UCLA’s antisemitism continues with hostage debacle

Who would oppose a former Israeli hostage speaking to college students about his experience? Hamas?

No — it was UCLA’s Undergraduate Students Association Council, the elected student government.

On April 14, the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, together with Hillel — a Jewish students’ association — hosted an event featuring Omer Shem Tov, a 23-year-old who was abducted by terrorists from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, and held captive by Hamas for 505 days. 

One week later, the Undergraduate Students Association Council released a statement condemning the event on the grounds that it “advance[d] incomplete and harmful representations of ongoing violence.”

The student council did not condemn a government action. Or a political rally. Or a military campaign. It condemned an event featuring a young person, just like them, who had survived 505 days in the clutches of internationally recognized terrorists, only because the event did not also focus on Palestinian suffering.

The recognition of Israeli and Jewish suffering, on the one hand, does not mean ignoring Palestinian suffering, on the other. That zero-sum thinking is one of the great failures of campus discourse today.

I served as president of UCLA’s Undergraduate Students Association Council from 2017-2018. I know that office. I know that gavel. I know what it means to represent a student body as diverse, passionate, and complicated as UCLA’s.

And as an Iranian American Jew, I know, painfully, how often Jewish students on that campus have been asked to justify their identities, swallow their grief, or prove that their belonging does not come at someone else’s expense.

During my four years at UCLA, I witnessed antisemitism in both overt and subtle forms.

As a freshman, I sat down at a communal table near the dorms and saw the words “Hitler did nothing wrong” etched into the surface. That same year, I watched a Jewish student questioned for, and initially denied, a leadership role under the tired and dangerous accusation of “divided loyalty.”

In the years that followed, swastikas appeared across UCLA and other UC campuses. I was told my solidarity was “not welcome” when I showed up for other marginalized communities. And in my senior year, I returned from winter break to find the mezuzah I had affixed to my student government office violently stripped from its post.

For years, I have urged UCLA to pay closer attention to the antisemitic undercurrent running through parts of campus life. I thought it was bad then. I did not realize how much worse it could become.

UCLA had an antisemitism problem when I enrolled, and it had only become worse by the time I graduated. 

To condemn an event featuring a young man who was kidnapped from a music festival and held underground for 505 days is not activism. It is a moral failure.

And yet, this is the climate Jewish students are asked to endure.

The message being sent is chilling: Jewish pain is political. Jewish grief is suspect. Jewish survival is provocative.

And Jewish students may participate in public life only if they accept that their trauma will be debated, minimized, or condemned.

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To the students who voted in favor of this statement: If your compassion cannot stretch far enough to include a Jewish survivor of terrorist captivity, then you are not advancing justice.

Rather, you are exposing the limits of your own moral imagination. You are unworthy of the seats you occupy and the titles you hold.

To the UCLA community — administrators, faculty, alumni, donors, student leaders, and parents — the time to act is now. That means clearly condemning antisemitism when it appears, even when it is cloaked in the language of justice.

It means protecting the right of Jewish students and institutions to gather, mourn, speak, and tell our stories. It means refusing to let the student government continue to serve as a megaphone for those who hold antisemitic beliefs and use their posts to spew hate. 

UCLA shaped me. It gave me a home, a platform, and a profound belief in student leadership. But leadership without moral courage is not leadership. And a campus that cannot make room for the testimony of a freed hostage is a campus in moral crisis.

Arielle Mokhtarzadeh Ravanshenas, a UCLA alumna, was president of UCLA’s Undergraduate Students Association Council from 2017-2018.