President of California State University condemns antisemitic flyers on campus

Jewish students at CSULB have reported feeling unsafe on campus amid a burst of anti-Zionist sentiment.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

The president of California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) has denounced a recent antisemitic hate campaign targeting a professor that involved posting flyers across campus.

An unknown person or groups plastered in several buildings posters calling the professor, whose picture was included, a “genocide denier” and other demonizing names, The Daily 49er, a campus newspaper, reported on Wednesday.

“Earlier this week, flyers appeared on campus featuring the image of one of our professors and characterizations purporting to represent his views related to the Hamas/Israel conflict,” president Jane Close Conoley said in email quoted by the paper. “Everyone involved in the conflict is hurting … but no one on this campus is bombing Palestinians or was involved in the horror of Oct. 7.”

Pleading for civility, Conoley added, “No one on this campus deserves to be seen as an enemy. We are all reluctant observers of an unfolding tragedy.”

CSULB has been fraught with tension over Israel’s war with Hamas since Oct. 7, when the Palestinian terror group invaded the Jewish state, murdered 1,200 people, and kidnapped 253 others.

Jewish students at CSULB have reported feeling unsafe on campus amid a burst of anti-Zionist sentiment.

The same has been true for Jewish members of the academic community across the state, where anti-Zionism has led to incidents described as “riots” and Jewish students being spat on.

As The Algemeiner previously reported, University of California, Santa Barbara Student Association president Tessa Veksler last month discovered in the school’s multicultural center over a dozen messages, written on placards, which said, “resistance is justified,” “you can run but you can’t hide Tessa Veksler,” and “get these Zionists out of office.”

In marker, someone else graffitied “Zionist not allowed” on the door, just inches away from a mezuzah, a small parchment scroll containing Hebrew verses from the Torah that members of the Jewish community fix to their doorposts.

That same day, a mob of hundreds of pro-Palestinian students and non-students shut down an event at the University of California, Berkeley’s Zellerbach Library featuring Israeli reservist Ran Bar-Yoshafat, forcing Jewish students to flee to a secret safe room as the protesters overwhelmed campus police.

Footage of the incident showed a frenzied mass of anti-Zionist agitators banging on the doors of the Zellerbach.

The mob then, according to witnesses, eventually stormed the building — breaking windows in the process, according to reports in The Daily Wire — and precipitated the decision to evacuate the area.

During the infiltration of Zellerbach, one of the mob — assembled by Bears for Palestine, which had earlier proclaimed its intention to cancel the event — spit on a Jewish student and called him a “Jew,” pejoratively.

“You know what I was screamed at? ‘Jew, you Jew, you Jew,’ literally right to my face,” the student who was attacked said to a friend. “Some woman — then she spit at me.”

Earlier in the month, while the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) student government considered a resolution endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, one student who co-sponsored the resolution accused a Jewish student of being “classist” and using “coded” language because she argued that the council had advanced the resolution without fully appreciating the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the history of antisemitism.

The measure ultimately passed, and Jewish UCLA students told the campus newspaper that they find the BDS campaign, as well as the attempts of pro-Palestinian students who support it to defend Hamas’ atrocities, myopic and offensive.

“How can anyone dare to contextualize since Oct. 7 without acknowledging that the Jewish people are victims of such a cataclysmic attack?” Mikayla Weinhouse said. “BDS intentionally aims to divide a community. Its supporters paint a complex and century-old conflict in the Middle East as a simplistic narrative that inspires hate rather than advocates for a solution.”