Trouble on campus
‘Blind Spot’ talks to students facing – and fighting – antisemitism
“Blind Spot” begins and ends with footage from the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli demonstrations — maybe we might as well be straightforward and call them riots — at Columbia University last year.
(The Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey will show “Blind Spot” on Sunday, April 27, at 3:30. See below.)
The film looks at the officially unacknowledged, swept-under-the-rug antisemitism that many college students on many campuses across the country have faced, years before it became glaringly public in the response to the barbarities of October 7, 2023.
But the idea that grew into the film, which in the most part is told in chronological order and includes many interviews with Jewish students at many colleges across the country, as well as with politicians, writers, and Jewish communal professionals, began years ago, with Lenny Gold’s son’s high school experience.
Mr. Gold is “Blind Spot’s” executive producer. In 2009, one of his sons was in eighth grade at Friends Seminary, a Quaker-run K-12 school in downtown Manhattan. “It started when I found out that his Jewish eighth-grade history teacher compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with Nazis treatment of Jews,” he said.
At first, Mr. Gold thought that this was anomalous, one of the teachers going rogue, but when he researched it, he found that the American Friends Service Committee is openly, blatantly anti-Israel, and its headquarters are at the school.
“We did some digging and found out that the AFSC controls the board. So then we realized that this was a problem of the Quaker influence on the school. But then, as we got even further into it, we realized it was way bigger than just the Quakers. It was in public schools. It was in private schools all over the country. And it was on college campuses.
“So the long process that culminated in ‘Blind Spot’ began then. It was driven by my determination that if I could ever do something about it, I would, and I did. And wow.”
One of the decisions that most shaped the film was Mr. Gold’s realization — helped along by advice from journalist and Free Press founder Bari Weiss — that the story could best be told by college students, “because they are ones who are directly impacted,” he said.
Work on the film started in earnest in 2021. Eventually Mr. Gold found Ironbound Films, a company that produces documentaries; its work includes “Heading Home: The Tale of Team Israel,” the story of Israel’s 2017 national baseball team that won enough games to find itself in America, competing in the World Baseball Classic. (In the end, the team lost.) The film has won too many awards to list here. Ironbound’s three leaders, Seth Kramer, Daniel Miller, and Jeremy Newberger, directed and produced it.
And yes, that company name is local. Although Ironbound now is headquartered in the Hudson Valley, its two founders, Mr. Kramer and Mr. Miller, come from New Jersey. They named their business after Newark’s Ironbound section “because of its symbolic imagery,” Mr. Newberger, its CEO, said.
Early scenes in the film were shot at anti-Israel protests and encounters in Berkeley and Washington. One of the first interviews was with Blake Flayton, who was about to graduate from George Washington University. Two years earlier, he’d written an op-ed, published in the New York Times, that detailed how his identity as a “young, gay, left-wing Jew,” as the subhead declared him, wasn’t enough, according to anti-Zionists, whose rhetoric often crosses the boundary into active antisemitism, to override his love for Israel.
By October 7, filming was almost complete. The problem predated the massacre, Mr. Gold and Mr. Newberger both said. The film includes clips from two consecutive CUNY Law School commencements, when two Muslim women — identifiable because both wore hijabs under their caps and keffiyehs as scarves over their robes — Nerdeen Kiswani in spring 2022 and Fatima Mousa Mohammed in spring 2023 — elected by the student body to speak for it, used the opportunity to attack Israel.
The film shows that at least in the eyes — and mouths, and often hands —of college students, the difference between being anti-Israel and antisemitic is vanishingly small. Certainly it is possible to draw very real intellectual distinctions between them, but at least in the world that’s shown in “Blind Spot,” those distinctions don’t matter.
“Blind Spot” includes many discussions with Jewish students, who are remarkable for being both articulate and seemingly unflappable. There are interviews, as well, with notable local figures, including the novelist, essayist, and public intellectual Dara Horn of Short Hills; Susan Tuchman of Tenafly, the lawyer who’s the director of the ZOA’s Center for Law and Justice; and U.S. Representative Josh Gottheimer, whose Fifth District covers much of Bergen County.
“Blind Spot” makes clear that there is no simple left-right divide on anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Although most of the antisemitism it shows is from the left — insofar as the terms “right” and “left” matter here; as Mr. Newberger said, “those words have been hijacked” — it also includes clips from the infamous neo-Nazi Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, with young tiki-torch-carrying men shouting “Jews shall not replace us.”
