EDITOR'S NOTE: The original version of this piece included an inaccurate reference to criminal charges faced by the occupiers of the Millar Library that has been removed.
Conversations around antisemitism on college campuses have taken on national prominence since the Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel. At Portland State University, those conversations had already been happening for some time.
“We definitely started, however many years ago, at the bottom and made some progress,” Michelle Bombet Minch, co-chair of the Israel Advocacy Committee of Portland’s Jewish Community Relations Council said. “Then Oct. 7 happened. It was like, ‘Oh, now things are really going to be a challenge.’”
Nearly two years later, The Jewish Review was invited to examine the state of the university’s efforts to address its campus climate for Jewish students – to see what’s been done, whether it’s had an effect and what remains to be addressed.
Bob Horenstein, the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland’s Chief Community Relations and Public Affairs Officer, recalls dealing with issues of antisemitism on the PSU campus in the last decade in an entirely different context.
“It wasn’t the sort of antisemitism you see today,” he explained, “more the far-right kind of antisemitism that we didn’t think PSU was taking seriously.”
There was anti-Israel activism, to be sure. Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights, an affiliate of Students for Justice in Palestine (which has been banned or suspended at numerous schools around the country) sponsored a student government resolution in 2016 that called for the university to divest from Israel-connected businesses which passed PSU’s Student Senate by a vote of 22-2. Another resolution in 2021 specifically targeted PSU’s relationship with The Boeing Company; a relationship which provides scholarships and internship opportunities for PSU students and which activists object to due to Boeing’s work manufacturing military equipment which is sold to Israel.
“These are nuisances more than anything else,” Horenstein said.
“That was not a representative or typical moment,” Natan Meir, the head of the Judaic Studies program at PSU, said of the 2016 student government resolution.
By early 2023, Horenstein had been having regular meetings with Stephen Percy, who became president of the university in 2019.
“It wasn’t until Stephen that we really started to develop a strong relationship,” Horenstein said.
That relationship started to pay dividends. Solomon Wolfe graduated from PSU earlier this year – he got involved with Jewish community on campus through Greater Portland Hillel and became a leader in PSU’s Jewish Student Union.
“There was a lot of positive energy toward getting people involved. We did a lot of tabling events where we’d talk about upcoming celebrations we’d be having or events happening on campus and it felt good,” he said.
Sure, there were comments from passers-by and a few looks, but Wolfe and fellow JSU leader Ava Ponder spoke positively of the atmosphere on campus for Jewish students in the spring of 2023.
“People were pretty accepting,” said Ponder, who also graduated with the Class of 2025.
Outdoor gatherings for the High Holy Days and campus Sukkot celebration went smoothly, she recalled.
“It felt safe,” she said, “as safe as I think having a large number of Jewish students collecting on campus can feel.”
Ponder also took part in PDX Hillel’s Healing Perspectives trip to Israel and the West Bank in the summer of 2023– a group which included non-Jewish student leadership and tried to provide a nuanced examination of the region and its challenges.
In addition to supporting such activities, Jen Yoken, the former board chair of PDX Hillel, was party to the ongoing meetings between Jewish community leaders and university administration, including President Percy, who retired in the summer of 2023.
“Then PSU, of course, had a new president,” Yoken said.
Dr. Ann Cudd was not a stranger to higher education leadership when she took office as PSU’s President Aug. 1, 2023. After receiving a doctorate in philosophy and pioneering the field of analytical feminism, Cudd rose through increasingly prominent leadership roles, eventually being appointed Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, her graduate alma mater, in 2018. She’s also not a stranger to Jewish community tragedy; the Tree of Life Synagogue is less than two miles from Pitt’s campus.
“Many of our faculty, our deans, were members of the synagogue. One of our faculty members was murdered in the attack,” she said. “I remember we were wearing these t-shirts that said, ‘Pitt Strong’ and had a Star of David. The community really came together.”
She had already scheduled a lunch with Horenstein, Yoken, Bombet Minch, Meir and other Jewish community representatives, a sort of meet-and-greet event, for the second week of October. Also in attendance was Mark Rosenbaum. Actively involved in Portland’s Jewish community, Rosenbaum is also a former President of the Portland State University Foundation and a recipient of PSU’s Presidential Medal who joined the university’s Board of Trustees shortly before President Cudd’s appointment in 2023.
“My impression of President Cudd was that she’s very competent, very down to earth, very transparent,” Rosenbaum said. “She’s thoughtful and interested in engaging the broader community; she wanted to bring Portland State out more to the public.”
