Can the UW Protect Jewish Students?

Jewish community members met with the Regents to address Jewish safety. They were shouted out of the room.

When recent University of Washington graduate Hannah Nash agreed to speak at the Board of Regents meeting last Thursday, September 12th, about her experience as a Jewish student on campus, she expected some amount of protest. She did not expect the meeting to melt down.

Nash, along with four other speakers, was slated to advocate for Jewish student safety in the new year at the bimonthly UW Board of Regents meeting. But anti-Israel protestors got so rowdy that the Regents decided to pause the meeting. Ultimately, they called it off.

“I’m disappointed,” Nash says of the Regents’ decision to abort the meeting. “I’m not surprised with the response. It’s very on brand for how the university handles these things.”

Protestors wearing masks and kefiyehs attended the public meeting to push for an anti-Israel divestment initiative, which was supposed to be on the agenda but has been twice postponed by the Regents. Their presence coincided with planned speeches by Jewish community activists.

In the public audio recording of the meeting, protestors can be heard jeering, heckling, mocking, and booing the speeches.

“I was interrupted in the first few sentences,” Nash says. “Right when I finished people started booing me.” She thought, “Wow, no one has ever booed me,” she says. Protestors interrupted the speeches with accusations of genocide, fascism, lying, and killing babies. When community activist Bob Sulkin mentioned Hamas, a protestor cheered. “I was taken aback by that,” Nash says.

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Regents chairman David Zeeck asked the protestors multiple times to stop interrupting and threatened to have police remove them from the room.

“He just kept pleading with them,” says community educator Nevet Basker, who was one of the speakers. “They were laughing at him.”

After a loud outburst from the activists, Zeeck made the call to move the meeting. Members of the meeting, including UW president Ana Marie Cauce and student and alumni leaders, were escorted by campus police through a side exit and eventually relocated to an open classroom. Some protestors remained in the original room, chanting about divestment as the others left. According to an Instagram post, they “took the seats of the Board of Regents, convened the People’s Board of Regents, and unanimously passed two motions in favor of the divestment and labor demands.” They reportedly remained there for two hours.

Regents bylaws require meetings to be public and recorded. Once settled in the new room, they realized they were in violation of this requirement and could not legally continue the meeting. Attendees were then escorted through a garage to avoid protestors in front of the building.

“It’s more than disappointment,” says Basker. “There is outrage here about how we were treated. It’s not about Israel. It’s about, one, the safety and security of Jewish students and community on campus, and two, the rule of law and the ability to enforce a policy.”

“It’s exactly illustrative of what we wanted them to not do,” says Federation president and CEO Solly Kane. “They said they’d have the police clear the room, but then they didn’t. I don’t see how that does anything but embolden the demonstrators and send a message to the campus community that the rules aren’t going to be enforced.”

Later that day, Kane sent out an unusually urgent letter asking for the community to call on the university to “Establish and enforce clear, unambiguous policies on antisemitism, protests, encampments and masked demonstrations”; “Publicly release the findings from the Antisemitism and Islamophobia task forces, which were initiated last year but have yet to show any tangible results”; “Implement a clear plan for education on antisemitism for students, faculty, and staff—because awareness alone isn’t enough”; and “Ensure transparency and accountability by providing clear processes for reporting antisemitic incidents and outlining exactly how those reports will be addressed.”

The letter continues:

The safety of the Jewish community is non-negotiable. The University of Washington's inaction is setting a dangerous precedent, not only for us but for the broader community. What happens on this campus ripples into our schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods.

The Regents also put out a statement that day condemning the protesters’ behavior, and they declined to reschedule the meeting. A request for comment from the university was not returned.

Nash is frustrated that the meeting had so little security. Campus police had been dispatched to Greek Row for bid day, when the fraternities and sororities make their house selections, she says. “I think it’s pretty clear where the security needs to be.”

Nash is still recovering from the intensity of last year. She chose to spend part of her senior year taking classes remotely and didn’t want to attend graduation. Between graffiti and the encampment, the campus felt like a hostile environment. Armed with a degree in human-centered design and engineering, she says she needed to decompress before starting her job search.

“I feel like I didn’t get the education I deserve,” she says. “If students don’t get the education they deserve because people don’t feel safe to go on campus, that’s a big issue.”

With classes starting soon, it’s unclear if anything will change. Last year, Nash found solace at the Hillel, which provided food and comfort and a place to study when she didn’t want to go to the library. Chabad is characteristically unapologetic — last year, they set up tables in the encampment to show they were not afraid.

“We try to instill in the students, we are a Jewish nation,” says Miriam Weingarten, who runs Chabad UW with her husband. “We survive and continue to survive. No matter the challenges we face and the many, many years the Jews faced challenges, they stood strong and true to themselves, and that’s what we have to do.”

Still, she’s fielding calls from parents worried about their incoming freshmen. “We hope for the best,” she says, “but being realistic, we don’t know.”

Other university systems successfully put in place new guidelines for the year to come. The University of California system reinstated its own bans on encampments, blocking spaces and access, wearing masks to intimidate or conceal identity, and refusing to identify oneself.

Kane hoped the UW would be a leader; now he’s hoping they’ll just follow the example of other schools.

“It’s not too late,” he says. “The quarter has not started here. It’s never too late to do the right thing.”

Photo: The UW “liberated zone.” Joe Mabel/Wikimedia Commons

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Shoutouts

Thank you to the 750 people who registered to attend Confronting Hate Together: Resilience & Relationships and to the countless others who were on the livestream last night.

Thank you to the JCRC at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and Temple De Hirsch Sinai for all their hard work in helping the WSJHS make sure that our critically important exhibit could be shown to the public. —Lisa Kranseler

Thanks to Solly Kane and staff at Jewish Federation for their ongoing work with Hillel and UW to protect Jewish students on Campus. —Paul Nacamuli