“We focus on campus antisemitism, which comes predominately from what people call the far left, but this is the horseshoe theory of antisemitism,” Mr. Gold said. The right and the left are so far out that they come together. “One of the things that the far left and the far right agree on is that they all hate Jews.”
“One of the mandates that we had is that we were calling balls and strikes,” Mr. Newberger continued. “Lenny and I have different political beliefs — I probably lean a little more left than he does — but we never talk about it. We are in lockstep when it comes to Jewish students being excluded for being Jewish, when Israel is erased from the map, when the narrative of how Israel became a country is distorted. We come together on the idea that it is very important that Jewish students are able to express themselves, and to be able to embrace Israel, without being discriminated against.
“Whether you are on the left or the right, if you are against that, you are part of the problem.”
“‘Blind Spot’ is a civil rights story, about Jewish identity and the civil rights of Jews,” Mr. Gold said. “I am proud of that.”
“Blind Spot” includes many Black supporters of Israel; some of them are Jewish, some are not, and it is not possible to tell who’s who just by looking.
It talks about the storied alliance between Blacks and Jews, which was complicated, true, but also real, and shows photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr with his friend Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who led Temple B’nai Abraham, which then was in Newark and since has moved to Livingston.
It includes reporting from Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, the director of education and national security program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who is proudly both Black and Jewish, and so is her son, Noah. (She and her husband, Anton Shufutinsky, a Russian-American, have two sons, both of whom have made aliyah.) Noah — a rapper who uses the stage name Westside Gravy — also is in the film, as a GWU student, talking about his love for Israel.
It also interviews Dion Pierre, who is young, Black, not Jewish, and the Algemeiner’s campus correspondent. He is a careful observer and punctilious reporter and reflects what he sees through his lens as a Black man. His sympathetic but outsider perspective is valuable.
And it also includes an interview with Ritchie Torres, the Democratic member of Congress from the Bronx whose inspirational life story and unexpected but steady, measured support for Israel and willingness to show up in Jewish places to offer that support provide hope to the community.
So, “Blind Spot” began as an effort to educate both the Jewish community and the wider American world to ongoing antisemitism, but that was before October 7.
Mr. Gold had been keeping meticulously detailed spreadsheets of incidents of antisemitism on campus for years. He showed it to the filmmakers at Ironbound. “Our challenge was where to focus,” Mr. Newberger said. “How do we show that this is a systemic problem rather than isolated incidents?”
They looked for partners, people like Mr. Pierre, or Julia Jassey, the founder and CEO of Jewish on Campus, who were paying attention and could report on what they’d seen.
“And then when we put our heads together, Ironbound and Lenny, we were able to figure out a way to home in on specific incidents around the country that helped tell the story of what was happening, whether it was a toxic professor at GWU who was giving Jewish students ultimatums about their beliefs, or old-fashioned antisemitism like throwing rocks at windows in a Hillel house, or excluding Jewish students from clubs and groups, or injecting ideological falsehoods in a mandatory part of the curriculum,” Mr. Newberger said. “All of these things were clocked and reported at various schools.
“And the way that universities were responding was very important to Lenny.”
Then October 7 happened.
On October 8, “We went back and looked at all the footage we’d shot up to that point,” Mr. Newberger said. “We had thought it was great at the time, but we wanted to see how it landed now, in the wake of October 7. And we all thought that it was as great then as it was when we first saw it.
“We think that it’s even more impactful and more relevant now, because our goal when we started filming was to educate people about a problem that most of them didn’t know about.
Back then, “we knew that it was a problem. We knew that it was important. We knew that it was impacting Jewish students in a bad way, and most people didn’t know that. It wasn’t being reported on CNN or the New York Times or the network nightly news.”
Why? “You’d have to ask the journalists who failed to report it,” Mr. Newberger said.
But he came up with a possible, if lame, reason. “If you look at any of these events as isolated incidents, they’re easily dismissed as oh, you know, some people are ignorant, and some people hate the Jews, and you know, this stuff happens. But nobody except Lenny was looking at the problem from 50,000 feet up in the air.
“It wasn’t until October 7, when all of a sudden the problem was on steroids. People felt as if they were caught off guard, but we weren’t.
“We were seeing that it was really well organized. That the infiltration into the education system had been carefully thought through and funded. It wasn’t just isolated incidents of antisemitism as much as it was an attempt to hijack ideological pillars of the education system.
“When Lenny first came to us, we already had made two films about Israel’s baseball team, which were largely about the relationship between American Jews and Israel, but we had been aware of some of the teams’ experiences traveling and meeting organized protests, here in the United States, calling Israel an apartheid colonizer.
