a grant and a video that puts a complex history into simpler terms.

“UC Berkeley is rightly celebrated for its history of free expression and for being an inclusive community,” says Berkeley Law Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon, who started the Antisemitism Education Initiative in 2019 with History Professor Ethan Katz and Berkeley Hillel Executive Director Adam Naftalin-Kelman. “I really wanted to make sure that when we consider questions of racial justice, antisemitism is a part of that discussion.”

The program is coordinated by the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Committee on Jewish Life and Campus Climate, the Center for Jewish Studies, the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, Berkeley Hillel, and the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art & Life. The initial goal, Solomon says, was to educate students and other school community members about antisemitism’s history and modern examples of anti-Jewish bias.

Last fall, the initiative received a $25,000 grant from the Academic Engagement Network, a nonprofit that promotes free expression on campus, supports research and education about Israel at universities, and opposes efforts to delegitimize Israel.

The initiative has already hosted events, developed a presentation for new student orientations, run workshops for faculty and staff, and offered consultations to educators nationwide. Solomon, Katz, and Naftalin-Kelman also worked with Oakland filmmaker Sarah Lefton to write and produce “Antisemitism in Our Midst: Past and Present,” an 11-minute video.

It explains antisemitism’s roots and persistence, and the ways American Jews fall outside the nation’s tendency to define race as white or Black (benefiting from white privilege while also suffering from discrimination because of this “other” category that can prompt bias).

Regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict, the video says criticizing an Israeli policy isn’t antisemitic but that using traditionally antisemitic stereotypes to do so, or denying the Jewish people the right to a state while defending other nations’ right of autonomy, is.

The video script took over four months of work. Solomon, Katz, and Naftalin-Kelman pored over every sentence, considering how it would speak to different audiences and looking for misunderstandings. They then showed a rough cut to groups of students from diverse backgrounds, leading to further tweaks.

“It was immensely challenging to try to develop something that would be at once clear and unambiguous on key issues, and sensitive to nuance and the range of experiences of those in a student body so diverse as Berkeley’s,” Katz says. “We’re proud of the product and we’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback from a range of perspectives.”

With the national spike in antisemitic incidents, Solomon says the video and broader initiative are important “to ensure that people are educated and aware and have the tools to fight antisemitism. I’m proud that Berkeley is a leader in this movement.” —Gwyneth K. Shaw