Jewish students are returning to college campuses this month amid renewed calls for protests over the Israel-Hamas War, the resignation of yet another Ivy League president over the handling of last semester’s protests, and a federal judge’s preliminary injunction against UCLA for allowing protesters to exclude Jewish students from parts of campus. 

As the son of two Holocaust survivors, I always felt blessed to be born at a uniquely peaceful and prosperous moment in Jewish history. That sense of gratitude has been increasingly replaced with a powerful fear that in a world that’s moving backward, the fate of my children and future grandchildren will look more like that of Jews in the past.

I grew up with the horror stories told by my parents. As teens, they were rounded up from their homes in Transylvania and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were forced on a death march before being liberated by the American Army. Liberation, however, was short-lived. They were soon jailed in British-run detention camps in Cyprus until, like many displaced and orphaned child survivors of the Holocaust, they were eventually permitted to settle in Israel. They stayed until my mother discovered years later that her father — whom she believed had died in the camps — was actually alive in a small Swedish town close to the displaced persons camp where he was sent after the Holocaust. 

My sister and I were raised in this small town. As the only Jewish boy at school, I certainly encountered moments of antisemitism; but I considered myself lucky to never have suffered the atrocities my parents experienced. My children were raised in New York, attended Jewish day school and led a remarkably cocooned life. Today, however, that cocoon has been crushed.

The nearly 16 million Jews around the globe today are divided primarily between Israel and the United States, but neither country feels like a refuge. My family was visiting my mother in Tel Aviv when Hamas attacked on Oct. 7. Returning to the U.S., we witnessed deeply troubling eruptions of antisemitism on college campuses — Jewish students being blocked from classes and told to go back to Poland, where my parents were lucky to have escaped with their lives. 

The level of antisemitism unleashed after Oct. 7 woke Jews up to the fact that we’re not immune to the bigotry of the past. Antisemitism merely hibernated underground for much of my life only to emerge with brutal force once again. For the first time in their lives, my adult children are asking themselves: Is this where I belong? And if not here, then where am I safe?

It is truly unsettling to see protestors call for the annihilation of Israel, where half of the world’s Holocaust survivors live. As a strong supporter of higher education initiatives and work on Holocaust scholarship and education, I was dumbfounded to read a letter signed by prominent professors, including those who teach Jewish history, trying to dilute the most globally accepted definition of antisemitism in order to inoculate protesters from the reality of their anti-Jewish bias.

That this is happening at the nation’s most prestigious universities is no surprise to me. Echoes of the past are inescapable. During the darkest days in Germany, antisemitism was also embraced by the elite. Something has clearly gone awry in higher education, and it’s time for alumni and campus leaders to speak out with moral clarity and demand change.

While campus protesters casually equate Zionism with racism and claim that Israel is a colonialist endeavor, those who endured the Holocaust and years of detention and displacement have a different perspective, as do I: Zionism is the right to self-determination for Jews in their ancestral homeland after centuries of fragmentation due to violent pogroms, expulsions and campaigns of annihilation. The establishment of a modern Jewish state gave Jews a new sense of safety and strength, and this is partly why the demonization of Israel strikes at the very heart of the Jewish community. 

As universities embark on a new academic year, their leaders must acknowledge that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Those who equivocate will be complicit in endangering the safety of Jewish students.

It is also vitally important that institutions like the USC Shoah Foundation lead efforts to assess and respond to antisemitism in all its forms — including antisemitism at USC, one of our country’s foremost universities.

Within days of Oct. 7, the USC Shoah Foundation went to work gathering testimonies of survivors of Hamas’s deadly antisemitic attacks. The foundation has also established a training program for student athletes and other leaders who are learning to recognize and understand antisemitic hate. And this week, the foundation launched a major initiative, the Countering Antisemitism Laboratory, which will provide a platform for more research, education and a large testimony-based archive focused on the world’s oldest hatred. 

After Oct. 7, I vowed to my mother I would redouble my efforts to confront antisemitism, defend Israel’s right to exist and promote tolerance with unwavering determination. I understand and embrace the responsibility that survivors have bestowed upon us through their stories. I call on professors and administrators to listen, to reflect and to ensure that students are no longer taught to hate Jews. 

Will these efforts matter? I don’t know. But I owe it to my children to try.

Joel Citron, an alumnus of the University of Southern California, is chair of the Board of Councilors of the USC Shoah Foundation and a member of the university’s Presidential Leadership Council. He is also the vice chair of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation.