Rising anti-Semitism on American college campuses has dominated the headlines since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 of last year.
But the world’s oldest hatred pervades not just academia, but the workplace as well.widely distributed survey From the end of 2022 Of 1,131 U.S. recruiters, 26% said they were “unlikely” to proceed with hiring a Jewish applicant. Approximately 17% of recruiters even admitted that their company’s management “told them not to hire Jews.”
As for employees, according to a study conducted in late 2022 by an academic journal of more than 11,000 employees. Socius It found that more than half of all Jewish respondents said they had experienced discrimination at work. And this was before the Hamas attacks and the resulting 360% increase in anti-Semitic incidents across the United States in the months that followed.
Tensions over the conflict between Israel and Hamas are permeating businesses across the country, as both employees and company leaders take public stances on the war in Gaza.hundreds of companies condemned Hamas attack, many of the employees were not very sympathetic to Israel. And the resulting rift was as nasty as it was public.
For example, at Google, Israeli and Jewish employees Google’s San Francisco headquarters was the site of protests while condemning anti-Semitic comments posted on the company’s messaging channels. By pro-Palestinian activists. At Starbucks, company leaders took the unusual step of suing the company’s union. over pro-Palestinian posts on social media accounts.
Famous editor resigns new york timesa group of pro-Palestinian media workers criticized the paper’s coverage of the Gaza conflict during the occupation. The Times Manhattan headquarters in early November. After October 7, the workplace became a battlefield, with Jewish employees also caught in the crossfire.
Understandably, Jewish professionals are fearful and afraid to voice concerns about their safety and career prospects. But they also feel isolated, denied the structural support of formal anti-discrimination policies available to other minority groups.
new york post I recently spoke with Jewish experts from a variety of industries, along with academics and policymakers focused on office culture and anti-Semitism. That so many asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation speaks to the anxiety many Jews feel today.
Much of the blame can be placed on corporate diversity, equity and inclusion programs (DEI), which gained momentum in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020. Within two years, 75% of S&P 500 companies had chiefs.Diversity Officer, promoted Less than 50% in 2018. In 2022, the value of the entire DEI industry will increase almost $10 billion.
Despite years of rising anti-Semitism, corporate DEI departments have found themselves unprepared for the current rise in hatred against Jews. This is not surprising. “DEI initiatives in corporate America do not take Jewish needs into account,” says Ben Thwaites. Director of the Jewish Leadership Forum. “Too often other minorities advance at the expense of Jewish workers,” he continued.
Such sentiments are anchoring the Jewish experience in offices across the country. Consider the case of Rebecca, who works at a social media company in Manhattan. The problem, she says, is not that DEI has no benefits. Rather, the idea of DEI seems incapable of “providing equitable support to all minority groups at the same time.”
Rebecca added that the benefits of workplace DEI tend to go primarily to “minorities with a history of widespread acceptance,” such as women and African Americans. And this leaves many Jews feeling abandoned by corporate leadership.
Race-based affinity groups are a great example of this inequality. According to a McKinsey report, approximately 90% of Fortune 500 companies now have “employee resource groups” that provide underrepresented employees with a “safe space” to seek and share support. But such groups rarely exist for Jews, Rebecca said, because “we don’t fit neatly into most social justice frameworks.”
This lack of clarity has real-world consequences, explains Eliza, who works at a Manhattan-based tech startup. When she joined her company-wide DEI group at a previous job as an outwardly Orthodox Jewish woman, she received odd looks and blank stares from non-Jewish colleagues.
“DEI groups … were founded around the same time as the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement,” she said. “I’m here to remind everyone that there is anti-Semitism in the world as well. Jews are made up of mostly white men and are considered very privileged, so people I don’t think I realized that, but I don’t.”
For Naomi, vice president of investor sales at financial services firm Tribeca, her company’s pro-Jewish group has been relegated to a kind of second-class status. “We were prohibited from establishing an official Jewish employee resource group because being Jewish is considered more like a religion than a race,” she explains. “That means we still need HR and her DEI approval to host the event. We had to pay for those events ourselves. –But while other minorities have achieved formal status, we have never achieved formal status as a group. ”
After anti-Semitic incidents tripled in the United States in the wake of the Hamas attacks, Jewish leaders, particularly billionaire investor Bill Ackman, called for an end to the DEI program. Others, however, took a more cautious approach, calling for anti-Semitism to be factored into his existing DEI strategy. However, many workers say such demands have fallen on deaf ears.
Some of the shortcomings of DEI seem to be structural, if not by design. Take important anti-harassment training to keep workers safe. According to Janessa Mondestin, a DEI expert and executive director of Hire 4 Higher HR Consulting, existing “anti-harassment training…is lackluster and outdated…generally focused on sexual harassment for compliance purposes.” ” she says. “The complexities of diversity, including religious observances, should be included.” In most cases, this is not the case.
Then there’s the issue of safety, which may also fall under the purview of the DEI department. Caroline, a Long Island resident who works for a European luxury fashion brand, said her company took no action after “Jews…were attacked outside our office” in January.
“The company did nothing to reassure us until I gathered a group of Jewish employees and approached the DEI office,” she explains. Caroline describes the company’s response as “lukewarm.”
Other Jewish employees say DEI programs perpetuate dangerous and often untrue stereotypes that Jews are white, “oppressors,” and therefore not eligible for the benefits DEI offers. He says he is on the front lines.
Adam Michaels, founder and CEO of employee benefits platform Enrollify, has written repeatedly about anti-Semitism in the workplace since the Oct. 7 attack, calling the idea “abhorrent.” ” states that it is a thing. But Michaels isn’t surprised. “The people in charge of DEI programs appear to be the same people who justify Hamas’ actions as ‘oppressed freedom fighters’ and label Jews as ‘colonial oppressors,'” he said. Stated.
Benji, a product manager from New Jersey who works for a major payments technology company, agrees with Michael. “The far left sees us as oppressors of white people, but the far right doesn’t think of us as white at all,” he said. Today, about 20 percent of all Jewish households include non-white family members, so such thinking is clearly outdated.
“While there may be a gap between what happens on U.S. college campuses and what happens in the real world, universities are the training ground for everyone going into the real world,” Davidai said. said.
Shai Davidai, an Israeli-American and business professor at Columbia Business School who has been outspoken about the rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses, said, “Universities are one of the major employers in the United States.” ” he points out.
Davidai, who has been in academia for 13 years, reiterated that he supports the premise that companies should be diverse, inclusive and safe, but lamented the selective way in which DEI principles are imposed.
He cited International Holocaust Remembrance Day in late January as a good example of this contradiction. Most companies now offer strong programs centered around ethnic-specific “history months” and notable race-based holidays such as Juneteenth and Cinco de Mayo. But major Jewish events have received little similar attention, Davidai observes.
“You would think that would be the focus of DEI officials,” he said. “But I don’t recall seeing many large companies or universities make statements about International Holocaust Remembrance Day.”
As both anti-Semitism and scrutiny of DEI continue to rise, the question for many Jewish leaders is: What happens next? Even before October 7th, major companies like Google and Meta were already cutting their DEI budgets. But with DEI unlikely to disappear any time soon, Adam Neufeld, senior vice president and chief impact officer at the Anti-Defamation League, says many large companies are using anti-Semitism as a means of reducing anti-Semitism to existing DEI policies. He says he is starting to incorporate it into his strategy.
More than 250 organizations have signed the ADL, “from Google to UPS to Accenture to Nascar.” anti-semitism workplace pledge”, Neufeld said, calling on “workplaces to … incorporate anti-Semitism into their DEI efforts … and support the development of Jewish employee groups.” ADL’s goal is to “create a safe, fair and inclusive workplace for Jews and all employees,” Neufeld said.
But as the war in Gaza rages on, their security will not remain guaranteed unless Jews can secure the privileges and protections afforded to all other minorities in the United States. “You are always the oppressed, or in your mind you are the oppressor.” [the DEI] Prism,” says Benji, a fintech product manager in New Jersey. “But as Jews, we always seem to fall outside the boundaries of DEI.”
Jonathan Harounoff is a writer and communications director. Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA).
