(Jewish Group) From Nazis to Vietnam protesters, NY exhibit highlights history of campus antisemitism

In 1969, as protests seized the Columbia University Morningside campus, student activists frequently charged that the Vietnam War was akin to “the genocide of the Holocaust.” Meanwhile, some Jewish faculty who were Holocaust survivors called the students “academic Hitler Youth.”

The phenomenon resembles contemporary protests that have gripped American college campuses since the Hamas-led terror onslaught of October 7, 2023, which triggered the ongoing war in Gaza after 1,200 people in southern Israel were brutally murdered and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip. It’s also one of the historical parallels at the heart of “Between Antisemitism and Activism: The Jewish University Experience in Historical Perspective,” a new exhibit at the Center for Jewish History (CJH) in New York City.

Running through the end of the year, the exhibition highlights how Jewish students and faculty have navigated antisemitism for more than a century. It also accentuates the positive, showing how Jewish students and faculty have asserted their identity on campus, from the founding of Jewish studies programs and campus groups such as sororities and fraternities.

“There are people who will look at what’s happening today on campuses and say we’re back in the 1930s. We’re not, but there is a through line from that period throughout the whole postwar period until today. We find that the experience of early May 1933, when the book burnings by [German] university students took place, created the kind of prototype of Jewish suffering in the university context,” said CJH president Gavriel Rosenfeld.

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