The agenda of the meeting was dramatically altered by the events that immediately preceded it in Israel and their ramifications in Portland.
“Almost immediately after Oct. 7, the environment on campus for Israel-identifying Jews and Israelis became hostile and even toxic, with pervasive anti-Zionist sentiment and rhetoric that often crossed the border into antisemitism,” Meir wrote in an email to The Jewish Review. “We saw widespread use of messaging and imagery widely considered antisemitic, such as ‘From the River to the Sea’ and blood libel accusations (e.g., posters with the slogan ‘We Do Not Drink Blood’). We also heard from students that some faculty members were politicizing their classrooms, leading some Jewish students to feel excluded and unwelcome.”
“I don’t think any university was prepared for the amount of public demonstrations and the number of ways in which emotion was going to demonstrate itself,” Rosenbaum said.
Wolfe, in his role as a JSU leader, recalled fellow students telling him they quickly felt uncomfortable openly expressing Jewish identity on campus. He said that JSU events that would have previously had 20 or 30 attendees drew single-digit numbers of students after Oct. 7.
“People didn’t feel safe having Shabbat in the park or planning meetings that were more public,” Ponder added.
“Our students were afraid to go to campus. They were afraid to go to class,” Yoken said. “PSU wasn’t doing much right after Oct. 7.”
Several students came to the first meeting with President Cudd and presented their experiences upfront.
“It was helpful,” President Cudd said, “in my coming to understand the environment for our Jewish students, for our Jewish citizens in Portland and how that was beginning to look, frankly, pretty ugly.”
“Some of us were in tears in the room,” Bombet Minch said of the meeting. “The biggest thing that we heard was not just how uncomfortable they were on campus but how, in many ways [President Cudd] contributed to that because she did not put out a statement in support of the students immediately.”
“I know some other universities in the area made statements, reached out more publicly to the Jewish communities on campus,” Ponder said, “and I don’t remember Portland State really doing that.”
It wasn’t until Nov. 1 that President Cudd released “A note about commemoration, tolerance and our community” on PSU’s website.
“We do not tolerate violence or hate of any kind, and we stand up strongly against antisemitism and Islamophobia, both of which are rising nationally as a result of recent events. We believe that students, faculty and staff — with all of their diverse backgrounds and beliefs — deserve to be safe and seen in our community,” the statement said in part. “As we watch with sadness the human tragedies unfolding in the Middle East war, many in our community are in pain and passions are understandably running high. It is more important than ever that we recommit to our core values.”
“[President Cudd] definitely made an effort to engage Hillel and the greater Jewish community. She was very open to that. She was continuing the work of her predecessor, President Percy,” Yoken said. “The problem was, early on, there was a big question with President Cudd as to whether oe not she truly understood the critical needs of Jewish students, what Jew-hatred looks like, what the students were experiencing and how it was affecting them.”
“When Oct. 7 happened, it was really a shock,” President Cudd said. “It surprised me that the reaction was not all sympathy for Israel and for the innocent civilians who were attacked, but rather some glorification of the resistance that you saw in Instagram posts. I would say that was in Portland generally. Portland is a certain kind of place. It has a politics I did not expect. It would not have been the same reaction in Pittsburgh.”
In December of 2023, President Cudd formed the Task Force for Building Community and Fighting Hate, which was more fully announced in January of 2024 and chaired by former President Percy.
“I was on that task force,” Horenstein said. “I didn’t feel like it really did anything to address antisemitism on campus.”
“Overall, the administration’s response to the crisis on our campus was fragmented; on the whole, it seemed unable to recognize that antisemitism was a real problem at PSU.” Meir said in an email. “That’s not to say that individual administrators did not have excellent intentions and deep sympathy for the plight of Jewish students, but as an institution, PSU seemed unable to respond appropriately.”
The university’s relationship with Boeing came up once again: A demonstration organized by SUPER disrupted the Jan. 26, 2024 meeting of the Board of Trustees to the extent that trustees were escorted from the room by campus security officers. The Vanguard, PSU's student newspaper, reported that demonstrators physically blocked several trustees’ vehicles from leaving the parking lot and that property damage and vandalism to the meeting room were found in the demonstration’s wake. On May 13, the Student Senate once again passed a resolution calling for PSU to sever its connections to Boeing – the third in less than 10 years.
The task force, which eventually became known as the Task Force on Building Community Through Dialogue, released a 33-page report in July of 2024. One of the items highlighted in the report was an interfaith and intercultural dialogue facilitated by the Middle Eastern, North African and South Asia Cultural Center and its assistant director, Ahmed El Mansouri. JSU members, students from the Muslim Student Association and PDX Hillel staff participated.
“At the outset I introduced them to a conflict resolution model that we leaned into throughout the process,” El Mansouri said in an email describing the dialogue to PSU’s Director of Strategic Communications Christina Williams, who forwarded the email to The Jewish Review. “The students used that framework to guide what were often difficult but ultimately very constructive conversations. Their shared goal was to move toward collaboration. The outcome was a joint tabling event on campus, where they issued a united message: ‘Ceasefire and the release of all hostages.’ Both groups intentionally chose that wording because, in the past, those terms have been framed in ways that put blame on one side or the other. They wanted to reclaim the language as a shared call to end the cycle of violence — the necessary first step for any further conversation about healing, justice, and safety.”
“I think he’s a good guy. I think he was trying to bring Jewish and Arab or Muslim students together to dialogue, and I applaud him for that,” Horenstein said of El Mansouri. “But it was such a small group that it didn’t have any sort of wider impact on the campus itself.”
The tabling event was held May 29. Linoy Yecheli, then the Israel Fellow for PDX Hillel, was at the event.
“Ahmed was very welcoming and tried to work with us as much as possible to make [MENASA] a more welcoming space,” she said. “It was inviting for [Jewish] students, but students still were afraid of encountering students that won’t necessarily share opinions with them.”
Before the tabling, the task force report and the renewed demands to cut off Boeing, however, came the climax of the growing anti-Israel protest movement and something of a turning point for the school and the community surrounding it.
The Branford Price Millar Library, with its distinctive semicircular glass facade bowing around a 120-year-old beech tree along Portland’s South Park Blocks, is a vital hub of campus life at PSU. It’s the largest academic library in Portland and a prime study spot for a student body that mostly lives off-campus.
On Apr. 29, 2024, following a pro-Palestinian demonstration on campus, a small group of individuals broke into the Millar Library and barricaded themselves inside. PSU’s campus was closed the next three days before Portland Police eventually cleared the building. The Portland Mercury reported that police arrested at least 30 people remaining inside, the majority of whom were not Portland State students.
Photographs of the exterior of the library, provided to The Jewish Review by a university employee on condition of anonymity, show graffiti including a rendition of “Intifada” that substitutes the first “a” with an anarchist symbol, “All Glory To Our Martyrs,” and “F*** Your Peace,” as well as large-format stickers on the exterior of the building and nearby lampposts which read “All Zionists Are B*******.”
“That was a really stressful time,” Ponder said. “It happened around our midterms, when the library is most in use.”
Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that it took $1.23 million dollars and more than four months to repair the building, including damage to electronics and the building’s fire alarm system.
Due to the ongoing investigation by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, President Cudd declined to speak on the record about the occupation of the library, providing a statement about the occupation through Liz Fuller of Gard Communications, a crisis communications firm working with the university.
“This was an extremely difficult time on campus, and my number one concern was making sure all students were safe,” the statement read. “. We worked closely with our government partners to address at each stage. It took us a few days to safely address the situation at the library and figure out the best way to address it. We knew that some protestors in the library were not students, and we wanted to make sure no one was harmed. We gave over operational control to law enforcement, and they safely resolved the situation. We closed the whole campus, not just the library, because we felt it created an unsafe environment in many ways. It’s important to note no amnesty was granted to students related to the library protests.”
“[The university] did what I thought was appropriate,” Rosenbaum said, “which was, when it became clear that this was a matter of extreme safety, they turned it over quickly to the City of Portland and the Portland Police to deal with because they didn’t have the manpower nor the expertise on how to handle the situation. It was the city that took rather a long period of time to work out their plan and to figure out how to do what they wanted to do.”
Rosenbaum noted that PSU has received criticism for the length of the occupation due to the response timeline of Portland Police. Ponder gave voice to those very concerns but said she felt supported as a Jewish student on campus during the process.
“[President Cudd] comes to our events. She listens to us,” she said. “But I think the administration maybe wasn’t prepared for this type of encampment and this type of political unrest on campus.”
“Especially reflecting back on it, I do feel like we were supported by the administration,” Wolfe said.
