A legal defender for human rights says it s a shame that Jewish students are feeling pressured to shed their identity when most other groups are encouraged to celebrate theirs.
Jewish students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have endured “an unrelenting campaign of anti-Semitic harassment,” according to a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.
Those students and others supportive of Israel “have been subjected to an alarming increase in anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism over the past five years,” according to a statement issued Friday by the Louis B. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which helped prepare the complaint.
Over that period, multiple swastikas have allegedly been scrawled across the campus; menorahs and mezuzahs have allegedly been vandalized; and windows of Jewish fraternities have allegedly been “smashed with bricks,” according to the statement. What’s more, pro-Palestine students have also allegedly glorified members of terrorist organizations, assailed Jewish students and their allies with epithets like “Nazi” and “white supremacist” and turned univer