Dr. Aryeh Zmora recently received a letter from the Civil Rights Department of the United States Department of Justice in Washington approving his filing a class action suit in his name and in the name of other faculty members who also claim to have suffered from antisemitic treatment at St. Cloud University in Minnesota. The letter was in reference to a complaint made by Dr. Zmora (an Israeli citizen) to the Equal Opportunities Commission after he had been fired from the University.
Following is a list of antisemitic incidents reported by both faculty members and students at the university.
i. When Dr. Zmora , a lecturer on the Italian Renaissance, planned to deliver a lecture on how his mother had survived in the Holocaust, his colleagues at the university said that there were pleasanter subjects to discuss and even warned him not to deliver the lecture.
ii. About three weeks after the lecture, the university administration informed him that not only had his candidacy for tenure been terminated (although he had previously been informed that he was a “leading candidate”), but that he had been fired.
iii. The head of the History Department told Zmora that he was of German extraction and that if his parents had not emigrated to the United States he might have been a soldier in the SS who might have killed the members of Zmora’s family. He expressed his objections to teaching about the Holocaust in his department claiming that the subject was a “personal agenda”.
iv. A member of the faculty used to describe how he had disinfected his office which had previously been occupied by a Jewish homosexual.
v. Antisemitic announcements appeared frequently at the university, and neo-Nazi literature and antisemitic caricatures were freely distributed around the university campus. A pamphlet denying the Holocaust and expressing neo-Nazi views was inserted into the university’s official newspaper.
vi. When one of the Jewish lecturers complained about the antisemitic publications, he was told to “go cry at the Wailing Wall”.
vii. A Jewish woman student received a note with a swastika after a fellow student had learned of her origin.
viii. Christian students were asked not to take courses presented by Jewish lecturers.
ix. The Dean of one of the departments was in the habit of greeting his Jewish colleagues every morning with “Heil Hitler”.
After Dr. Zmora’s complaint became known, meetings in support of him were held at St. Cloud, and lecturers and students, who had previously been afraid to complain about antisemitic incidents, began telling about them. An “Association of Jewish Lecturers” was established on campus whose purpose is to protect their rights and status against antisemitic harassment.
The antisemites began enforcing various sanctions against Zmora’s supporters who had made 14 complaints of discrimination on campus both to the Equal Opportunities Commisstion and to human rights organizations.
The scandal at the university received wide publicity over the media in the United States, and the university authorities decided to order two independent investigations into what was happening on campus. The report which was published in July 2001, revealed serious findings on “strong feelings” of antisemitism on campus, which the administration “is unable or unprepared to confront”.
It transpired that there is a tradition at St. Cloud not to grant tenure to Jewish lecturers who are employed because of lack of choice. It transpires that of the 750 lecturers at this university, only 15 are Jewish, and the number of Jewish students is even lower: 12 out of a total of 25 thousand students.
According to Dr. Zmora, antisemitism on campus is part of an atmosphere of racism and antisemitism in the entire area. 60% of the population in the town are of German extraction, descendents of families who arrived in the United States in the 19th Century. Several years ago, a child from the town disappeared, and leaflets were distributed around town making blood libel accusations reminiscent of those made against the Jews in the Middle Ages.
