Lucy Haney is used to being the lone Jew in a room. Growing up in the Bible Belt of northwest Georgia, Haney’s family were often the sole representatives of the community for miles around. It was the type of place where most of her neighbors had “never met any Jewish people” and, occasionally, someone would try to convert her.

“I was the only Jewish person in all of my classes in high school,” Haney jokingly remembers. But Haney soaked it all up, absorbing Southern culture and soul to the point where she even plays in a country music band.

When it came time to pick a college, Oglethorpe University, a private school just north of Atlanta founded in the 1800s, stood out. Although it wasn’t originally on Haney’s “list of colleges to look at,” Oglethorpe’s well-regarded communications program eventually won her over.

“I was really drawn to the fact that Oglethorpe prides itself on being a very inclusive and diverse campus,” she said. “This is a place where people are accepting of all backgrounds and cultures.”

However, in March 2020, Haney began noticing a shift in the campus climate that coincided with the onset of the pandemic and the arrival of a new administrator named Meredith Raimondo. What Haney experienced was just a taste of things to come: Three years later, antisemitism is rife on America’s college campuses, with pro-Palestinian groups from elite schools such as Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown issuing statements blaming Israel for bringing the horrific Hamas terrorist attack of last Saturday on itself.

Raimondo arrived at Oglethorpe after spending nearly two decades at Oberlin College, about a 45-minute drive from Cleveland. The American-studies scholar had climbed the ranks of the distinguished liberal-arts school over the years. In 2014, she was appointed Oberlin’s special assistant to the president for DEI and campus Title IX coordinator. Two years later, Raimondo became dean of students.

The bespectacled strawberry-blonde administrator, sporting a tattoo on her left arm, wielded enormous influence on campus from these appointments. The month Raimondo became dean, she brought her newfound powers to bear on Gibson’s Bakery, a beloved local establishment that had served the community since 1885.

In November 2016, Jonathan Aladin, an underage Oberlin student, tried illegally to buy alcohol from the establishment. When an employee, the owner’s grandson, refused to hand over the liquor, Aladin tried to shoplift it instead. The worker tried to prevent the robbery and pursued Aladin outside the store, where he was beaten, kicked, and stomped by the student and his two female friends from Oberlin.

Rushing to judgment, Raimondo immediately began mobilizing students, demanding a boycott of Gibson’s Bakery to protest the owners’ alleged racism. The high-ranking administrator distributed flyers outside the storefront accusing Gibson’s of discriminating against black people and even urged faculty members to join the boycott. “DON’T BUY,” her flyers read in all caps beneath a paragraph explaining: it is “a RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION.”

Gibson’s later sued Oberlin, specifically naming Raimondo in its defamation case. In 2019, the store won a multimillion-dollar ruling which, three years later, the Ninth District Court of Appeals unanimously upheld.

Legal filings later revealed Raimondo had no remorse for her role in assassinating the character of the bakery owners. When a retired Oberlin teacher bemoaned the school’s “handling of the Gibson matter,” Raimondo texted another administrator: “F*** him, I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this needs to be put behind us.”

The trio of black students ultimately pled guilty to charges ranging from attempted theft to underage purchase of alcohol and aggravated trespassing. Raimondo decamped for Oglethorpe in October 2021, somehow unsullied by her role in a high-profile scandal that is expected to cost Oberlin nearly $40 million in damages.

Antisemitism at Oberlin

When Raimondo arrived at Oglethorpe, she was well known as one of the central players in the Gibson’s Bakery fiasco, but Haney and her fellow students were unaware that Raimondo had also allowed a culture of antisemitism to fester at Oberlin during her tenure. In 2009, as a professor, Raimondo spoke on a panel with the academic Jasbir Puar about the “sexual politics of Israel.” Puar, a gender and women’s studies professor from Rutgers, had just published an influential academic book, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, featuring dense prose about “biopolitics,” “homonationalism,” “U.S. sexual exceptionalism,” and a chapter titled “the turban is not a hat.”

