Stop the Anti-Jewish Persecution at the University of Maryland

Jewish students at the University of Maryland just endured one of the most brazen acts of religious discrimination our campus has ever seen. On Yom Kippur—the holiest day of the Jewish year, when Jews fast and gather in synagogue—our student government voted on and passed a resolution accusing Israel of genocide. With Jewish students absent for religious reasons, the measure sailed through: twenty-eight in favor, none opposed, and only one abstention.

This wasn’t a scheduling accident. It was intentional. Anti-Israel activists first tried to schedule the vote for Rosh Hashanah. When outrage grew, they simply shifted it to Yom Kippur. One speaker even justified the timing by sneering that Jews “need to atone” for Israel’s actions. Others smeared Jewish organizations as “fascists” and grotesquely compared Israel to the Nazis, invoking a “final solution.”

At a September 17 meeting of the UMD Student Government Association (SGA), that vote was pulled from the agenda at the last minute, with anti-Israel forces warning in an Instagram story that the vote was being moved, not canceled. In its place, the SGA passed an “emergency bill” - meaning that it was not debated or discussed during the general body, accusing Israel of genocide. The situation has only escalated, with UMD Jewish groups noting that the SGA has “marginalized Jewish voices and aim[s] to harm Jewish life on campus.” 

As Leo Terrell, Chairman of the Justice Department’s task force on Jew-hatred, warned in the days before the vote: extremists are “intentionally picking the holiest days of the year for Jews to force them to choose between defending their Zionist identities or observing their religion. This is shameful and unacceptable!”

For the fourth time, once each semester since the war began, droves of people stormed the student union building with their faces covered so they could scream at and intimidate student government officials. The cruel rhetoric used by some of the anti-Israel speakers proved their ugly intentions.

One explicitly justified the holding of the vote on Yom Kippur by saying that Jews “need to atone” for the actions of Israel, and that the student government holds sessions on some Christian holidays, so holding a vote about Israel on the holiest day in Judaism was acceptable. Another called the members of the Jewish nonprofit StopAntisemitism “fascists.” A third accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of carrying out a “final solution,” a hideous reappropriation of Holocaust imagery.  

Ultimately, with Jewish students absent, the student government’s vote on the resolution passed with twenty-eight in favor, none opposed. A single member of the body was brave enough to abstain. 

Studies have consistently shown that targeted anti-Israel campaigns on campus can be directly linked to a rising tide of antisemitism. During the 2023-2024 academic year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tracked a nearly 500% increase in antisemitic incidents on U.S. college campuses compared to the 2022-2023 academic year. 

For nearly two years now, there has been an unprecedented deluge of antisemitic activity on UMD’s campus. Some of the most egregious acts included chalking the campus with “Holocaust 2.0” among other hate speech. In September 2024, four visibly Jewish students were harassed while walking to the campus Hillel by an individual who said, “F*** you Jews” and “Christ is king, f*** you Jews, you killed Jesus.” For 23 months, Jewish students have been met with frightening chants of “Globalize the Intifada” and “From the River to the Sea” while walking to class or studying for exams. 

With a strong population of around 6,000 Jewish students, about 20% of the campus is Jewish, making Maryland the fourth-largest public university in terms of Jewish population. Sadly, it also has the most antisemitic hate-bias incidents in Maryland. 

This year, anti-Israel extremists have been trying to abuse the Jewish high holiday calendar to push their hateful agenda and prevent Jewish students from defending themselves. It’s a continuation of a long trend by Israel’s haters to weaponize Jewish holidays against the Jewish People: most famously during the surprise Arab attack on Israel on Yom Kippur, 1973, the holiest day of the Jewish year, but also on the October 7, 2023, atrocity itself, which was carried out on the joyous Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. 

Last spring, anti-Israel radicals brought a similar anti-Israel resolution before the UMD SGA, calling for divestment from companies that do business with Israel and a handful of other countries. A campus representative from Christians United for Israel (CUFI) stated that the “referendum has been deeply divisive… [T]he language and tactics used made it clear that this was about targeting Israel, not promoting justice or peace. It has left many Jewish and pro-Israel students feeling alienated and concerned about rising hostility.”

To its credit, the UMD administration clarified that it would not allow the hateful referendum to impact the school's operation, announcing that “[t]he results of the referendum have no bearing on the operations or policies of the university or its foundations.” 

The time has come for the administration to protect UMD’s Jewish students and create an environment of discussion and inclusion instead of one of hate and exclusion. UMD’s administration must continue to reiterate this clear stance.