By Karen Parry
SAN MARCOS, California — We are so proud of the small yet resilient community of Jewish student leaders at CSU San Marcos who continue to plan programs and events to foster productive dialogue about the ongoing Israel-Hamas war despite the contentious campus environment.
On Tuesday night, March 25, a small event hosted by Students Supporting Israel (SSI) at CSU San Marcos featured two former IDF lone soldiers. Before the event, Hillel staff supported student organizers and worked with the University to confirm that safety measures were in place. We had received information prior to the event that several external non-student organizations as well as on-campus student organizations were leading a protest to seek canceling the event.
The program started successfully and without interruption. Police created a blockade to prevent protesters from physically disrupting. Throughout the event, participants could hear protesters screaming and attempting to get a police reaction outside. This was disruptive to the event, intimidating to participants, and undermined the program’s learning goals. Approximately 15 minutes before the scheduled conclusion, the CSU San Marcos administration abruptly called for the event to end and directed the 32 attendees to evacuate, citing an inability to maintain the security perimeter. Police escorted students through a back exit of the space to cars that drove people to safety.
While we appreciate the critical support provided by the San Diego Sheriff’s Department, CSUSM Police Department, and the administration in maintaining safety, we are deeply concerned and disappointed that Jewish students didn’t have freedom of expression for the entirety of their event.
Together with our partners at Leichtag Foundation and in coordination with our partners at the Jewish Federation, we immediately met with senior administrators to discuss proactive next steps. We are grateful for CSUSM’s commitment to this work.
We have faith that CSUSM is taking this situation seriously and are hopeful that they will address the situation through the following actions:
1. Making a public statement from CSUSM about this incident that reiterates their commitment to protecting the safety of Jewish students while upholding their right to gather peacefully in keeping with university policies and committing to take action to ensure this does not happen in the future.
2. Committing to an investigation with consequences for student organizations and students affiliated with this intimidation. This will send a clear message that hate and violence do not belong on the CSUSM campus.
3. Following through with their commitment to establish an antisemitism task force that reflects the expertise and appropriate representation of our Jewish community and participate in Hillel’s Campus Climate Initiative as planned.
Hillel San Diego remains dedicated to serving the Jewish community on our campuses. We are grateful to our partners within the University and the Jewish community for working with us toward a better future outcome. As always, please reach out to me if you have questions or need support.
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Karen Parry is the executive director of Hillel of San Diego.
Sadly, this message from Hillel leaves out a lot of context. First, though the message talks about Hillel wanting to “foster productive dialogue,” this event actually featured a picture of an IDF soldier pointing a machine gun, and the event was called Triggered (https://www.instagram.com/p/DHEZoonSTpk/). This upset many on campus, Jewish or not, and it did not seem designed to foster peace or dialogue.
It seems that Jewish faculty or administrators were not looped in on this either, to try to prevent problems in the first place or to advise the student organizers that a poster like that might land as hostile and even scary to other students. It’s antisemitism if they tried to stop us from celebrating Purim, which of course they didn’t – but not when people want to demonstrate at an event like this. So to say that we have an antisemitism problem on campus and “students don’t feel safe” is going overboard.
Please, let’s not put on events like this and say they’re for productive dialogue – and then be upset when folks disagree. We don’t want to cry antisemitism every time someone protests something that the government of Israel is doing.
It seems to me that not enough was done to stop the agitators from disrupting and endangering the Jewish students.. rather than ending the meeting early and sneaking the Jewish students to safety, why weren’t the perpetrators stopped and/or arrested ? Why did the victims have to suffer, once again at the hands of the perpetrators? Where is justice?