Institutional change has to be widespread.
“Last year, we had a bunch of hate crimes on campus that targeted international students, Black students, and Jewish students. There were some swastikas and Jewish professors received nasty emails. What resulted from that was a list of needs that we issued from the Jewish community to the administration. One of those needs was to develop a university-wide anti-Semitism training. So incoming students, including faculty, will have to go through this training called Stop Bias. We just got the first pilot training off the ground — which is really cool. We’re doing it all through Hillel, and I’m a part of the team that helped develop it, and I’m also part of the team that’s helping to deploy it. There’s two parts to the program: The first part is learning about what antisemitism is and how it relates to who we are on campus, because antisemitism manifests differently wherever you are. Then the second part is what you can do to stop it and how you can be an ally to your Jewish friends. Institutional change has to be widespread, it can’t just come from two or three people. The feedback from the program has been great so far, and it seems like people on our campus are really learning about antisemitism.” — Rebecca Sereboff, Syracuse University