The return of college football is bringing a surge of excitement to sports fans nationwide. It also offers a novel opportunity to confront the antisemitism that has plagued university campuses for the last two years. 

The connection isn’t obvious, but it is powerful. 

I know, because this spring Alums for Campus Fairness pioneered tapping into the on-campus celebrity of college sports stars to amplify calls for university administrators to do more to protect Jewish and pro-Israel students. The early results were encouraging and suggest that organizations invested in ending the scourge of anti-Jewish hate should take advantage of new ways to enlist college athletes in the cause. 

Our campaign focused on Syracuse University. In 2023, the university emerged as a model for others to follow when it chose to tackle incidents of antisemitic behavior on campus head-on following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. As many other campuses experienced, anti-Israel encampments were constructed on Syracuse property; but instead of waffling, administrators promptly confronted and dismantled these antisemitic displays. They went further, condemning the “reprehensible behavior” of demonstrators who falsely accused Jewish organizations of being “complicit in genocide.” And when other students brandished pro-intifada signs at a sit-in, the school’s vice president for student experience called out the term’s association with violence and genocide and made it clear that noncompliance with university policy would result in disciplinary action. 

To give administrators the public credit they deserve for this leadership, we engaged two mission-aligned student athletes to boost the message behind a thank you campaign we deployed on and around the campus. 

The athletes — football player Dan Villari and basketball player Chris Bell (who has since transferred to the University of California, Berkeley) — posted memes we designed to their X and Instagram accounts, generating over 20,000 impressions collectively. More importantly, it marked the first time a Jewish philanthropy has used the NCAA’s Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) policy, the three-year-old framework empowering college athletes to profit from their personal brands. The policy is typically associated with nationally recognized college stars who have used it to ink major endorsement deals with leading companies. Less heralded but just as significant, it has created opportunities for a larger swath of college athletes to lend their voices to causes closer to their own campuses. 

Chris and Dan’s posts were key in bringing attention to our broader campaign.  Using a mix of targeted digital advertising we generated nearly 590,000 views on Reddit, Meta and LinkedIn, and reached hundreds of students through digital billboard displays. Beyond the athletes’ posts, we deployed humorous memes — one depicted Syracuse mascot Otto the Orange “dunking on antisemitism” — to engage Gen Z students in their preferred medium. The approach might strike older audiences as odd, given the weightiness of the subject, but it worked: The campaign was a massive success, expanding our organization’s Syracuse chapter by more than 1,000 new members.

Now there are signs that like-minded Jewish nonprofits are adopting similar strategies. 

The Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, for one, recently announced its Blue Square Athlete Ambassador Program, leveraging the NIL model to highlight Jewish college athletes “breaking barriers and representing the unique stories of the Jewish experience – on and off the field.” Among the inaugural class, standout Stanford University baseball player Ethan Hott said his career as a collegiate athlete has shown him “the unifying power of sports firsthand,” and he intends to “continue leveraging that power while encouraging others to celebrate their faith proudly and stand united against hate.”

More will hopefully follow. And our organization will continue to apply the lesson demonstrated by this success: Confronting this virulent hate that has so regrettably erupted nationwide requires startup-style thinking, harnessing creativity and nimbleness to make use of new strategies and tools. For our part, if university administrators won’t fulfill their duty to create a safe environment on campus for all students, we will find innovative ways to hold them to account. 

Jewish and pro-Israel students returning to campus for the new academic year deserve nothing less. 

Avi D. Gordon is the executive director of Alums for Campus Fairness.