American Jewish Committee Disavows Statement With AAUP on Campus Anti-Semitism

The American Jewish Committee is disavowing an April statement in which one of its top experts on discrimination joined the president of the American Association of University Professors in arguing that some recent complaints of anti-Semitic incidents on American college campuses amounted to attempts at censorship, The Jewish Daily Forward reported on Tuesday. In the statement, Kenneth Stern, the committee’s point man on anti-Semitism and extremism, and Cary Nelson, the AAUP’s president, argued that many of the complaints do not involve actual discrimination but instead represent attempts “to silence anti-Israel discourse and speakers.” In a recent e-mail obtained by the Forward, David Harris, executive director of the AJC, told Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer in Hebrew who has filed a federal complaint of anti-Semitism at the University of California at Santa Cruz, that he regretted the decision to release Mr. Stern’s statement and regarded the statement as “ill-advised.”