USC student leader says she quit because she was harassed for supporting Israel

A Jewish student leader at the University of Southern California has said she resigned due to harassment over her support for Israel.

Rose Ritch, the vice president of the Undergraduate Student Government, says in an open letter to the campus community published yesterday that she has to resign to “protect my physical safety on campus and my mental health.”

The university administration has recently stopped impeachment proceedings against Ritch over allegations of complicity in racial misconduct on campus, and for not calling out alleged racial misconduct and microaggressive behavior by the student government president, who resigned last month, the Daily Trojan student newspaper reports.

“I have been harassed and pressured for weeks by my fellow students because they opposed one of my identities. It is not because I am a woman, nor because I identify as queer, femme, or cisgender,” Ritch writes. “All of these identities qualified me as electable when the student body voted last February. But because I also openly identify as a Zionist, a supporter of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, I have been accused by a group of students of being unsuitable as a student leader.

“I have been told that my support for Israel has made me complicit in racism, and that, by association, I am racist. Students launched an aggressive social media campaign to ‘impeach [my] Zionist a**.’ This is anti-Semitism, and cannot be tolerated at a University that proclaims to ‘nurture an environment of mutual respect and tolerance.’”

She says the USC student government “has failed to be an inclusive space for numerous communities on campus.”

A USC spokesperson had no immediate comment on Ritch’s accusations, the Daily Trojan reports.

— JTA