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In California and Washington, a push to define and redefine anti-Semitism

In recent months new reports and allegations of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activity on University of California campuses appear to have died down — at least by comparison to the flurry of coverage from early 2014 to early this year.
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May 21, 2015

In recent months new reports and allegations of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activity on University of California campuses appear to have died down — at least by comparison to the flurry of coverage from early 2014 to early this year.

But that doesn’t mean American activists on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been lying dormant. 

Senate Concurrent Resolution 35 (SCR-35)—a nonbinding bill urging each UC campus to adopt resolutions condemning anti-Semitism — is moving quickly through the California State Senate, even as the left-wing group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has succeeded in softening some of its language, pushing legislators to remove a reference to anti-Semitism “augmenting education programs” and to add a clause clarifying that the bill doesn’t restrict any legally protected free speech.

And on May 18, the group, along with 250 academics, sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry asking the U.S. State Department to remove from its definition of anti-Semitism any reference to Israel. The current State Department codification says that demonizing Israel, delegitimizing it and holding it to double standards are forms of anti-Semitism. The State Department includes comparing Israeli policies to those of the Nazis and denying it the right to exist as forms of anti-Semitism. There is no indication that the State Department will comply and change its definition.

Meanwhile, the AMCHA Initiative, a pro-Israel campus watchdog based in Santa Cruz, Calif., is pushing the University of California’s Board of Regents and UC President Janet Napolitano to adopt the State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism and to condemn, but not overtly restrict, what it considers egregious and anti-Semitic activities against Israel and against pro-Israel students on campus. 

This week, AMCHA sent two letters to Napolitano that had been signed by nearly 700 UC alumni, UC faculty and rabbis, and which urge the University of California to both adopt the State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism and to make campuses implement training programs to help faculty and staff identify and address anti-Semitism on campus, in the letter’s words, “with the same promptness and vigor as they do other forms of racial, ethnic, and gender bigotry and discrimination.”

Dianne Klein, a spokeswoman for Napolitano, wrote to the Journal on May 19 that the topic of anti-Semitism isn’t on the regents’ agenda for their meeting in San Francisco this week. “That doesn’t mean, however, that the issue will not be discussed,” Klein wrote. 

AMCHA Initiative co-founder Tammi Rossman-Benjamin said on May 19 she hasn’t received a response from Napolitano or the regents since sending the letters. But on May 21, Napolitano said in a

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