Bergen County Jewish Link
In the fall of 2021, Ruthie Vogel, a student at the University of Maryland, asked her business ethics professor how to prepare for missing class due to chagim during her first semester of college. “He told me I’d be able to make everything up,” she said. However, when she returned to classes after the chagim and met with her teacher again, he told her that the work “could only have been done during class.” Vogel said that his response disappointed her because “it was a class that was built on discussing values, so I thought he would care more—but he didn’t.” [Ruthie - there is zero relationship between being a business ethics professor and being an ethical person. כידוע ומפורסם].
For Orthodox Jewish students attending a secular college, the reality of their college experience includes professors unwilling to accommodate their religious needs, or fellow students unknowingly regurgitating popular antisemitic ideas. Sarah Forst, an incoming senior at Binghamton University, recounted similar experiences as Vogel, relating a time when a professor learned he must allow her to miss his class because of the Jewish holidays but told her to her face that he didn’t want to, while another professor “called me a liar because I said that I couldn’t take a test on a Jewish holiday until a certain time.” Another time, a fellow residential adviser told Forst that “his accountant was cheap because he [the accountant] was Jewish.”
Forst continued that, while she learned facts about Israel and was shown maps in her Israel advocacy class at the Frisch School in Paramus, she wished part of her class could have also addressed the types of explicit antisemitism she would go on to experience on campus, explaining how stumped she was when she confronted people openly buying into classic antisemetic tropes and stereotypes. “There’s such a misconception that Jews are cheap and that we love money, [that] we have big noses,” she explained. “That needs to be focused on. I can tell you that we had this area of land and that area of land, but with the things I’ve been hearing, it’s more than that. There are antisemitic things said beside just arguments about the land.”
Ezra Perlmutter, who attended North Shore Hebrew Academy High School in Great Neck, is now an incoming senior at Rutgers University and has had several confrontations with antisemites on his campus, which are usually not addressed by the university. He detailed the constant incidents of antisemitism that have targeted his Jewish fraternity, AEPi, including being egged during Yom HaShoah events for two years in a row, as well as being screamed at with antisemitic slurs by Rutger’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and said that some “smaller incidents” included stories of students in his fraternity “getting screamed at” and being labeled with slurs while wearing a kippah on Shabbat and walking to the Hillel or Chabad.
“Smaller incidents” of being verbally attacked and singled out by fellow students, which Perlmutter said occur on a weekly basis, are worsened by the fact that he and his peers often feel abandoned by their university administration and Hillel, with Perlmutter saying that Rutgers struggles to address incidents of antisemitism. He explained that, when his fraternity was egged last year, the university released a statement labeling the incident as antisemitic, but later apologized and retracted it after being attacked and pressured “because they didn’t say something for the kids of Palestine.”
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We want to assimilate. We want to attend non-Jewish universities and immerse ourselves in their culture. Then they essentially tell us "WE DON'T WANT YOU!!! GO AWAY DIRTY JEWS!!!!"
Maybe, just maybe, they are Hashem's messengers to remind us "הן עם לבדד ישכון ובגוים לא יתחשב". I like to think we should have already learned this lesson 80 plus years ago but I guess we didn't.
The Gemara says about the importance of Yiras Shomayim:
מַאי {קהלת י״ב:י״ג} ״כִּי זֶה כָּל הָאָדָם״? אֲמַר רִבִּי אֶלְעָזָר: אָמַר הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא: כָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻּלּוֹ לֹא נִבְרָא אֵלָּא בִּשְׁבִיל זֶה.
With regard to the end of this verse, the Gemara asks: What is meant by, “for this is all of man”? Rabbi Elazar said: The Holy One, Blessed be He, said about him: The entire world was created only for this person [who has Yiras Shomayim]. This is the ultimate person for which all of man was created.
If there is one thing that one doesn't get on a secular college campus it is Yiras Shomayim. The hidden bracha is that at least they remind us that we are Jewish and thus don't belong.
