How College Safe Spaces Became Dangerous for Jews

I write a lot about how college campuses have become bastions of progressive ideology, with ivory towers turning into Marxist dreamlands where “safe spaces” and “microaggressions” are used to thwart conservatism and freedom at every turn.

This is all very true, but there’s another looming threat on college campuses that isn’t being discussed – one that is more ancient and more dangerous.

It’s the rise of anti-Semitism.

As a conservative, freedom-loving American, this is disheartening. As a Jew, this is extremely troubling and personal.

Writing about the rise of anti-Semitism on American college campuses in the Washington Post, Anthony Berteaux details how safe spaces are extremely dangerous for Jewish people.

When Arielle Mokhtarzadeh arrived at University of California, Berkeley, to attend the annual Students of Color Conference, she had no way of knowing that she would be leaving as a victim of anti-Semitism. …

For Mokhtarzadeh, an Iranian Jew at UCLA, her freshman year was punctuated by incidents of anti-Semitism that were both personal and met with national controversy. She was shocked during her first quarter in school, when students entered the Bruin Cafe to see the phrase “Hitler did nothing wrong” etched into a table. Months later, Mokhtarzadeh’s friend Rachel Beyda was temporarily denied a student government leadership position based solely on her Jewish identity, an event that made news nationwide.

The campus was supposed to be her new home, her new safe space — so why didn’t she feel that way? She went to the conference hoping for some answers.

But on the first day there, she was horrified when the discussion became an attack on Israel — and soon devolved into attacks on the Jews.

“Over the course of what was probably no longer than an hour, my history was denied, the murder of my people was justified, and a movement whose sole purpose is the destruction of the Jewish homeland was glorified. Statements were made justifying the ruthless murder of innocent Israeli civilians, blatantly denying Jewish indigeneity in the land, and denying the Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered,” she said. “Why anyone in their right mind would accept these slanders as truths baffles me. But they did. These statements, and others, were met with endless snaps and cheers. I was taken aback.”

Mokhtarzadeh walked out on the verge of tears. “It was in that moment, during that conference, that I realized that every identity and every intersection of identity was to be welcomed and championed in progressive spaces — except mine.”

She’s not alone though – because safe spaces aren’t safe for anyone except whiny children and whiny professors who don’t want to confront any ideas different from their own. They’d rather deal in straw man arguments and logical fallacies that compete in a truly free marketplace of ideas.

The FBI knows the danger here for American Jews:

The ramifications of ignoring the normalization of anti-Semitism cannot be understated: The most recent FBI hate crime report found that 58.2 percent of hate crimes motivated by religious bias were targeted at Jews. Jews make up 2.2 percent of the American population, so the FBI’s statistics make it clear that Jews are the most disproportionately attacked religious group in America. It should be troubling to everyone that an SJP member at Temple University physically assaulted a pro-Israel Jewish student two years ago, calling him a “Zionist baby killer.” But it should be far more troubling that the SJP chapter at Temple (like all SJP chapters) promotes itself as a progressive organization, claiming solidarity with movements such as Black Lives Matter.

It’s time to wake up to what is really happening in our progressive circles. Acceptance and peace isn’t the name of the game – instead, these militant organizations are seeking to demonize those minorities who have faced the most deadly persecution in the last century.

Turns out, progressives don’t want to stick up for the actual persecuted after all.

Those of us who have been paying attention aren’t surprised.