JEWISH WEEK
by Hannah Dreyfus
October 8, 2014

Early Sunday morning, just hours after the end of Yom Kippur, the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) at Atlanta’s Emory University was spray-painted with swastikas and offensive graffiti……Though immediately condemned by Jewish organizations and university staff, the incident didn’t take place in a vacuum. The Emory attack is just one in a growing number of incidents targeting Jewish students that have taken place on college campuses around the U.S. in recent months. Just last week fliers, which appeared around the University of California, Santa Barbara campus declared that “9/11 Was an Outside Job,” with a large blue Star of David.

In an attempt to arm students with high-tech tools to fight anti-Semitism on campus, the Simon Wiesenthal Center this week unveiled its new mobile app, CombatHateU. The group’s leaders were joined by AEPi international fraternity leaders Tuesday in Midtown to announce the launch of the app, which will give college students a way to immediately report incidents of anti-Semitism on campus. The app is the third in a series of digital anti-hate initiatives developed by the Wiesenthal Center’s Digital Terrorism and Hate Project; the previous two have focused on reporting and monitoring anti-Semitic incidents online.

At the launch, representatives from the Wiesenthal Center also noted recent anti-Israel incidents, including at Ohio University last month, when Student Senate president Megan Marzec doused herself in fake blood on video while urging students to boycott Israel (the video was intended to parody the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge)……

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