“I’ve been in higher education more than 35 years. I’ve never seen anything like this. The level of vehemence and even violence of the protests, it’s unprecedented in my career,” President Cudd told The Jewish Review.
“I think the turning point was the occupation, the destruction of the library,” Horenstein said. “As we continued to meet with [President Cudd] and put forward expectations, we started to see steps that were being taken.”
In the 15 months following the events in the Millar Library, the university has worked to take a more proactive approach to issues surrounding Jewish student life and pro-Palestinian activism. PSU has always had policies in place regarding how, where and when political protests can be conducted – those policies now have an easy-to-find home online (pdx.edu/free-speech) and the university has formed a Protest Expression Advisory Team to communicate those guidelines to the campus community and monitor social media and other platforms to know when things are happening and whether there’s a chance of something becoming an issue.
“I think we’ve gotten better at talking with our student leaders to say, ‘Hey, we know this event is going to happen. Here are our rules. Here’s what we’re expecting you to do. Of course, you’re free to gather and to protest, but you can’t disrupt our classes, you can’t take over buildings,” President Cudd said. “Those rules haven’t changed so much as we’ve been clearer about them.”
The school is also focusing on public clarity with its relationships with outside firms, both in terms of its investments and with business partnerships. President Cudd formed a committee to assemble recommendations to bring to the Board of Trustees, which sets university policy on such matters. The policy, President Cudd explained, “basically says we won’t take partisan political perspectives into account, but only consider PSU’s financial and educational needs when deciding on what partnerships or investments we'll engage in.” That policy was approved by the board in June of 2025 and should, in theory, put to rest any notions of the university backing away from its relationship with Boeing.
“What I wanted to do was step back and look at the principles behind how we engage with investments and partnerships,” she continued. “I think that our experience with these protests against Boeing, for instance, gave us good reason for adopting this stance of neutrality, because if we are changing our minds all the time about which companies we will partner with or invest with for partisan political reasons, then I think we won’t be seen as a very reliable partner.”
President Cudd is also working with academic departments and the university’s Faculty Senate on policies surrounding political statements made by university programs and departments – those conversations are ongoing. But it’s not just President Cudd and the board that are working on the issue.
“The university is taking serious steps to combat antisemitism, such as sending senior student affairs administrators to the Summer Institute on Antisemitism in Higher Education at Brandeis University,” Meir said.
The Summer Institute, in its second year, brought staff from more than 25 schools together to learn about antisemitism, how it specifically affects higher education and how to address it. “The Institute also explores anti-Zionism and its relationship to contemporary antisemitism, developing skills to navigate engaging with Israel in a time of crisis,” its website explained.
It wasn’t just administrators who had a chance to learn more about antisemitism. Meir has long offered a four-credit course on the history of antisemitism; in the spring of 2025, a no-cost, one-credit online version debuted and quickly filled to capacity.
“Several years ago, I heard about a free one-credit course on antisemitism that the University of Connecticut had decided to offer to all its students. After Oct. 7, it was clear to me that PSU needed such a course,” Meir said. “In meetings with President Cudd, I encouraged her to make such a course a priority, which she eventually did. That’s when my colleague Nina Spiegel ( the Rabbi Joshua Stampfer Associate Professor of Israel Studies) and I began to work on developing the course.”
“Making a course free requires a lot of work on the part of many people in the background,” President Cudd said, “but it was really well received and we’re looking for ways we can broaden the availability.”
Meir said he’ll be teaching the course again this spring and hopes that it will also be available to interested faculty and staff. He is already in talks with other institutions about replicating the course.
“Based on student evaluations, many students found the course to be highly relevant, especially given current events. They felt it provided them with a better understanding of antisemitism and equipped them to identify and combat it. For some, the course was ‘eye-opening,’ providing new knowledge about the history and experiences of the Jewish community. One student who identified themselves as Jewish specifically mentioned feeling less ‘othered’ and ‘unwelcomed’ as a result of taking the course,” he said. “My dream is to ultimately have the course be open to all Portlanders who are interested in educating themselves about antisemitism.”
“The 2024-25 academic year saw a significant drop in antisemitic rhetoric and incidents,” Meir said. “It is impossible to find just one reason for this, but much credit must be given to President Cudd’s newfound determination to ensure that PSU would no longer be a comfortable home for antisemitism.”
Incidents continued to arise – but the decisiveness with which they were addressed, and the frequency of that action, had changed.
