Last fall, University of Maryland President Darryll Pines established a “Joint Presidential Senate Task Force on Antisemitism and Islamophobia” amid the surge of pro-Palestine protests that rocked American colleges during the first few months of the Israel-Hamas war.

The task force’s stated aims were to “address and mitigate future hate-bias incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia,” in hopes of implementing “new initiatives to foster understanding, dialogue and support.”

Now that a year has passed, Pines sent out a campus-wide email last month announcing that the task force had produced a report, recommending 10 steps the university should take to combat bigotry.

The report’s excessively verbose list of recommendations suggests nothing of substance. Half of them relate to increased education regarding hate, perhaps hinting at making a pre-freshman module specifically related to antisemitism and Islamophobia. The rest are general prescriptions to the UMD administration.

This report was disappointingly insufficient. It lacked the clarity to call out explicitly antisemitic expressions, and worse still, it offers no solution to the rise in antisemitic incidents on campus.

Regarding the Holocaust 2.0 chalking, the report explains that it “was understood by protestors and many on campus to refer to Palestinians as victims and not as a threatening gesture toward Jewish people.

Others on campus, however, viewed the statement as a reference to the Nazi Holocaust, and it was widely distributed on social media through early 2024, where it was often understood in this way.”

What other holocaust could it be referencing? There is no interpretation of this chalking which exonerates it. The Task Force could have taken a strong stance against chalkings of this kind, but instead excuses it by giving it a plausible double meaning. 

Earlier last year, a Jewish student living in campus housing was the target of antisemitic whiteboard graffiti on their own door.

Presumably in reference to this incident, the task force report reads: “Police reported at least one hate bias incident of a swastika being posted on a whiteboard in the past year. Because such incidents have also occurred in previous years, it is unclear whether these incidents were directly related to the war in Gaza.”

The very same student was graffitied again. Police were notified, but there seems to be no indication that anyone was ever caught or disciplined.

This incident and others like it constitute a concern that many people would consider to be cardinal.

The Task Force report includes a report from the UMPD on hate/bias incidents brought to their attention from January 2022 – August 2024.

This section mentions that the campus protests passed exceedingly peacefully, with no “criminal violations requiring enforcement at these free-expression events.”

On the other hand, there was an alarming rise of antisemitic incidents evidenced in two data tables, which the report shoved to the very last page of the last appendix of the report.

This UMPD report may have arrived late in the drafting of the lifetime of this task force, but the challenge of antisemitic harassment was already well known.

Taylor Faust, a student advocate for Israel, has recorded dozens of these antisemitic incidents since last spring and has submitted countless BISS reports.

“There’s no way to not know about it, you very much have to be looking away to not see there is an issue,” she said. 

None of the recommendations determined by this Task Force tackle the issue of antisemitic incidents. The Task Force report offers little recourse to this problem besides reporting to the existing Bias Incident Support Services (BISS).

“The issue right now is that the jump from BISS to the Office of Student Conduct is huge,” Taylor said. “You might feel uncomfortable with a specific person or situation, but not want to report a specific person to the OSC… There needs to be an in-between.”

The report seems to brush this data aside and direct its focus on the comparative results from the “Campus Belonging & Community” survey.

This survey, conducted last spring, first asks the respondent if they identify as either Jewish or Muslim, and asks questions about general comfort level and negative treatment, which can both be interpreted vastly differently by each participant.

Following the Jamie Raskin speech disruption last spring semester, some Maryland faculty concerned about the rise of antisemitism on campus banded together to form the Faculty Against Antisemitism and for Academic Freedom (FAAFAF).

This group issued a dissent to the Task Force, written by emeritus professor Jeffrey Herf and signed by nine other members.

“The task force omits details of testimony of Jewish students in their own words who felt intimidated by the persistent ferocity of the anti-Zionist demonstrations,” Herf told Mitzpeh. “Such a survey is no substitute for the testimony of students whose concerns and protests initially led to the formation of the task force.”

Herf called attention to the fact that the task force had not adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which would encompass calls to destroy the state of Israel like the chant “intifada, revolution.”

Herf also objected to the manner in which committee members were appointed, and questioned their expertise on antisemitism.

“There is nothing ‘joint’ about it — the committee was appointed by the president,” Herf stressed. “There are members of the faculty who are familiar with Islam and the Middle East, but they will not and have not worked on antisemitism when it comes in its Islamist or leftist forms.”

This task force — which is co-chaired by Maxine Grossman, head of Jewish Studies, and Middle-East policy expert Shibley Telhami – is composed of 26 students and faculty, both Jewish and Muslim.

Jewish Student Union President Stone Schwartz, a student member of the task force, was satisfied with its work.

“It being a joint task force really gave us the opportunity as students and faculty to come together and talk in a respectful manner, and really see each other’s perspectives,” he expressed. “I do think the task force was successful on that aspect… on humanizing each side.”

In regard to the aforementioned incidents reported to the police, Stone commented that “the task force is mainly concerned with what can we do to prevent them from happening again.”

“There could have been a higher focus on the incidents, but I think that a major goal of the task force was to find a way to move forward – not move past – and build a stronger campus,” he said.

While the university can’t fully satisfy both the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine side, we are right, as Jewish students, to expect that the university take firm action against the antisemitism spurred on by Oct. 7. But judging by the task force’s pareve and lacking report, it seems that this university is doing the opposite.

The cycle of hate, which sees Jewish existence on this campus fall into jeopardy each time a conflict erupts thousands of miles away, must end. But for this to happen, the university must move beyond empty words and begin actually listening to its Jewish student population.