Standing tall in Santa Cruz

Standing tall in Santa Cruz: U.C. lecturer wages war against anti-Jewish activity on campus
On the third floor of the Baskin engineeringwholesale jewelry building at U.C. Santa Cruz, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is going over points of Hebrew grammar.
Her 25 students in first-level Hebrew — a panoply of African Americans, Latinos, Asians and whites —fashion jewelry are calling out the gender associations of Hebrew words Rossman-Benjamin is reading from her notes. Some words, like “father” and “brother,” are easy to remember; they are grammatically masculine. Others, like “door” and “window,” just have to be memorized.
“It’s pretty random,” Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer in Hebrew language at U.C. Santa Cruz, tells her students. “The way to know is its form, how it looks.”
For the past 10 years, Rossman-Benjamin has been following that same directive with single-minded determination: Focusing on “form” and “how it looks,” she has been tracking incidents of anti-Israel activity at this coastal campus.
Perhaps in isolation, the incidents she tracks might be considered legitimate stands against the Jewish state, even when the criticism is harsh, as it often is.
But when looked at together  — the anti-Zionism, the demonization of Israel and Israeli leaders, the comparisons to Nazi Germany, the questioning of the Jewish state’s legitimacy — Rossman-Benjamin says theycheap jewelry take the form of something more insidious: a sustained, inaccurate and hateful assault on a core aspect of Jewish identity.
Such rhetoric has been present on California college campuses for years, raising recent concerns most notably at San Francisco State University, U.C. Berkeley and U.C. Irvine. The effect of the rhetoric, she and her allies claim,  has been manyfold — from harming thewholesale fashion jewelrywell-being of Jewish students to impacting the integrity of academic discourse on the Middle East.