There was still the matter of addressing the occupation of the Millar Library. The Vanguard reported that 33 individuals were subject to proceedings under the university’s code of conduct. Sanctions were handed down to 21 individuals as of November 2024. The PSU Campus Dispatch Newsletter, a blog maintained by PSU Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, published a portion of a conduct determination letter received by at least one student which detailed hefty sanctions – suspension from the university for the entire academic year, 20 hours of community service, financial restitution of $5,000 and a three-page review of the impact of the events and how “other options that were available for expression of free speech and sharing your concerns.”
Additionally, SUPER, the group which had led the disruption of the January 2024 board meeting, was placed on probation through June of 2025.
While much of the university’s action was in response to acute situations, they also took action to address longer-simmering problems.
One such issue was the Women’s Resource Center. Labeled as a space for “community engagement opportunities [and] feminist leadership education,” the WRC had become a bastion of anti-Israel sentiment under the leadership of Director Nic Francisco-Kaho’onei.
“They were promoting anti-Israel evets, teach-ins, that sort of thing,” Horenstein said.
“It was supposed to be open doors for everybody,” Bombet Minch said, “but it became a place of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel propaganda and Jewish students didn’t feel comfortable even going somewhere like that.”
The Vanguard reported that Francisco-Kaho’onei participated in a hunger strike during a “Week of Rage” led by the PSU Disarm and Divest Coalition beginning on the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks.
“A lot of their messaging tended to not seem as inclusive towards Jewish students and community members,” Ponder recalled. She said that the JSU had considered reaching out to the WRC to cosponsor a film screening about sexual violence by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, but decided not to due to the tone of the WRC’s messaging.
President Cudd declined to speak on the record about the WRC, but said in a statement through Fuller that “We have made some personnel and programmatic changes in the Women’s Resource Center… It is essential that the Women’s Resource Center, like every other place else on campus, is welcoming to students from all backgrounds.”
The most prominent change was at the top – on Apr. 25 of this year, Francisco-Kaho’onei was dismissed by the university. They were not the last PSU employee to come under the spotlight for anti-Israel activism.
Yasmeen Hanoosh, a Professor of World Languages, attended a rally outside the June 4 school board meeting in Beaverton in support of board member Tammy Carpenter, who was facing investigation over anti-Israel materials shared on her personal social media page. A video shows Hanoosh being asked by an unidentified interviewer if she is familiar with Hamas.
“I am Hamas,” Hanoosh responds. Gesturing to the crowd behind her, she added, “We are all Hamas.”
By June 6, Hanoosh had been placed on administrative leave by PSU, a move announced in a statement calling the video “reprehensible.”
“PSU stands unequivocally against antisemitism, terrorism, and hate of any kind, including the statements made in this video,’ the statement says. While the statement did not identify Hanoosh, KOIN-TV reported her identity.
“The faculty member was placed on administrative leave while they’re being investigated,” President Cudd told The Jewish Review earlier this month. “The investigation is still ongoing."
While much has been addressed, students at PSU are still dealing with antisemitism on campus.
Ari Douglas began his graduate studies in PSU’s School of Social Work in the fall of 2024.
“I had one professor ask me why I wasn’t at Brandeis for my MSW,” he said. “Brandeis doesn’t have an MSW program.”
The same professor, Douglas said, flatly denied that the PSU campus sits on land that was once the hub of Portland’s Jewish community before urban renewal eliminated the majority of the neighborhood.
Douglas also recalled a lunch-hour student-led workshop on antisemitism he was part of that fall.
“A student who was not Jewish said, in regards to choosing Israel, that they can just move,” Douglas explained. “I felt, and a friend of mine who was there with me felt that was deeply antisemitic and not in keeping with the values of social work, either. The refusal to look at intersectional issues is appalling, because we know that there are poor and unhoused Jews in Israel, and they cannot easily move.”
When asked how the university responded to the situations he mentioned, Douglas said, “not at all.”
Douglas is not the first person to have these sorts of experiences.
“We’ve seen that the School of Social Work has an anti-Israel culture,” Horenstein said. It’s why he’s been pursuing the viewpoint neutrality policy that the university is currently considering.
“I will say that the School of Social Work faculty feel strongly that political advocacy is part of what they teach their students, they feel that’s part of the discipline of social work itself that inevitably leads to potential disagreements about what kind of advocacy they should be engaged in,” President Cudd said. “Where we draw the line, of course, is with harassment and bias and hate speech. That should not be part of the academic environment.”
