Why has antisemitism become so difficult to condemn? In recent years, this issue has often been pulled into adjacent political disputes that make simple moral clarity tough for many to express.
My experience in the Associated Student Government (ASG) has shown me that even good-faith efforts can get caught in that dynamic. But it has also shown me something encouraging; when antisemitism is clearly understood as hatred toward Jewish people on the basis of religion or ethnicity, students are ready to condemn it.
Since 2022, two legislative efforts in ASG to condemn antisemitism, including one that I introduced in 2023, did not make it through. This February, however, when I introduced a clean, depoliticized resolution, it passed overwhelmingly.
National data still shows elevated antisemitic incidents, and Jewish students report high levels of exposure and concealment. In January 2025, Hillel reported that 83% of Jewish college students had experienced or witnessed antisemitism since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, while 41% said they felt the need to hide their Jewish identity.
Violence and threats have not faded with time. In recent months, the world saw the antisemitic terror attack at Bondi Beach and the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. Just a few weeks ago, Jewish students and community members at Stanford University received threatening emails containing “numerous unfounded and conspiracist claims” and references to monitoring their behavior, according to The Stanford Daily.
What has changed over the last few years is not only the level of hate, but also the degree to which that hate has become normalized in our society.
After the Oct. 7 terror attacks, anti-Jewish sentiment, which once stayed closer to the fringe, became acceptable to express in public. Much of the surge initially came from the political left, particularly on college campuses, where hatred was often wrapped in slogans and rationalized as politics.
To be clear, opposition to the Israeli government is not necessarily antisemitism; there should be room to criticize governments, wars and military actions. Not all opposition or slogans are motivated by hatred of Jews; however, some clearly are.
This year, right-wing antisemitism has become more visible. Old conspiracies about Jews controlling money, media and politics have found new life online, voiced directly by figures like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens.
In a friendly interview with Tucker Carlson, Fuentes blamed “organized Jewry in America” for blocking national unity, while Owens warned followers on X that “You should absolutely be aware of where the Chabad is nearest your home. These people are dangerous.”
The problem is not confined to internet personalities alone, as shown by the leaked Young Republican chats in 2025 and the antisemitic group chat involving campus Republican leaders in Miami-Dade County, Florida.
When that kind of rhetoric is repeated often enough, especially by people with large platforms, it makes open prejudice feel more permissible
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That process is accelerated by the architecture of online life itself. Many of us no longer see one another eye to eye; we see each other pixel to pixel, constantly being fed people’s worst moments by code designed to hold us in a maintained state of constant outrage.
This should be alarming to every student, not just Jewish students.
A culture does not become openly antisemitic all at once; it starts with words and symbols. It stems from hesitation to condemn it out of fear of “rocking the boat.” A bad joke goes unchallenged, a slogan gets rationalized and even a simple moral statement starts to sound too controversial for impartial organizations to say out loud.
Once this happens, a permission structure for hate begins to form, and a relatively small number of hateful people can bully a much larger number of decent people into silence, simply by making statements of clarity feel perilous.
Too many of us worry that condemning antisemitism will be misread as taking some other stance we do not mean to take, so we end up saying nothing at all.
That is exactly why I brought my recent resolution condemning antisemitism to the floor of ASG. It passed by a wide margin, and in doing so, ASG said something that should never have been difficult to say in the first place: hating Jewish people for being Jewish is wrong.
The vote should encourage students, because it showed that the vast majority of us are still capable of moral clarity, empathy and basic decency when asked to confront this issue directly.
We do not need to solve the conflicts of the Middle East before we can have clarity on this. We do not need unanimous agreement on every geopolitical dispute. What we need is the courage to say that hating Jewish people on the basis of their religion or ethnicity is wrong.
Do not let fear of controversy silence you. Say it plainly: antisemitism is wrong.
Nicholas Barry is a senior majoring in business economics. He is a former senator serving in the Associated Student Government and is also a voting student member of the University Senate.
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