The Jewish community at Princeton University needs your support for the upcoming campus-wide BDS referendum vote from April 11-13. The student elections ballot question asks Princeton undergrads to embrace the racist Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign and divest its stocks, funds, and endowment from companies that do business with Israel, specifically citing Caterpillar, Inc. The ballot question is due to be certified on Saturday, April 2 – we urge you to make your voice heard with Princeton’s administration now. 

The racist BDS referendum question misrepresents the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an effort to delegitimize the State of Israel and is rooted in anti-Jewish hatred. The referendum bizarrely singles out and demonizes the world’s only Jewish state, applying a double standard to Israel. Student government has pursued no such referendum targeting China, Russia, or other known human rights abusers; instead, it attacks the Middle East’s most flourishing democracy, in which Palestinians serve in the governing parliamentary coalition and on the Supreme Court.

Far too many times, we have seen anti-Israel referenda poison the environment for Jewish and pro-Israel students on American college campuses. As you know, data shows a strong correlation between anti-Israel sentiment and attacks on Jews; last May, antisemitic incidents in the US more than doubled thanks to anti-Israel incitement online during Israel’s war with Hamas, and a recent study shows that schools with five or more BDS-supporting faculty are six times more likely to experience acts targeting Jewish students for harm.

It is not just the Jewish community that is affected by BDS: allowing student government to endorse extreme positions chills pro-Israel speech from all students, who are made to feel unwelcome on campus. The same will happen at Princeton if President Eisgruber does not speak out strongly against the referendum.

There is a recent precedent for removing such referenda from the ballot entirely: Chancellor Jones of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) recently removed a BDS referendum question from UIUC’s undergraduate election ballot due to concerns for Jewish student safety and wellbeing. It’s time for Princeton to follow suit and stand up for the rights of Jewish students on campus.

We urge you to contact President Eisgruber to demand he protect Jewish students by removing the referendum question from the ballot and publicly condemning the referendum as antisemitic. In addition, we encourage him to adopt the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism – the only internationally-accepted definition of Jew-hatred – as an educational tool, using it to help students, faculty, and staff understands why initiatives like BDS are antisemitic.