Puar later notoriously distinguished herself by advancing conspiracy theories that Israel “mined” dead Palestinians “for organs for scientific research,” echoing the medieval antisemitic blood libel.

Raimondo’s approach to the classroom also reflected her tolerance for virulent antisemitism. While at Oberlin, she taught courses “spanning the themes of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity studies, social justice, and HIV/AIDS,” and her assigned readings regularly featured Puar’s works as well as those of Joseph Massad, a writer who has argued that the “shared goal of expelling Jews from Europe as a separate unassimilable race” created an “affinity between Nazis and Zionists all along.”

Despite this record, Raimondo was tapped as the university’s point-person on inclusion and tolerance. Two months after assuming her role as DEI emissary to the school’s president, she ignored the expressed concerns of Jewish students after the university’s pro-Palestinian group installed over 2,000 black flags outside Oberlin’s makeshift synagogue on Rosh Hashanah to commemorate “Palestinians murdered by Israeli Defense Force.” On another occasion, the group posted messages such as “Ohio is infested with Zionism.”

A public letter signed on behalf of 20 Jewish students and nearly 200 alumni begging for a “thorough investigation and documentation of all acts of antisemitism,” in January 2016 produced no administrative response.

“I hesitate to disclose this part of my identity to members of our community, not because I am concerned they will disagree with me, but because I know from experience that, simply upon hearing the words, ‘I am a Zionist,’ they will shut out my voice entirely,” two female students confessed in a letter to the Oberlin Review, the town’s paper.

“The Oberlin idea of Jewish people is that we are all just rich white people,” Eliana Kohn, a student who attended the school during Raimondo’s tenure, wrote. “This ignorance is not only harmful to them but also to all Jewish students as a whole, because we are seen as people who cannot possibly be affected by discrimination and oppression. When the campus allows just a single narrative, the open-minded students do not seem so open-minded anymore. They have already made their decisions on who is oppressed and who is not.”

Oberlin maintains the school takes antisemitism seriously. “To be clear, we abhor antisemitism and all forms of hate, discrimination and harassment. We work every day to ensure that our campus is safe for all students, faculty, and staff, including those who identify as Jewish. Antisemitism has no place on our campus. At Oberlin College, we are deeply committed to Jewish studies and Jewish life as important parts of our tradition,” a spokeswoman told NR. The representative further underscored that Oberlin’s president participated in a recent trip to Israel sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and continues to offer a Jewish Studies degree specialization.

Just months after the 2016 public letter, an outlet reported that Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric at Oberlin, ranted on Facebook that Israel was behind 9/11 and parroted antisemitic conspiracies about Jewish control of banking. When four alums traveled to Ohio to speak with school president Marvin Krislov and Raimondo to address growing fears of antisemitism, they left empty-handed.

“We were told that we were out-of-touch with life on campus, and that all was well — then we were shown the door,” two attendees wrote following their meeting. The “extreme disinterest from administrators will have some alumni wondering whether Jewish students are even wanted at Oberlin.”

Another graduate, Melissa Hare Landa, the Oberlin chapter executive of Alums for Campus Fairness, described the school under Raimondo’s watch as plagued by a “pervasive and extreme prejudice against students unwilling to completely condemn Israel.”

“Raimondo is the person who is supposed to be handling the issues that [are now being] raised,” one concerned Oberlin community member told Algemeiner following her appointment in 2016. “How can she be fit to address claims of antisemitism when she is obviously incapable of recognizing it?”

Raimondo Arrives at Oglethorpe

Raimondo’s lax attitude toward campus antisemitism is in keeping with a growing body of research which shows that DEI specialists and campus progressives don’t consider Jews to be one of the many niche identity groups in need of special protection.

Raimondo’s disregard for antisemitism was exported to Oglethorpe once she unpacked her bags and settled in as the school’s vice president of student affairs in the fall of 2021. “It really started to shift post-Covid when everyone got back on campus,” Haney explained. The changing atmosphere coincided with Raimondo’s entrance as well as a broader reshuffling of high-ranking administrators.

Raimondo and Oglethorpe did not respond to a request for comment.

