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OAKLAND -- Larry Mahler has trouble getting people to join an online discussion group for Jewish students at the University of California, Irvine.
"A couple of people told me they didn't want to go in because they're afraid of being identified as Jewish on campus, and being targeted," said Mahler, 20, a senior who's president of the campus chapter of the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi.
The campus is in Orange County, but Mahler makes it sound as if his college experience has been the equivalent of attending a German university on the eve of World War II. "A few quarters ago, I took a Holocaust history class and it was really frustrating to see the way Jews were constantly vilified, made unequal to their peers," Mahler said. "To read that in a textbook and then walk around campus and still see that happening to us... makes me feel like there hasn't been too much progress."
Mahler and other Jewish students say that their problems stem from increasing strife with Muslim students and the failure of university administrators to intervene.
The situation has drawn the attention of the Zionist Organization of America, which filed an 11-page complaint on October 11 with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, claiming students at the state-run campus have been subject to anti-Jewish vilification, intimidation and harassment. The organization, best know for aggressively opposing Israeli territorial concessions and waging public campaigns against media outlets and institutions that it deems anti-Israel, has recently stepped up its legal advocacy in the United States.
In its complaint, the ZOA claims that the situation for Jewish students began to deteriorate in 2001 as "student groups registered with and supported by the university began presenting speakers and publishing information on campus that was plainly intended to incite hatred of Jews and of Israel." The complaint cites articles in Alkalima, the campus' Muslim student magazine, equating Zionism with Nazism; a sign reading "Israelis love to kill innocent children," which remained on campus despite complaints to administrators, and incidents of threats and near-violence involving Muslim students and supporters of Israel. It...