DANIEL ROSEN: Campus Protests Are Dying Down. But Antisemitism Still Lurks in Classrooms.

Campus Protests Are Dying Down. But Antisemitism Still Lurks in Classrooms.

By Daniel Rosen, President of the American Jewish Congress.

The rise of antisemitism on U.S. college campuses that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel has cooled down, at least on the surface. We aren't seeing as many distressing videos as we did last year of protesters blocking Jewish students from parts of the UCLA campus, damaging a campus building at Columbia, or setting up an encampment in Harvard Yard chanting "globalize the intifada," a reference to violent Palestinian uprisings against the Jewish state.

But don't be fooled. There is a fertile source of antisemitism on American campuses that lies under the hood. Windows aren't being broken. Nazi swastikas aren't being displayed on the walls of college dorms. Jewish ritual objects such as mezuzahs aren't being torn off of doorways. Instead, some professors have turned their classrooms into hidden breeding grounds for anti-Israeli and antisemitic views.

As a 311-page report released last week by the Harvard University Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias revealed, there is some deep-seated bias against Jews and Israelis in the lectures, books and other academic content of too many instructors. Harvard President Alan Garber, who is himself Jewish, said the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza brought tensions to the surface that had long festered under the radar, and promised to address them.

Unfortunately, this kind of propaganda masquerading as education is common at elite institutions. UC Berkley's comparative literature department, for example, advertised a spring 2025 course that described the U.S.-designated terrorist organization Hamas as "a revolutionary resistance force combating settler-colonialism."

Faculty and students deserve to know what is being taught at their institutions and the values their universities uphold. Ensuring transparency in course content is crucial not only to reduce the spread of antisemitism and other prejudices, but also to protect students, parents and faculty members who do not want to find themselves part of academic environments that promote indoctrination and hatred.

That is why the American Jewish Congress, the organization I lead, is calling on lawmakers to put forward a Syllabus Transparency Act that would require universities that accept federal or state funding to post their complete humanities syllabi online: course objectives, required readings, assignments and so forth.

It was Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish U.S. Supreme Court justice (and one of the founders of the American Jewish Congress), who called sunlight "the best of disinfectants." Syllabi must be brought into the light to see what students are being taught.