Hillel at ASU Introduces Reporting System for Jewish Students

As Halloween decorations come down and the last thrills of the spooky season have faded, there is something scary lingering on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus.
On October 31 of this year, ASU students found and reported to campus authorities an antisemitic poster reading ‘Who Controls the World? Jews Do’ accompanied by the cartoon likeness of a vampire.
This incident, while horrifying, is not the first of its kind on the ASU’s campus. A similar incident occurred with a ‘Hitler was Right’ poster in fall of 2020, and a poster featuring swastikas in fall of 2019. Antisemitic incidents, it seems, are a regular opening to the holiday season.
“[The poster] was terrible to see as a new student on campus,” said Ariella Golden, a freshman at ASU and active participant in the Hillel Community at ASU. “to see that happen at my own campus…and knowing how little was going to be done about it.”
This trend isn’t unique to ASU. Across the country, antisemitic incidents on college campuses have been on the rise. A poll from the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University found that 71% of the Jewish undergraduate students polled had either experienced verbal harassment or witnessed someone experience verbal harassment because they are Jewish.
For Golden, and many other Jewish students, organizations like Hillel International and Chabad at ASU, among others, act as a safe space where they can practice their culture in peace.
“Hillel is here to support and advocate for the needs of Jewish students,” said Debbie Yunker Kail, executive director of Hillel at ASU. “When we see these challenges, we work quickly to address them and prevent them from happening.”
Kail believes that dealing with antisemitism is a part of Hillel’s duty to the students they support. “[Anti-semitic incidents] can make Jewish students feel vulnerable and unsafe in the place they are trying to call home...That’s really challenging for a young student who is just figuring out who they are.”
With no sign of improving attitudes towards Jewish students, Hillel International, in conjunction with the Anti-Defamation League and the Secure Community Network, released a new method of reporting hate incidents on campus in September of this year. Jewish students can now visit ReportCampusHate.org to report any incidents of harassment that they might encounter.
Golden is also optimistic about the website’s impact. “I think that reporting to an organization that understands what it means to have an antisemitic incident happen and the trauma and hurt that it can cause can lead to people being better able to process and deal with it,”
But not every Jewish college student is involved with Hillel.
Kate Gregson, a junior at the University of Arizona who generally frequents Chabad at U of A instead of Hillel, worries about Hillel ostracizing some students.
“[On my campus] Hillel is extremely liberal, which is not necessarily problematic,” Gregson said. “[But] when you take a religious organization of any kind and you make it overly political, you run a really serious risk of turning kids away...then [those kids] are not going to get to be Jewish at college, which isn’t fair.”
For those kids, and for Gregson herself, Hillel isn’t the organization of choice, and that means that this new website being implemented by the organization hasn’t reached their circle.
Even with these hesitations, Gregson is hopeful about the new reporting system. ”I do think it could be really helpful, especially if it can be utilized to hand off the problem to someone with more time, more resources [and] more power,” Gregson said “If that’s the idea they’re going for, I think that’ll be super helpful.”