RUTHFULLY YOURS

Benjamin Gladstone is a junior at Brown University.

Providence, R.I. — Last semester, a group came to Providence to speak against admitting Syrian refugees to this country. As the president of the Brown Coalition for Syria, I jumped into action with my peers to stage a counterdemonstration. But I quickly found myself cut out of the planning for this event: Other student groups were not willing to work with me because of my leadership roles in campus Jewish organizations.

That was neither the first nor the last time that I would be ostracized this way. Also last semester, anti-Zionists at Brown circulated a petition against a lecture by the transgender rights advocate Janet Mock because one of the sponsors was the Jewish campus group Hillel, even though the event was entirely unrelated to Israel or Zionism. Ms. Mock, who planned to talk about racism and transphobia, ultimately canceled. Anti-Zionist students would rather have no one speak on these issues than allow a Jewish group to participate in that conversation.

Of course, I still believe in the importance of accepting refugees, combating discrimination, abolishing racist law enforcement practices and other causes. Nevertheless, it’s painful that Jewish issues are shut out of these movements. Jewish rights belong in any broad movement to fight oppression.

My fellow activists tend to dismiss the anti-Semitism that students like me experience regularly on campus. They don’t acknowledge the swastikas that I see carved into bathroom stalls, scrawled across walls or left on chalkboards. They don’t hear students accusing me of killing Jesus. They don’t notice professors glorifying anti-Semitic figures such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt or the leadership of Hezbollah, as mine have.

Like some other colleges these days, the University of Michigan is bowing to progressive convention and letting students who don’t want to be referred as either “he” or “she” pick their own gender pronouns. Whatever they choose determines the way professors and other staff at the school will address them.http://heatst.com/culture-wars/heres-what-happens-when-a-college-lets-students-pick-their-preferred-gender-pronouns/

While the whole exercise it meant to allow students to re-identify as any one of dozens of obscure genders (like agender, sisgender, etc), some students are having a bit of fun with the challenge. One student, Grant Strobl, seemed to have sparked a mini movement by officially changing his preferred pronoun to “His Majesty.” His are some of the other ways students now want to be addressed.

AND: University of Michigan Professors Will Face Disciplinary Action for Ignoring ‘Preferred Pronouns’By Jillian Kay Melchior http://heatst.com/culture-wars/university-of-michigan-professors-will-face-disciplinary-action-for-ignoring-preferred-pronouns/

The University of Michigan yesterday unveiled a new webpage that allows students to choose their preferred pronouns, including “they” and “ze.”

Preferred pronouns will appear on class rosters, and if professors accidentally use the wrong pronoun, “you can acknowledge that you made a mistake and use the correct pronoun next time,” said the university’s provost and vice president for student life in a campus-wide email announcement. It also called using preferred pronouns “one of the most basic ways to show your respect for their identity and to cultivate an environment that respects all gender identities.”

A university spokesman tells Heat Street, “If there were a persistent pattern of ignoring a student’s preference, we would address that as a performance matter.”

The new Wolverine Access page allows students to add, change, or delete preferred pronouns, which will be shared only with “those who have a legitimate education interest in the information,” the new webpage says. Students who don’t specify a preferred pronoun won’t have one listed, the university said.

The college’s IT team made the change, so it had no specific cost, a university spokesman said.

The decision comes after a University of Michigan junior founded the Wolverines for Preferred Pronouns Initiative, also starting a Change.org petition that has gained more than 750 signatures this year.