During Haney’s last semesters at Oglethorpe, she recalls student-government representatives openly saying, “Israel’s main goal is to kill off all Muslim countries,” without pushback from administrators, and professors distastefully comparing the Holocaust to American slavery. “It was just inappropriate and unnecessary,” the communications grad reflects.

“The turning point for me came with a group on campus that really, I would say, aligned themselves very closely with communism,” Haney explained, referring to the Radical Petrels, a student group that played off the university’s aviary mascot. “They had an Instagram where they recommended podcasts” featuring “terrorists who had killed a lot of Jewish people within the conflict.”

The Radical Petrels had shared a link to a podcast, “Unified for Palestine,” a talk show focused on questions such as “Will there be a Third Intifada?” During that episode, the co-host jokingly tells listeners: “By the way, the Israeli flag is the equivalent of a Swastika to Palestinians.”

Another typical social-media post from the podcast features a cartoon of how an “Israeli Salad” is made, showing IDF soldiers barging into a Palestinian house and stomping on a girl’s head, drawing blood. The antisemitic undertones of the visual even drew fellow activists to condemn the graphic. “Israel is a settler-colonial apartheid state,” one self-described “neuroqueer #actuallyautistic” Jewish user responded. “That said, invoking blood libel is unacceptable and counterproductive symbolism for exposing and resisting the realities of the state’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

Such rhetoric and imagery epitomized the podcast’s flavor yet, when Haney raised her concern that the Radical Petrels encouraged students to tune into the show, Oglethorpe’s designated DEI head, Laura Chandler, didn’t bother to respond. She “never once directly answered my emails regarding concerns about antisemitism on campus,” Haney wrote. Instead, she was redirected to speak with the newly arrived Raimondo.

“Somehow, it just trickled down to her to deal with, which was always very odd to me because she wasn’t even necessarily in charge of anything DEI-related,” she told NR.

Haney met with Raimondo to share her concerns about how anti-Israel rhetoric on campus often crossed into antisemitism. “Me, along with my other few Jewish peers, were not comfortable [on campus]. We were frightened and wanted a commitment and support from Oglethorpe saying: ‘We commit to be against antisemitism.’” Instead, Raimondo reportedly worried that a more proactive deterrence to such rhetoric – already employed to combat homophobia, transphobia, and racism at Oglethorpe – would “offend” students of other backgrounds, Haney says.

The administrator’s handling of Haney’s concerns, she felt, showed “very poor leadership.” “It goes against what someone in that role should be doing,” believing that Raimondo failed to appreciate how “outed I felt as somebody that might have a different opinion.”

Concerned about the campus climate, Haney and some of her fellow Jewish students asked Oglethorpe administrators to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working-definition of antisemitism,” a non-legally binding standard that has been adopted by nearby schools, such as the University of Georgia, to national governments, including the United States, Germany, and Canada. Critics have argued that it undercuts free speech and disapproval of Israel and Zionism.

After the IHRA proposal, Raimondo asked to speak with Haney again. Nothing came of the meeting apart from pleasantries. In a bid to placate Haney, university administrators invited her to join a newly launched “diversity board” comprised of students of different backgrounds. Nothing happened with that either, Haney feels, despite sharing difficult personal experiences about being Jewish on campus.

“It was very difficult. I struggled a lot the last year of college. It was my senior year, and it was a very sad senior year, honestly. I wanted to end on a happy note,” Haney reflected. “It was very disruptive in my life and very exhausting. It caused a lot of pain for me.”

After graduating in 2022, however, Haney carried a different worldview. “It’s definitely changed my perspective of the world as a Jewish person. The truth is there’s no political identity that will protect you from antisemitism. I think that was really important for me to learn. Learning about who I am and being able to stand up for myself.”

Haney’s love for Oglethorpe still runs deep, but she is fearful that the administration’s cold shoulder to Jewish students is leaving them exposed.

“I love Oglethrope. It was where my parents met. It’s a very special place to me, and part of the reason why I actually wrote that article is because I want it to stay around and have a good reputation and make sure that they’re treating their student body well.”