U.C. Berkeley has become a place that tolerates intolerance, according to a disgruntled Jewish former candidate for student body president.
In his failed campaign run in the spring, San Francisco native Daniel Frankenstein says he and his staff were showered with anti-Zionist and even anti-Semitic abuse.
“People spit on me and said ‘Zionist’ and kept on walking. I was spit on a couple of times. I was called a conservative Zionist bastard, a f—ing Jew,” said the former student senator. An e-mail describing his experiences is now making its rounds on the Internet.
“There was another girl helping me out who happened to be Catholic, and a guy said, ‘Hey, are you a Jew girl? Frankenstein’s Jewish, and that must mean every single person helping him is a Jew.’ Or people would walk by and say they’d never vote for a Zionist.”
Frankenstein doesn’t chalk up his electoral defeat to anti-Semitism — his Student Action Party, after holding power for many years, was swept in every electoral race. He does consider his ardent Zionism and overt Judaism a political albatross, however.
According to local and national Jewish leaders, U.C. Berkeley is the site of the nation’s most intense pro-Palestinian campus activism. For Jewish students, the situation has gotten out of hand, in Frankenstein’s opinion.
Many Jews, he says, are afraid to flaunt their religion on campus. No Zionist, he claims, will ever be accepted within campus progressive circles. And statements that would cause shock if directed against blacks or Latinos are acceptable when describing Zionist Jews, he asserts.
Karen Kenney, U.C. Berkeley’s dean of student life, said the university strives to maintain a tolerant atmosphere, and she believes it is doing so.
“On campus, we support free speech, and there have been times over the past couple of years people on Sproul Plaza have espoused both pro-Israel and anti-Israel sentiments, and people have also espoused both pro-Palestinian and anti-Palestinian sentiments,” she said.
Regarding the charge that liberal organizations on campus use anti-Zionism as a litmus test, she replied, “I would not say ‘any’ liberal organization. For example, to be involved with environmental issues or abortion rights issues, I would certainly say that is not the case.”
Upon receiving a copy of Frankenstein’s e-mail, Kenney invited him to join the recently formed Hate Acts Committee, which she hopes to expand into a full-fledged task force in the fall.
Frankenstein said this was “a nice gesture on the part of the university, but, frankly, I don’t see a task force of seven students bi-monthly to talk about hate…as in any way solving any issues on campus.”
Problems run deep, according to Frankenstein, and he’s not sure what can be done about it. He accused leaders of progressive campus organizations of tolerating anti-Semitism from fringe members of their groups.
He chalked up the crux of the campus’ problems to “anti-Semitism and anti-Zionist propaganda and proliferation of lies from the extreme left…I believe that professors who indoctrinate instead of educate are the root cause of the problem.”
Kenney said that U.C. professors are not indoctrinating their students, and there are clear academic senate guidelines to what educators can and cannot cover in their courses.
“I define tolerance as the ability to voice and debate and listen to different points of view on different subjects,” she said.
And, by that definition, is U.C. Berkeley a tolerant campus?
“I do think so,” she answered.