Not in our name
Graphic by Sami Seyedhosseini, Cartoonist
“Antisemite,” “fake Jew” and “terrorist.”
These are some of the names my friends and I have been called for being Jewish people who support justice and ending racism in our community. Why? Because we oppose Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank and invasions and bombings of neighboring countries.
It’s incomprehensible that I could be called these things by people in my own community, especially when being Jewish has been an inseparable part of my identity since birth.
Since Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip in 2023 began, pro-Palestine protests have spurred an increase of student support for Chapman Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and the organizing of faculty to advocate for an end to the genocide.
It’s hard to explain how isolating it became to be an anti-Zionist Jew on campus after spring 2024. Ironically, the very office meant to make all Jews feel welcome on campus led the way in othering us. During Chapman SJP’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, the Office of Jewish Life sent emails describing “fears and anxieties,” as though the encampments were inherently threatening to Jews. In reality, Jewish students participated in the protests and even led Shabbat services at the encampment.
It wasn’t just the Office of Jewish Life. After Chapman SJP received a DEI award, former university President Daniele Struppa sent out a campus-wide email apologizing to Jewish students, as if the mere honoring of SJP as a recognized club organization was an offense to our people. The award was ultimately retracted.
As the university continued its silence on genocide, I helped create Chapman Judaism On Our Own Terms (JOOOT), a home for Jewish students like myself, so that other Jewish students would never feel as alone as I had. One of our first actions was to email Struppa about his statement. Seventeen students signed, asking for an apology for making us into a monolith. He refused. As a result, my ethnicity and religion were politicized and flattened into something determined by those in power, rather than myself.
With the continual erasure of Palestinian suffering by Jewish Life on Campus and Chapman University administration as a whole, I found I had no place in my school’s mainstream Jewish community. Our institution’s indifference to genocide, as a third-generation descendent of Holocaust survivors, made no sense to me and I couldn’t ignore it or stand by. The circumstances required our Jewish Life on Campus institutions to meet the moment and say never again — and they didn’t.
Chapman has ignored the plurality of Jewish students at every step in response to the lawsuits by Zionist alumni, and due to these suits has implemented the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates anti-Zionism with actual Jewish hatred. Under the current student conduct code, I can be called an antisemite for comparing Israel’s genocide of Palestinians to the Holocaust that my ancestors faced.
Freedom of speech has already been silenced on this campus in capitulation to the Trump administration by both Struppa and new President Matt Parlow. I have watched Chapman’s administration try to shut down and punish student protesters for showing up on campus for the issues they care about. I’ve watched my friends get doxxed and targeted by Zionists, creating a chilling environment to speak in dissent, even as a Jewish student.
It’s more important than ever to speak out, to amplify the voices of Palestinians on the ground, documenting their own genocide and say never again — and mean never again for anyone.