Universities’ and academics’ tendency to perceive and project themselves as champions of liberalism and equality makes them very resistant to acknowledging the many forms of prejudice and discrimination that exist on campuses.

Consequently, defensiveness and denial in the face of reports of discrimination are common. Such reports are what psychologists characterise as “ego-dystonic” – they challenge the self-conception academics and universities have of themselves.

But universities do not transcend social and political realities or socially common prejudices; they . We might aspire to equality and justice as individuals and as university communities but we are far from achieving them for many different groups. And that people.

Discrimination in the UK takes many forms. Frequently it rises to the level of hate crimes. And when targeting religious minorities, those crimes : 106 religious hate crimes are directed against Jews per 10,000 members of the population in England and Wales, and 12 against Muslims.

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These appallingly high numbers are exacerbated by the fact that Jews – like Muslims and other groups – are also targeted on account of their perceived ethnicity and race. In many cities in the US  – including New York – Jews are the most of any for .

Just as we must root out sexism, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination, anti-LGBT discrimination, xenophobia and racism, we must acknowledge and address anti-Jewish bigotry. The experiences of prejudice, harassment, vilification and exclusion that Jewish students, staff and faculty experience and report are real and should be trusted.

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Yet Jewish people frequently experience gaslighting in both UK, US and Canadian higher education when they report such experiences. Their integrity is called into question – even though dangerous and damaging insinuations of Jews falsely claiming abuse are a common anti-Jewish conspiracy theory.

When I was studying in the UK as a postgraduate, I experienced anti-Jewish prejudice at both the London School of Economics and the of – including, ironically, in contexts where I studied and researched human rights. I also experience it today, as a faculty member of the University of California, Berkeley, where I teach human rights and global studies, just as I did when a visiting professor at George Washington University and as a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University.

Nor am I by any means unique among Jewish students and faculty – either in my experiences or in the downplaying, denial, condescension and evasion of responsibility with which my reports of those experiences have frequently been met. Jews are told we do not understand the nature of discrimination, our own Jewish identities or our rights to teach, study, and research free of prejudice, harassment, and discrimination, with access to justice and freedom to maintain and express our identities.

The human right to self-determination is universal. The right to equality before international human rights law is legally binding in the UN Charter and both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It applies to Jews as it does to other peoples, including Palestinians. Yet, too often, Jews are denied that equality.

An example is the widespread insistence in many university departments and programmes – particularly in the humanities and the social sciences – that Jews do not have equal rights to and should be denied them. This denial frequently takes the form of inflammatory public statements and written and verbal incitement against Jews and Israeli nationals, which foster an atmosphere of exclusion, fear, and intimidation and which frequently encourage and enable pernicious prejudices, pejorative stereotyping and harassment of Jewish students and faculty for their religious, ethnic, cultural and national identities and beliefs.  

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Another example is the more subtle exclusion and denigration of Israeli and Jewish students and faculty, in the classroom, in advising settings, and other faculty/student interactive contexts, for not sharing the same pervasive and dominant ideological convictions as other students and colleagues.

At issue is not the freedom to criticise the policies of any government, Israeli or otherwise. The issue is the invidious denial of the right to self-determination when it comes to Jews and Israelis: the questioning of the right of Israel to exist as an independent country, more than 75 years after it was established, precisely as an expression of the universal right to self-determination applied to Jews.

Additionally, at universities in the UK and North America, there is ignorance – and often downplaying or denial – of the ethnic and racial diversity of Jewish people. They are typically depicted reductively as European by faculty, administrators and programmes that ostensibly aim to foster knowledge about and respect for diversity and inclusion. In reality, millions of Jews hail from and identify with the cultures of North Africa, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Central Asia, Southwest Asia and Hispanic and Lusophone Latin America. North American and British Jews are increasingly diverse, too, with converts who identify as Black/African American, Asian, and Hispanic. One example is the Korean American rabbi of the Central Synagogue in New York City, . And more than half of Israel’s population has cultural and ethnic origins in Arab lands as diverse as Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Morocco – because their ancestors were expelled and fled those lands as refugees escaping persecution and violent attacks.

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All Jews will continue to face heightened marginalisation, at both universities and in society at large, until the diversity of Jewish identities is recognised and respected – including the facts that all Jews experience prejudice and discrimination on account of their religion and ethnicity and that many Jews experience additional erasure and exclusion in intersectional ways, reflecting their Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Hispanic identities.

Because there are many types of discrimination and racism, universities need to ensure that their frameworks for anti-discrimination and anti-racism are inclusive of Jews and respond effectively to the ways Jews experience racism and discrimination. In some cases, there will be overlap between how Jews and other minorities experience discrimination but in other cases there will not. Nor is that distinctiveness of experience unique to Jews: devaluation, marginalisation and exclusion are common forms of discrimination across ethnic groups but the precise forms they take, their intensity and the context differ from group to group. 

To improve their understanding of Jewish experience and to draw up more effective anti-discrimination policies, universities should survey their Jewish members on their lived experiences of racism and discrimination – taking care to engage a representative sample of Jewish people, to avoid tokenism and to listen with openness and receptivity.

Prompt reparative action is vital to ensure universities are inclusive of and respectful to Jews in all their diversity, alongside all minorities.

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is lecturer in development practice and international and area studies at the University of California, Berkeley.