The path outside the freshman dorm Durfee Hall on Old Campus was an explosion of color on Tues., Oct. 14. In bright chalk: peace signs, hearts, “We are all one Yale,” “Wish for happiness,” “Free your mind,” “Acceptance,” “Raise your voice,” “We stand together for peace,” “One Love.” An Anne Frank quote. Students’ names and names of student groups, residential colleges and teams. Flowers and spirals and stars—and Jewish stars, too. And at the very center of the mural: “There is no room for hate in this house.”
“Oh, this is so cute!” exclaimed one student as she passed the bench where I was sitting. Which made me feel conflicted, because what lies beneath the sidewalk art is definitely not cute.
During the night of Sun., Oct. 12 (or early Monday morning), someone had drawn three swastikas in chalk on that same sidewalk now covered in colorful phrases and symbols. The next evening, Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway, GRD ’95, emailed the University community about the swastikas. By midnight that night, students were gathering with their own sidewalk chalk, inviting passers-by to join them in creating a mural.
The central element of the mural—“There is no room for hate in this house”—is a direct quote from Holloway’s community-wide email. “The swastika, appropriated by the Nazis in the last century as an emblem of anti-Semitism, is particularly offensive and disrespectful toward the Jewish members of our community,” Holloway wrote in that same communication, “but, in truth, it insults us all. The use of the swastika violates our values of respect, thoughtfulness, generosity, and goodwill. I will not stand idly by when this or other symbols of hate are used on this campus.”
Shayna Otis, DC ’16, was running a booth on her own by the Lanman-Wright steps near the mural on Tuesday. As students and professors walked by, she addressed them. “Write down something about your identity that makes you proud,” she suggested, proffering scraps of paper and a pen. “Read what other people are proud of. Combat the swastikas with increased pride in your heritage.”
Otis told me that she had received notes from more than 100 students, and that even more had stopped just to peruse the traits that others had cited as sources of pride. Her approach to dealing with the incident—by standing on Old Campus, asking passersby to consider the incident from their own perspective—mirrors the implication in Holloway’s email: of course this incident is significant to Yale’s Jews—who, according to an estimate from Yale Hillel “consistently make up between 20 and 25 percent” of the undergraduate population—but is also relevant to the entire University community as an act of general hate.
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This is the second time within two months that swastikas have appeared in public places on campus.
On Mon., Sept. 8, freshman counselors discovered swastikas drawn in dry-erase marker on two whiteboards in an entryway of Vanderbilt Hall. “We are writing to be clear that this is completely unacceptable and we are extremely upset by seeing these expressions of hate within our community,” Branford Master Elizabeth Bradley, EPH ’96, and Dean Hilary Fink wrote in an email to their freshmen and freshman counselors. “I know you join us in wanting to live in a place of respect that honors all people at Yale and beyond. Let us remember how precious peace, health, and community are—and together act in ways that elevate these values with every breath we take together.”
Bradley noted that the similar nature of the two incidents—both on Old Campus, physically inside the University community—elevates the problem. “The fact that it’s a second event automatically means it’s a different category,” Bradley told me. “Because now you say, oh, is there a trend?”
Anti-Semitic incidents have risen globally this summer, amid increased conflict in Israel and Gaza. Alarming violence in France, Brussels, Germany, Sweden, and other European countries made international news this summer.
“The reality is that we have been largely shielded living in the U.S.—especially in this part of the U.S.—from the rise of global anti-Semitism,” said Shua Rosenstein, the Rabbi of Chabad at Yale. “And if this incident, and the other events we’ve seen across college campuses, indicate a shift in that, we have to unite as a community to fight hatred.”
Yale is not the first college campus in recent weeks to deal with anti-Semitic hate speech. At Emory University in Atlanta, swastikas and other offensive graffiti were spray-painted on the walls of the historically Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi on Sun., Oct. 5, the night after Yom Kippur. Student newspaper The Emory Wheel reported that swastikas were also found in the main campus library on Tues., Sept. 16. Almost exactly one year prior, on Sept. 18, 2013, swastikas were discovered at Elon University, on the message board at its Center for Religious and Spiritual Life.
At Yale, Holloway chose to emphasize the most recent incident not in terms of a global or national trend but in the language of unity. “I think a slight against anybody is a slight against everybody,” he said in an interview with the Herald.
While Holloway—and the New Haven Police Department, who are investigating—are unsure who drew the swastikas, their placement in on Old Campus influenced Holloway’s decision to treat them as a community-wide issue. “When I first heard about it, I woke up to the news, and I thought it was in front of Durfee’s, on Elm Street, which is still a big deal, but it’s a different kind of big deal, because this was inside on Old Campus, and the gates are locked at night—unsettling in a different kind of way,” Holloway told me. “So once I understood that, it made it just clear that we’re going to write a message to the Yale community.”
Rosenstein approves of Holloway’s community-focused approach. “I thought Holloway’s response was thoughtful,” he said. “He responds as a dean of Yale College.” Rosenstein sees himself as an agent of Jewish communities around the University, as he spent Wednesday fielding phone calls and emails and communications from present and former Yale Jews. But he considers Holloway to be right in addressing the situation as one in which the whole Yale community is implicated.
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The ephemerality of both chalk and dry-erase marker lends a bizarre note to these incidents. Because, of course, both mediums are so easy to erase. So much so that the girl walking by Durfee when I was sitting on the bench only knew that there was a “cute” mural in place on the sidewalk. Holloway noted that he didn’t even know about the incident in Vanderbilt Hall until a few days after the fact.
Of that incident, Holloway said, “It was really easy to get rid of—you just wipe your hand, and it’s gone.”
The Old Campus swastikas were less easy to wipe away. In his email, Holloway noted that faint impressions remained. But students stepped in with chalk of their own, and when I sat on Old Campus, there was no lingering impression of hate speech. The physical expressions of hatred have been scrubbed away. The more difficult question is how to scrub away the hate that inspired the action—and how to make sure that in covering something up, the community doesn’t forget that it happened.
But Holloway is determined not to let the conversations fade. “I don’t want the energy of the student response to be lost. Too amazing to take for granted,” he wrote in an email to the Herald. “I am intrigued by students’ willingness to join in and offer their narrative about who they are and what they value in the wake of the chalking incident. Perhaps there’s some way to get students to share themselves in that way.”
Sitting outside Durfee, I am conscious of this impressive student response—one that comes not just from Jewish students targeted by the graffiti. But the question that lingers is how the community will continue to address this. It is important and necessary to cover the physical manifestations of hate, but it is also important that we don’t forget it was there in the first place. “There is no room for hate in this house,” the mural reads. But this incident proves that hate still exists, and, as a community, we need to find a way to eradicate it.
– Graphics by Julia Kittle-Kamp