Sanders urged to hold hearing examining antisemitism on college campuses

The Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Antisemitism on Wednesday called for the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee to hold a hearing on the rise in antisemitism on college campuses.

In a letter to HELP Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the task force’s co-chairs, Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) and James Lankford (R-Okla.), expressed concern about the safety of Jewish students on campus.

“Schools have a legal responsibility to protect their students from discrimination, yet many university presidents and administrators have failed to forcefully condemn antisemitic speech and incidents on campuses in the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attack,” Rosen and Lankford wrote in the letter.

“We are profoundly concerned that far too many Jewish students do not feel safe on college and university campuses,” they added.

The letter comes amid a surge in antisemitic activity in the U.S. — including on college campuses — since Israel was attacked on Oct. 7 by Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that governs the Gaza Strip.

According to new data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), antisemitic incidents increased by 360 percent between Oct. 7 and Jan. 7, compared to the same period last year.

The 3,283 reported incidents during those three months also exceed the number of incidents usually reported in a full year. Of those incidents, more than 500 took place on college campuses, while more than 600 were targeted at Jewish institutions, such as synagogues.

FBI Director Christopher Wray also warned last month of the spike in hate crimes targeted at Jews, saying those investigations had jumped by 60 percent since Oct. 7.

The call for a hearing also comes after the House Education Committee held a high-profile hearing on antisemitism on college campuses, during which the panel heard testimony from three elite university presidents: Harvard University’s Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sally Kornbluth.

The university presidents all declined to say, without qualification, that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ policies against harassment. They faced immediate backlash to their testimony, and Magill resigned shortly thereafter. Gay recently resigned after also facing renewed allegations of plagiarism. Kornbluth remains in her post.

Sanders’s office did not respond immediately to a request for comment.