FOR THE RECORD
A story Friday, "Speaker: 'A lot' of anti-Semitism," should have reported that UC Irvine professor emeritus Nathan Rynn is a member of the University Synagogue, which is in Irvine and is not affiliated with UCI.
*****************
A federal civil rights official who visited UC Irvine on Thursday said anti-Semitism exists on the campus, although he added that it was difficult to gauge how large of a problem it is.
Kenneth Marcus, the staff director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, spoke to an audience of about two dozen in the campus Berkeley Place building. Marcus' group, an independent agency established by Congress in 1957, issued a report last July on campus anti-Semitism nationwide, and UCI was among the campuses cited in the study.
"There is a question to whether what we are seeing is a large number of small incidents, or a systemic problem in higher education," Marcus told the audience. "Either way, what we're seeing is a lot of it."
Marcus, who formerly served as head of the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, supervised the report on campus anti-Semitism last year. The report, which determined that anti-Semitism was a problem on a number of campuses, cited recent incidents at UCI and included testimony that Jewish students were often intimidated and physically harassed.
Marcus could not say whether anti-Semitism is more prevalent at UCI than at other campuses, but he said prejudice on the whole has grown stronger — or, at least, more widely reported — in recent years. He distributed copies of the report at the lecture as well as postcards featuring the slogan "Silence is an ally of hate."
Marcus, who met with Jewish student groups earlier in the day, said he urged people to report instances of discrimination or abuse.
"People think what happened to them is an isolated incident and it's not happening to other people," he said.
In recent years, Jewish student groups at UCI have been targeted or criticized on a number of occasions — although some have questioned whether the conflicts are racially motivated or simply based on political issues.
The Muslim Student Union angered many last May when it ran a weeklong program titled "Holocaust in the Holy Land," while Muslim students protested at a speech in January by pro-Israel historian Daniel Pipes.