“So we were getting glimpses of anti-Zionism, which is antisemitism according to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which we cover in the film.” (That’s the definition created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a group of 35 countries. It says: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It includes examples of antisemitism expressed as anti-Zionism; it is this part of the definition to which groups that reject it object.)
Mr. Newberger talked about a demonstration at Brooklyn College, which he found oddly well planned.
“It was three or four days after October 7, and it was extremely well organized,” he said. “I went through the Instagram pages that were promoting it, and they went 20 slides deep with how to talk to reporters, how not to talk to reporters, and what chants they should be chanting.
“This was not like a spur-of-the-moment reaction to October 7. This was well-oiled machinery.”
The question of anti-Zionist actions being well funded and organized is not explored in “Blind Spot.”
“It’s only now, in the months after ‘Blind Spot’ has been released, that I’ve been doing further research for a potential new project about K-through-12 antisemitism,” he continued. “I’ve been talking with people who have been showing me a direct line from foreign country funding, whether it’s Qatar or China or Russia, to shell corporations that fund curriculum creation.
“Curriculums that erase Israel are now being distributed to teachers at national teacher conferences. This is not in ‘Blind Spot.’ This is only since ‘Blind Spot.’ It was clear to Lenny and Ironbound that this was not coming out of a vacuum, that these professors who were espousing the erasure of Israel, that Zionism is apartheid, Israelis are colonial settlers, and every other negative you can throw at Israel — it was clear to us that they were organized to a degree, that there was a connection between them, from city to college to college to city.
“‘Blind Spot’ doesn’t draw a target on the funding, but this is what I’ve learned from talking and researching since. It’s clear that this is not something that can be done without financial support, because it’s so broad, and that’s why it’s such a big problem.
“And we’re not just talking about an incident at, let’s say, Columbia. We’re talking about incidents at the University of Vermont and Tulane and George Washington University. It’s because the movement that was very well prepared and eager to jump from October 7 to anti-Israel rhetoric was organized, funded, and had their sh** together. Pardon my French.
“We made a deliberate choice to focus exclusively on the students, but we know that there are other aspects of what’s happening that are important. I personally hope that other people make films to cover it. because if we had covered it, we easily could have made a four- or five-hour movie.”
Mr. Newberger talked about one of the incidents in “Blind Spot,” which showed a professor, Lara Sheehi, at work at GWU. “She’s teaching a psychology class, and she asks students to go around the room and get to know each other. It’s a feel-good exercise. When a student says they’re Jewish and from Israel, she says, ‘It’s not your fault that you were born in Israel.’”
“And it goes on from there.”
After more incidents involving Dr. Sheehi, the Jewish organization StandWithUs filed a Title VI complaint against her, but a law firm that GWU hired “said ‘Oh, no, no, it’s fine. There’s been no violation,’” Mr. Newberger said. “But the heat on her was so hot, she actually left GWU and went to Doha University.
“And Doha, of course, is in Qatar,” a country often suspected of funneling funds to support antisemitic acts, among many other things.
“So this professor, who was well organized and ahead of her time with her rhetoric, was espousing this anti-Zionist stuff in her mandatory class.
“These aren’t like Israel studies or Middle Eastern studies teachers we’re talking about. They’re teachers in sociology classes and art history classes and psychology classes. All this was just allowed to go on.”
Because Mr. Gold and Mr. Newberger both worry that the antisemitism in schools is not confined to universities, they show one story of antisemitism in a high school. It’s at Friends Seminary, where Mr. Gold’s son was a student, but it’s a story not from 2009 but just a few years ago. It’s told by Elliot Sadoff, who just graduated from Columbia, reflecting on his time at Friends, and the antisemitism he faced. “I definitely felt ostracized there,” he said. “I would not send my kids there.”
But the film is not all dark. The students are all impressive, smart, articulate, apparently self-confident, and brave. Very, very brave.
Mr. Gold and Mr. Newberger agree.
“This generation is ready to lead the fight,” Mr. Gold said. “They will lead with steadfast confidence and unconquerable moral courage.”
Who: The Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey
What: Is showing the film “Blind Spot”; a panel discussion with Leonard Gold, Jeremy Newberger, and college students will follow.
Where: At Westwood Cinemas in Westwood
When: On Sunday, April 27, from 3:30 to 5:30
For more information: Go to jfnnj.org and scroll down, or email Laura Freeman at LauraF@jfnnj.org, or call her at (201) 820-3923.
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