A coalition of over 2,000 Orthodox Jewish rabbis issued a statement calling for American universities to suspend any further implementation of “diversity” programs, claiming that such programs often lead to increased anti-Semitism, as reported by Fox News.
Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), told Fox that “with antisemitic incidents rising at an alarming rate, using Israel as a convenient facade, universities must ensure their diversity efforts include protection of Jewish students.” Menken said that most Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives have instead led to “foxes [guarding] the proverbial hen house.”
“We believe that universities should suspend all DEI programs pending a comprehensive review of how candidates are selected for staff positions,” Menken continued, “because those harboring what should be obvious disqualifying biases were apparently identified on literally dozens of campuses with influence over thousands of students.”
CJV’s demand comes after a recent study released by the Heritage Foundation, which revealed that most staff who are placed in charge of such DEI initiatives often “express anti-Israel attitudes that are so out of proportion and imbalanced as to constitute antisemitism.” By tracking the Twitter feeds of over 700 DEI staff across 65 different universities, Heritage found that such personnel were three times as likely to tweet about Israel than about China; of those tweets, 95 percent were critical of Israel, while 62 percent of the China-related tweets were supportive of the Communist regime.
“While criticism of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic,” Heritage’s report summarized, “the inordinate amount of attention given to Israel and the excessive criticism directed at that one country is evidence of a double-standard with respect to the Jewish state, which is a central feature of a widely accepted definition of antisemitism.”