A person’s identity is one of the most valuable things they possess. One’s identity is not just fundamentally who they are; it connects them to their people and their history.
The Algemeiner reports that an assault against one’s identity — by undermining it, minimizing it, attempting to redefine it, or retaliating against an attempt to assert it — is an attack of the deepest personal nature.
Unfortunately, the Jewish identity is increasingly under attack, particularly for Jewish students on campus. While identity-based attacks are unacceptable in any context, when they are directed at Jewish students by professors in the classroom — who use their positions to indoctrinate, denigrate, manipulate, and penalize Jewish students because of their identity — administrators must step in and correct this abuse of authority. If they fail in this responsibility, we must call upon the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to do the job for them.
This is precisely why StandWithUs has filed a Title VI complaint with OCR seeking to remedy an egregious assault on the Jewish and Israeli identities of students currently enrolled in the Professional Psychology Program at George Washington University. On the very first day of the fall 2022 semester, in the program’s mandatory diversity course, students were asked to share about themselves, including specifically about their identities. When one student proudly identified their home country as Israel, the professor’s immediate response was to offer a “consolation” because it was not the student’s “fault” that they were born in Israel.
This statement was a foreshadowing of the antisemitism that was to come from this professor towards the individual Jewish students in her class, painting Jews as racists and white supremacists, and towards Israel as the Jewish collective. Importantly, such rhetoric should not be confused — or excused — as a mere political position, which professors generally have a right to espouse in the classroom. Rather, it is flagrant disdain for someone’s national origin — an indisputable and undeniable aspect of their identity. In short, it is blatant discrimination.
Source - The Algemeiner/Twitter - Image - Wiki Commons