RUTHFULLY YOURS

The University of Missouri has been the location of several anti-Semitic acts that the president, Tim Wolfe, appeared reluctant to address. The final vile act, which included the formation of a swastika, was enough to encourage thirty-six Jewish and civil rights organizations to demand the president’s resignation. Concurrently, Black graduate student, Jonathan Butler, heroically began a hunger strike, and within days, both the president and Chancellor Loftin stepped down from their positions.

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, who usually gets it right, this time said that Jewish students will likely find themselves facing an even more hostile, threatening and unsafe environment because administrators are either too busy or too scared to address anti-Semitism, thereby leaving Jewish students more vulnerable and unprotected. So, should the inmates continue running the asylum? Acts of bigotry are occurring throughout America’s campuses and worldwide, whether or not the students are outspoken. Anything can trigger another “moderate” to becoming an active aggressor, whether the bully is motivated by others’ acts of intolerance and violence or by the relatively unobtrusive prey. Being busy or scared is hardly an excuse for the head of a university to shirk his responsibilities.

Rossman-Benjamin suggested that a president may fear appearing to favor Jewish students. Does she think it’s wrong to favor any victimized students or just the Jewish students? What if there were a second group of victims? Would the administration feel more comfortable and legitimized if a non-Jewish group were imperiled along with the Jewish? In fact, is it not moral to protect and care for the students who are attacked? An administrator must display the attributes of both ethics and courage to govern such an institution, and use the event as a teaching strategy and warning.

During the course of last fall’s semester, swastikas were found at the posh Fieldston School in Riverdale and a sixth grade student drew one in art class, seemingly unaware of its significance. Additionally, a notebook appeared with the cover exclamation “Hitler Rocks.” In response to the protests of Jewish parents, the school convened a special meeting for the sixth grade to discuss these events but apparently stressed the original use of the swastika as a symbol of peace, stating it could also be a symbol of hate but failing to even mention the word Holocaust. To make a second round of amends after this egregious “oversight,” the school made arrangements for the Simon Wiesenthal Center to send its regional director, along with a Holocaust survivor to tell her story to the entire middle school.

Michael Cohen, the Wiesenthal representative, goes into great detail in an article in The Jewish Week (Jan about what short and long term goals the combined organizations developed to enlighten both students and faculty about the Holocaust and tolerance education. At a school whose tuition is $45,000/yr, one would expect this to be part of the regular curriculum in any class of World History, particularly in a city with the largest share of survivors and their descendants, in a school heavily populated with Jewish students. Surely it doesn’t require a visit from the NAACP for Fieldston students to learn about slavery and the Civil war..

Throughout Mr. Cohen’s account, whenever he mentions the Holocaust, he adds tolerance education, as though the phenomenon of the extermination of Europe’s Jews were not a sufficiently large topic in itself. When Black Lives Matter holds a protest, they don’t include qualifiers extending to other groups suffering from intolerance of persecution. When LGBT holds rallies, they similarly don’t include anti-Semitism or racism. Only Jews are forever minimizing their own causes and still trying to prove to mainstream society that what happened to them is important because it can also affect other groups. Intolerance and bullying are school-yard words that have no place in the same sentence as Holocaust. Once you’ve paired intolerance with lactose, it’s forever inappropriate for the industry of mass starvation, torture, medical atrocities, freezing, rape, shooting people into the pit they’ve had to dig or making them watch their babies’ heads bashed against a wall or thrown into the air as target practice.