Berkeley professor: I will not leave my office until the university addresses antisemitism

Ron Hassner, a professor of international conflict and religion at the University of California, Berkeley, announced last week that he would not leave his office until the institution has seriously responded to a surge of antisemitic incidents in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war, according to a letter that circulated online on Saturday.

“If my students feel that they cannot walk safely across campus without being bullied, then I will not cross campus either,” Hassner said. The scholar, who counts Israel among his areas of focus and recently authored a book on interrogational torture, will continue to teach his courses remotely from his office. 

The requests he has submitted to the university are that the school re-open the campus’s front gate, which anti-Israel demonstrators have blocked access to, and that the school apologize to and re-invite Ran Bar-Yoshafat, the Israeli reservist speak on campus whose event had to be moved off university grounds amid fears of security concerns. 

Hassner noted in the letter that the sit-in protest is “non-confrontational, non-violent, and legal,” contrasting it with other demonstrations. Though acknowledging that the act will initially be “easy to ignore,” the professor predicts that if the university fails to respond to his concerns adequately, “it will become an increasingly embarrassing public display” for the school. 

Hassner said that the primary purpose of the sit-in, though, is to communicate solidarity with Jewish students amid the current campus environment. “My office will be open at all hours of the day and night, on weekdays and weekends, to all students who do not feel safe, or who have been subjected to antisemitic abuse, or who wish to chat,” he wrote. 

Situation on campus is "shiva-worthy," prof says

“I will also leave a light on in my office window at all times so that all students…can see that at least one faculty member is sleeping as badly at night as they are.”

In an interview with the Jewish news outlet in Northern California, Hassner spoke of his own feeling of insecurity on campus. “I’m so sorely afraid,” he said. “It makes me want to cry.”

The professor compared his protest to sitting shiva, noting that he only uses the bathroom down the hall and does not have access to a shower, just as somebody in mourning does not bathe for the first seven days. The situation is “shiva worthy,” he told J. 

“If the university can’t get its grip around this, we are doomed,” he concluded. “Jewish students will stop coming to this campus.”