Alexa Smith gives presentations to high school students on how to speak up against antisemitism on college campuses inspired by her own antisemitic experiences at the University of Michigan and her efforts to speak up there. Contact Alexa Smith at alsmich@umich.edu
From Alexa Smith as background information for the discussion of this podcast:
The title of the mandatory talk was PENNY STAMPS SPEAKER SERIES: Emory Douglas: Designing Justice -- see https://stamps.umich.edu/events/emory-douglas
In October of 2018, my senior year at University of Michigan, I was forced to sit through an overtly antisemitic lecture as part of the Penny Stamps Speaker Series, which is a required course for all art students at the University of Michigan. The lecturer, Emory Douglas, projected an image of Adolf Hitler and the Prime Minister of Israel together with the caption “Guilty of Genocide” across their foreheads. In what world is it okay for a mandatory course to host a speaker who compares Adolf Hitler to the Prime Minister of Israel?
As a Wolverine, I sat through this lecture horrified at the hatred and intolerance being spewed on our campus. As a Jew who is proud of my people and my homeland, I sat through this lecture feeling targeted and smeared to be as evil as the man who perpetuated the Holocaust and systematically murdered six million Jews.
This experience was not unique. Two years prior I was forced to sit through another mandatory Stamps lecture in which the speaker, Joe Sacco, made references to Israel being a terrorist state and explicitly claimed that Israeli soldiers were unworthy of being represented as actual human beings in his artwork.
This time in 2018 I decided I would no longer sit quietly and allow others to dehumanize my people and my community. I credit my brother Dan Smith with his tremendous help and guidance in my calling for actionable change from the university. I simply could not have done anything that I did without him.
Unfortunately, three years later and the University of Michigan administration is repeatedly failing to forcefully respond to antisemitism, and so it comes back worse and worse each time. A line needs to be drawn and it needs to be drawn now.
