The First Film To Document Campus Antisemitism Both Before & After October 7

Maya Sobel describes how a friend received a death threat in May 2021 for posting about Israel on social media - and has never posted since. She says that pattern is common on campus: Pro-Israel students posted in 2021, then stopped because it`s exhausting and difficult, because people don`t listen, and because the way these conversations are approached makes people wonder what the point even is.

Maya says she still posts proudly about her own identity and views, but the opposition, as she puts it, doesn`t sleep - and after hearing what happened to her friend, she has had to ask herself whether she should be more careful.

She closes on a more hopeful note: She is inspired by her peers` willingness to stand up for what they believe in. Standing your ground and saying what you believe is true is an important life lesson - but, she adds, students also need to be willing to step back and ask what`s the other side of the story. Speaking out is a double-edged sword: it can be powerful, and it can be harmful. She doesn`t dislike anyone for speaking critically of anyone - the UVM administration, the Israeli government, or even her own community - because we`re all human, and we should all be able to take criticism and understand it. ...

Blind Spot Executive Producer Leonard Gold, himself a concerned alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania, recounts a moment that he is still having difficulty processing during a recent talk given by Dr. Mark Wolff, chairman of Penn`s Antisemitism Task Force.

Dr. Wolff had been appointed by Penn President Liz Magill several months prior to her resignation in the wake of being asked at the widely-viewed December 2023 congressional hearing whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Penn`s code of conduct.

Speaking at a Long Island synagogue to a predominantly Jewish, concerned audience, Dr. Wolff told the group, "I just want you to know that no Penn student is required to take the course of an antisemitic professor."

Lenny found it extraordinary that the chairman of Penn`s Antisemitism Task Force was openly acknowledging that Penn has antisemitic professors on its faculty, a fact that the ADL`s most recent report card and other evidence supported, yet the only comfort that he could offer was assuring us that no Jewish student would be required to take the course of any such bigoted professor.

Lenny asks the obvious question: even if no student is required to take any of these courses, plenty of students still elect to - and are being told in those classes that Jews are bad and that Israel is bad, and are being indoctrinated and brainwashed with no pushback and no opportunity for discussion or exposure to other points of view. That, he notes, only puts us back to where we were on October 6. ...

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) shares his origin story: Born and raised in the Bronx in poverty, the son of a single mother who supported three children on a $4.25 per hour minimum wage, growing up in public housing with mold, mildew, leaks, lead, and unreliable heat and hot water. He got his start in politics as a housing organizer, and at age 24 — with no money, no party machine, and no political experience — won his first race by campaigning door-to-door, face-to-face, becoming the first openly LGBTQ elected official from the Bronx.

Torres explains that he measures the value of a life by its impact on others, and wants to be remembered for living life on his own terms and according to his own values, and he says that fighting antisemitism is among those values. He describes today`s antisemitism as a modern manifestation of an ancient hatred — one with a long, ugly history of scapegoating Jews for whatever afflictions a society happens to face. What`s unprecedented, he argues, is not the antisemitism itself but its algorithmic amplification on social media.

He believes much of the antisemitism unfolding in American society originates on college campuses, and that social media then enables it to permeate outward into the broader society - a combination that has brought antisemitism into the mainstream to an extent we have not seen in recent memory. ...

Maya Sobel recalls that around her freshman year at the University of Vermont, a teaching assistant publicly tweeted that they would dock students` grades if their families were from Tel Aviv or if students went on Birthright.

She questions why her grades should be impacted by where her parents are from, or why she should have to renounce her family`s home country to be treated fairly in class. She points out that students from no other country are forced to pass that kind of litmus test, and asks if a teacher would dock points against students from Moscow, or who visit Russia, because of what Putin is doing. ...

Dion Pierre, campus correspondent for the Algemeiner, reflects on his years of daily reporting on campus antisemitism and argues that "higher education ultimately failed to uphold values that 10, 12 years ago, it was destroying lives to defend."

Since 2021, Dion has been documenting Jewish students being gang-assaulted, spit on, called the K-word, expelled from sexual assault survivor groups, and suffering all manner of other indignities and injustices. He points out that if this were happening to Black students, Al Sharpton would be cashing checks every day, because so many people would be calling on him for advocacy.

The politics, he says, ultimately don`t matter - what matters is that universities align themselves with traditional American values of equality and tolerance, and they are not doing so for Jewish students, and that has to be corrected.

He rejects the idea that there is an exception to the law for someone who is progressive, wears ripped jeans, and thinks they are against the system. Racism is not something you get to condemn selectively while telling everyone what a virtuous, open-minded, cosmopolitan person you are.

Dion also observes that the ideology motivating these decisions lazily and destructively projects the history of American race relations onto the very different history of Jews and Arabs, and Israelis and Palestinians - and in doing so, totally erases the experience of Middle Eastern Jews who faced expulsion and persecution and who do not fit America`s conception of "white." ...

Brandy expresses concern about schools that not only allow bullying of Jewish students but also have professors who espouse antisemitism, and administrators who are complicit by knowingly allowing it to happen. She notes that such conduct would result in the firing of professors if it were directed at any group other than Jews or Israel. ...

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) explains why advocating for the Jewish community is not, for him, a question of "why" — it is a question of "why not." He points out that one need not be Jewish to fight antisemitism, just as one need not be Black to fight anti-Black racism, and recalls that Jewish civil rights workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were among those murdered in Mississippi so that people who looked like him could vote and live freely without the undignity of Jim Crow.

He has the sense that we are all in this together, and we have a moral obligation to fight extremism, regardless of which form it takes. He cites Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.`s observation that the greatest tragedy is not the strident clamor of the bad people but the appalling silence of the good people. In a time of rising antisemitism, Torres says, every person faces the same simple moral choice: be appallingly silent, or speak out. Either we can be part of the problem or part of the solution. His values, he says, require him to be part of the solution. ...