As a pro-Palestinian encampment settled in on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus this spring, Jewish studies professor Devin Naar was doing something he’d never done before: teaching a class on antisemitism, the first offered at his school in more than a decade.
“It was the hardest class I’ve ever taught, and maybe the most rewarding,” said Naar, a historian of Sephardic Jewry. He described a class where Jews who attended Hillel and Chabad events conversed with Jews who hosted encampment Shabbat services. The environment was civil, he said, and moved “beyond slogans” to feature guest appearances from local activists and Jewish community leaders.
Midway through the semester, Naar received an invitation to join the public university’s antisemitism task force. As at other schools gripped by toxic climates since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, the university’s task force was charged with diagnosing the extent of the antisemitism problem on campus and coming up with possible solutions. It would be made up of faculty, staff and students, mostly Jews, and would work alongside a parallel task force on Islamophobia…