As I sat down to read The Dartmouth at lunch on Monday, the headline "Hate mailings target gays, Jews" caught my eye. According to the article, last week anti-Semitic and antihomosexual pamphlets were distributed to a number of prominent gay and Jewish leaders on campus. Similarly, last year around this time a Jewish star and the words "death to you" were painted on the door of one of the Jewish apartments. My purpose in writing this article is not to concentrate on the incidents but on the response or rather, the lack of response to them.
For example, why did I first learn about both these incidents in The Dartmouth? As a member of the Jewish community I would have expected to be individually informed of anti-Semitic incidents that targeted fellow Jewish students. However, in neither instance was I informed of the event by Hillel, the Roth Center or even other Jewish students. Why is there a reluctance to talk about or confront these events? In Monday's article, Josh Green is quoted as saying "he was not going to make his experience public until he discovered others had received similar pamphlets." Why did he feel this way? Isn't even one such mailing sufficient cause for alarm? My questions are not founded in criticism but rather in curiosity.
Last fall, the campus was rocked by the ghetto party incident. There were daily articles, discussions and protests. This incident was seen as such an important demonstration of racism that it was picked up by the national media and publicized throughout the country. While I do not want to immerse myself in the sticky question of what the ghetto party meant, the one thing that is clear is that it was unclear. Peoples' interpretations varied from the belief that it was based upon simple ignorance to the view that it was a clear example of racism. However, as far as I know no one proposed that it was an act that threatened violence. "Death to you," that is a threat.
So, why were there no campus marches? Why was there no national media coverage? And why were two discussions seen as sufficient to deal with this incident? Perhaps the answer is simple. Perhaps there was a conscious decision made by the Jewish leaders at Dartmouth to let it blow over. There would have been very good reasons for this decision. Marches and newscasts would have done nothing more than help to discourage prospective Jewish students from coming to Dartmouth. This fall I remember someone saying that it was "incidents like the ghetto party that discourage minority students from coming to Dartmouth." Perhaps it was precisely this sort of reaction that the Jewish leaders hoped to avoid by keeping the responses low key.
Although I understand this reasoning and a large part of me agrees with it, I also find it slightly troubling. Why is there such a drastic difference in the way Jewish people deal with racism? Why are we so willing to suppress our outrage and simply endure?
This article is not a call to arms, but it is a deliberate attempt to say something when most people seem reluctant to. I want to know why more people don't feel the need to stand up and loudly and repeatedly condemn these acts of hate? I want to know why we want to forget rather than confront these incidents? This is especially true in these types of anonymous incidents where there is little possibility of conflict.
In speaking out against these events we would simply be standing up against the faceless apparition of hatred and ignorance. Perhaps we are afraid that vocal responses will produce further incidents of hate. Perhaps we prefer to pretend this sort of hatred doesn't exist and that these incidents are isolated anomalies. We should not be afraid to confront hatred and we should not have to pretend it doesn't exist. If this is why the Jewish community's responses to these types of incidents are minimal and restrained, then, in my opinion, there is a problem. Perhaps if there were an understood feeling that any act of hatred against one member of Dartmouth was an outrage against us all then no one would feel they had to bear the fear, the humiliation or the pain of it alone.