Meanwhile, SUPER continued to make waves on campus. A January protest by the group resulted in further conduct charges against the group – charges which were rescinded in April, though the group remained on probation through June.
The Portland Mercury noted that while a statement from the university said that “student conduct decisions are, and have always been, made independently,” the decision to rescind the charges came immediately after Portland City Councilor Mitch Green, whose District Four includes the PSU campus, said he would vote against city funding for PSU’s arts and cultural center project intended to replace the Keller Auditorium unless the charges against SUPER were dropped.
Yoken wants to see more done for Jewish students across campus, not just in the School of Social Work.
“I think that we, as a Jewish community, need to set the bar higher for our Jewish students on how we expect them to be treated on college campuses. The question for Portland state is: Can they make strides in a way that makes Jewish students want to attend Portland State and feel comfortable to proudly share and celebrate their Jewish identity,” she said, “and I’m not sure we’re there yet.”
For what it’s worth, neither is the U.S. Department of Education.
In February, PSU joined, along with Columbia University, Northwestern University, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Minnesota were notified by the department’s Office of Civil Rights that they were being investigated, pursuant to President Donald Trump’s executive order,” Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” for violations of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“Too many universities have tolerated widespread antisemitic harassment and the illegal encampments that paralyzed campus life last year, driving Jewish life and religious expression underground. The Biden Administration’s toothless resolution agreements did shamefully little to hold those institutions accountable,” Acting Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a media release from the department.
In March, OCR sent letters to those five universities and 55 others threatening enforcement actions under Title VI unless the schools “fulfill their obligations to protect Jewish students on campus.”
Horenstein noted that neither the education department nor the Anti-Defamation League, which has heavily criticized Portland State in recent months, have contacted him or any other local Jewish community leaders to discuss the situation.
“I believe you make change through relationships, through collaboration,” he said. “You may not get everything you want. But I think that’s how you do it, not coming down with a sledgehammer.”
Meetings between university leadership and Jewish community representatives are now quarterly, and Horenstein is in regular contact with President Cudd via text and email.
“I’m really grateful for my relationship with Bob. I’m always grateful for his advice,” President Cudd said. “He will ask me when he hears about some kind of incident or protest that’s coming up, whether it’s on our campus or beyond and we will dialogue about it. Sometimes he’s aware of things before I am, so I’m grateful for that.”
While President Cudd, Horenstein and many of those The Jewish Review spoke to said that significant improvements have been made on campus, there’s still work to be done. Bombet Minch is hopeful that PSU can move forward on policies around political positioning by academic programs.
“Not only is it, logically, the right thing to do and intellectually the right thing to do,” she said, “it shows a firm stance and not a wishy-washy sort of playing both sides. It puts a line in the sand.”
She also wans to see PSU incorporate antisemitism education into its diversity, equity and inclusion programs – an idea which may be more challenging with the closure of the Global Diversity and Inclusion Office amid a campus-wide reorganization of DEI programs, as announced earlier this month and reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Yoken would like to see PSU participate in Hillel International’s Campus Climate Initiative – a program that Oregon Hillel and the University of Oregon have already joined together in that helps schools build a comprehensive plan to address antisemitism. (See “Oregon Hillel seeks wellness professional, joins nationwide Campus Climate Initiative,” The Jewish Review, Apr. 2, 2025, page 4)
“I think the problem is that [PSU’s efforts to address antisemitism have] been reactive and not proactive,” Yoken said. “Something like the Campus Climate Initiative would have been a proactive step for the administration.”
For President Cudd, the focus is not only on continuing the progress that Portland State has made, but on making amends for that which went wrong.
“We need to repair relationships that were harmed in that 2023-24 year when there were so many protests and ugly things spray painted on walls,” she said. “The most important thing is, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘What can we do to repair this? How can we move forward?’ Talking about the things that we are trying to do to support students and asking them what more they’re interested in seeing.”
Wolfe feels like that has already begun – even if it wasn’t always visible.
“Because I was asserting myself in those spaces, making the time to talk to administration, that gave me a perspective,” he said. “But I do know that if you were a member of [JSU] and you weren’t reaching out directly to the administration and having conversations, it might have been tougher to see.”
Bombet Minch is almost certainly not alone in expecting exactly that.
“To uplift us and get is back to where we were before Oct. 7 is going to take things that are more visible,” she said, “repairing the damage that happened on campus so that PSU is seen as a safe place for Jews.”