Antisemitism tracker launches initiative to combat antisemitism on college campuses

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(The Center Square) – Jewish advocacy group and antisemitism tracker the Anti-Defamation League launched a new initiative Wednesday aimed at helping university students, faculty and staff combat antisemitism on their campuses.

The initiative includes two reports tracking “less visible” forms of antisemitism at universities, a confidential reporting mechanism for those encountering antisemitism on their campuses and guidance for how to respond.

While antisemitic incidents on college campuses may have peaked in 2024 among an abundance of anti-Israeli protests, the latest reports from the league track where they may be occurring among faculty and course curricula. 

“Antisemitism doesn’t only show up in a student protest chant or an encampment,” said the league’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt. “It can show up in a syllabus, a lecture, a seemingly innocuous remark.”

The report identified multiple “recurring patterns” at universities across the country, including what it characterized as faculty presenting political claims about Israel and Zionism as fact, amplifying the viewpoints of designated terrorist organizations, singling out Jewish and Israeli students in classroom settings, and calling on their schools to withdraw university investments connected to Israel.

As examples of the first pattern, the report cited instances at Columbia, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford and Yale universities, as well as the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana and the University of Missouri.

Course descriptions at Princeton and Stanford characterized the Israel-Hamas war as a Palestinian genocide. The Princeton course included a reading whose summary described “Israel’s genocidal project” as “hypervisible” in the war in Gaza but “unfolding” since 1948. A Yale seminar “alluded to Israel as a ‘settler-colonial structure of occupation and violence,’” according to the report.

In 2025, the University of California, Berkeley offered an English comparative literature course that initially referred to the Israeli military in the Palestinian Territory as the “Israeli Occupying Force” and Hamas militants as “revolutionary resistance forces” standing up against colonialism and imperialism.

The school later revised the course description to no longer include the names of Israel or Hamas specifically, though it did still include reflection on “Indigenous Palestinian resistance against settler-colonialism.”

The report cited assigned readings at UC-Berkeley and Columbia written by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., European Union, Canada and Israel, as amplifying “pro-terrorism narratives.”

It called out instances of “singling out Jewish and Israeli students” that were reported by students and included in a report by Columbia University's Task Force on Antisemitism where Israeli students were the subject of derogatory comments by other students and professors. 

The second league report documents some of its findings examining faculty groups it claims have “deepened their collaboration with anti-Israel student groups since the wave of 2024 campus encampments,” including the American Association of University Professors, the Coalition for Action in Higher Education and the Sanctuary Campus Network.

“The hostile environment on campus toward Zionist and Jewish students is not an accident, but the result of organized, well-resourced networks working to reshape academic institutions from within,” said Oren Segal, the league’s senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence.

In addition to a variety of best-practice guides and model policies for schools seeking to combat antisemitism, the final piece of the initiative is the Campus Classroom Reporting mechanism.

Accessible on its website, the league describes the mechanism as “a confidential reporting and support channel for students, faculty and staff facing antisemitism in classrooms and curricula.”