Rabbi Steven Burg is the international CEO of Aish, a global Jewish educational movement. He formerly served as Eastern Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where he oversaw the Museum of Tolerance in New York City.
(Oct. 23, 2026 / JNS)
For much of the past three years, the images from American college campuses were hard to ignore. Encampments blocking off large parts of universities around the country, antisemitic chants at the gates, Jewish students harassed and physically assaulted, advised to find another route to class to avoid confrontation.
Those encampments are mostly gone now. Thankfully, most university presidents have tightened discipline, rewritten codes of conduct and assured Jewish parents that the worst is behind us.
I want to believe them. Yet incidents such as what transpired last week in the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University have shown that the hate has left the encampments and has moved into the classrooms.
According to Adam Kredo’s report in The Washington Free Beacon, a two-day conference took place inside a closed conference room that quickly descended into an “anti-Israel hate-fest.”
The gathering’s stated subject was the legacy of the war on terror 25 years after the 9/11 attacks on America. The university’s own Institute for Middle East Studies served as a co-host, alongside nearly 40 co-sponsoring groups.
Kredo was in the room and reported on the travesty that ensued.
Irene Calis, who directs Arab World Studies at American University, told the audience that “Zionist billionaires of the Epstein class, like Robert Kraft,” the owner of the New England Patriots and a longtime Jewish philanthropist, were now being forced to issue statements of support for Palestinians. She described a student who had filed an antisemitism complaint against her as proof of a Zionist conspiracy.
An organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement explained that the goal of her divestment campaign was “to weaken the Zionist state.”
Before a word of this was spoken, attendees had to sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to record, photograph or identify anyone present. Speakers then spent two days lamenting the repression of free expression on campus. Nobody in the room seemed to notice the irony.
Policies have improved. The culture has lagged behind.
People can argue about Israel. They can criticize its government and rally for Palestinians if they do so peacefully. That is part of public life in a free country.
What Calis said belongs in another category entirely. Linking a prominent Jewish philanthropist to a notorious sex offender and casting him as one of a shadowy class of “Zionist billionaires” is one of the oldest moves in the modern antisemite’s playbook dating back to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from 1903. Jewish money. Jewish control. Jews pulling strings out of sight.
Jews in Europe heard the same charge a century ago in other languages. Attaching a modern scandal to it changes nothing about what it is. Kraft, for the record, has poured much of his own fortune into fighting antisemitism.
These arguments were said inside a GW building with a GW institute’s name on the program and a GW department sponsoring it.
Universities like to point to progress, and some of it is real. In March, the Anti-Defamation League found that schools had meaningfully strengthened their antisemitism policies. The same research found that nearly half of non-Jewish undergraduates had witnessed or experienced hostility toward Jews over the previous year, while only 5.3% had received any training on antisemitism.
In September, the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights unanimously approved a report calling campus antisemitism a serious civil rights problem and faulting schools for inconsistent handling of complaints.
The policies have improved. The culture has lagged far behind.
We need to change that. Hatred of Jews on American campuses has to stop, and stopping it starts with calling it by its name every time it appears, including when it arrives with a faculty title and a conference badge.
George Washington University owes the public an explanation of why one of its institutes lent its name to this event and what it plans to do now. Every university president should apply a simple test: If a speaker described the wealthy members of any other minority as a sinister cabal tied to a sex criminal, how quickly would the administration respond?
Jewish students deserve that same response, delivered just as fast. Trustees and donors should be asking the question as well, and they should keep asking until they get an answer.
The encampments were loud, which made them easy to see. What happened at GW was quiet, polite and protected by a signed agreement. Jewish students cannot afford for anyone to mistake that quiet for peace.