7:55 a.m., December 2, 2023
The chairman of Israel’s Holocaust Museum criticizes Ivy League schools for rampant anti-Semitism on campus
The chairman of the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, whose mission is to use the example of the systematic genocide of millions of Jews by the Nazis in World War II as a teaching point to prevent such mass atrocities from happening again, believes The The rapid rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the United States and around the world is due to the inaction of administrators at Ivy League colleges and other higher education institutions.
Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, said this while speaking to Fox News Digital after a week-long trip to the United States, where he met with presidents, rectors and deans of colleges on the East Coast, including Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University and Queens College Many of these prestigious institutions, where there has been a sharp rise in incidents of anti-Semitism, have had academics promoting inaccurate theories about Israel.
“At Ivy League colleges across the United States… there are groups of academics, not all, but important academics, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, who are meticulously, brick by brick, step by step, building pseudo.”-academic, pseudo-scientific, pseudo-intellectual theories that justify the elimination of the Jewish state,” he said.
“Violent demonstrations with students calling for ‘from the river to the sea’ or a ‘global intifada’ are of course extremely disturbing,” said Dayan, a former Israeli consul general in New York. “But in some ways it’s just a symptom.”
“With all these academic buzzwords about ‘ethnic-nationalist’, ‘settler colonialism’, ‘colonization of Palestine’ and ‘apartheid’, they are slowly but steadily building a pseudo-scientific truth of academic theories,” he said, adding that “first the demonization of Israel and then the justification occurs, after which they actively work to eliminate the Jewish state, and that is terrible.”
Dayan said calling for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state was “a terribly anti-Semitic act.”
Ruth Marks Eglash of Fox News Digital contributed to this update.