Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law chairman and founder Kenneth Marcus testifying before the Knesset about campus antisemitism in the US on July 25, 2023. Photo: Brandeis Center.

American nonprofit leaders on Tuesday testified before an Israeli parliamentary committee to discuss rising antisemitism on American college campuses.

Convened by the Knesset Committee on Immigration, Absorption, and Diaspora Affairs, the hearing marked the first time in over five years that an Israeli parliamentary meeting was specifically dedicated to the problem of anti-Zionism on US college campuses.

“Many are able to recognize Jew-hatred when it comes from white supremacists, such as swastikas spray-painted on a wall or overt denial of the Holocaust,” said Alyza D. Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law —a nonprofit that has successfully pushed the US federal government to protect Jewish college students from anti-Zionist discrimination said during her testimony before Israeli politicians.

The hearing comes amid hundreds of antisemitic incidents at higher education institutions across the country, ranging from ‘classic‘ expressions of antisemitism to the denial of the Jewish connection to the land of Israel and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination.

“Today Jewish Zionist students are increasingly being vilified, harassed, and shunned,” Lewin continued. “University administrators are failing to protect these students because they mistakenly think that what they are witnessing on campus is a political debate. But make no mistake — ostracizing, marginalizing, or excluding Jews on the basis of the Zionist component of their Jewish identity is not ‘speech.’ It is discriminatory and unlawful conduct and must be recognized and condemned as such.”

Lewin, in an interview with The Algemeiner Thursday, said it was crucial for Israeli lawmakers to learn of the severity of the left-wing antisemitism on college campuses, an issue which she said they were not previously aware, believing that in the US antisemitism is a mostly far-right wing phenomenon.

Others who testified before the Knesset include State University of New York-New Paltz alumna Ofek Preis, who was one of two students expelled from a sexual assault awareness group on campus for openly expressing the Zionist components of their Jewish identities, an incident that prompted a federal investigation by the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

“I think that the Knesset members were visibly moved by the testimony of Ofek Preis, who spoke about her background as a sexual assault survivor who was pushed out of a student group at SUNY New Paltz based on her Jewish identity as a Zionist,” Brandeis Center chairman and founder Kenneth Marcus told The Algemeiner during an interview. “It was virtually impossible not to notice Chairman Forer virtually choking up as he listened to it. I don’t think that Knesset members understood the extent to which anti-Zionism has become much more focused, directed, and, what you might say — in your face.”

He added, “They understood that there are campus radicals who have been poisoning the atmosphere on many college campuses with toxic falsehoods about Israel, but they were not, so far as I can tell, aware of the extent to which individual Jewish students are now being punished, marginalized, shunned and excluded. This was the news that they needed to hear.”

Tuesday’s hearing was called by Knesset Committee on Immigration, Absorption, and Diaspora Affairs chair Oded Forer, a member of the Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party.

Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations CEO William Daroff also testified, according to a report in EJewishPhilanthropy. Daroff stressed the importance of the US-Israel relationship and warning that “our community’s commitment to Zionism is an integral part our Jewish identity and has become a facet of hate directed against us.”

Daroff also praised the recently issued US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, which he quoted at length and described as “powerful words that are backed up by the strength of the United States government.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 219 antisemitic incidents occurred on US college campuses in 2022, a 41 percent increase from 2021. The total included 127 incidents of harassment, 90 vandalisms, and two assaults. 19 percent of incidents referenced Israel and Zionism and 25 targeted Hillel centers while a third involved swastika imagery.

In April, the Biden administration ruled for the first time that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act applied to anti-Zionist discrimination when the Office of Civil Rights concluded, following an investigation that lasted nearly two years, that University of Vermont failed to respond to numerous student complaints that Jewish students had been harassed by a teaching assistant and forced out of student clubs. The investigation was initiated by the Brandeis Center in Oct. 2021 with help from Jewish on Campus, a nonprofit founded by University of Chicago alumna Julia Jassey.

OCR is still investigating SUNY New Paltz for potential civil rights violations, as well as the City University of New York, where a deluge of incidents that have targeted students, faculty, and staff.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.