An increase in anti-Semitic activities on college campuses has some members of academia worried.

Recently, the president of Harvard gave a speech on the rise of anti-Semitism at Harvard and elsewhere. The speech came on the heals of a decision by Campus Watch, a website devoted to monitoring Middle East studies on college campuses, to drop the dossiers section it kept on professors who were supposedly anti-Israel.

“I speak with you today not as president of the University [of Harvard], but as a concerned member of our community about something I never thought I would become seriously worried about — the issue of anti-Semitism,” said Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard.

Summers said he was “Jewish, but hardly devout” and identified a number of events during the past year that marked the upturn in anti-Semitism. Summers noted synagogue burnings and the increase of European scholars calling for an end to support for Israeli researchers, while not voicing an end to any support for researchers from any other nation.

As for anti-Semitic events at Harvard, about 70 first-year law students at Harvard found anti-Semitic fliers in their mailboxes. The one-page fliers were topped by a hand-drawn, backward Swastika and a slogan offensive to Jews. Officials at Harvard said the 70 students were involved in a debate over free speech.

“I would like nothing more than to be wrong,” Summers said. “It is my greatest hope and prayer that the idea of a rise of anti-Semitism proves to be a self-denying prophecy — a prediction that carries the seeds of its own falsification. But this depends on all of us.”

Benjamin Soloman-Schwarz, a student representative of Hillel at Harvard, agreed with Summer’s analysis of rising anti-Semitism and felt the speech addressed some suppressed issues.

“I think Summer’s analysis was pretty good in terms of the anti-Semitism around the world and pointing out places where it has been popping up at Harvard,” Soloman-Schwarz said. “I do think that one of the more important things that he mentioned in terms of anti-Semitism is the divestment petition. He felt issues weren’t resolved, and these were important to bring, and he was hoping to get a real campus debate going.”

Harvard is not the only school to witness a rise in anti-Semitic events. San Francisco State University has seen arguments between Israeli and Palestinian supporters nearly turn violent. At SFSU, there was vandalism and blatant anti-Semitic remarks targeted towards Jews and their groups.

Anti-Semitism appears to be on the rise at some University of Wisconsin schools as well. Although the incidents have been minor, an increasing number of students are speaking out about the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and some see many of the arguments to be anti-Semitic in their slant.

“On Sept.11, there was a panel that the university put together that was supposed to be a revisiting of Sept. 11, 2001, but there was one student who got up when the president of the Milwaukee Jewish Council spoke and made something like a tirade against Israel and Jews specifically,” said Edda Post, Executive Director of Hillel, a Jewish student organization, at UW-Milwaukee. “He said, ‘You Jews, you never apologize for all the terrible things that you do, you need to apologize!’ and he screamed that.”

Post said many of the incidents occurred in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, and said there have been some minor anti-Semitic events.

“Last year in our newspaper there was a statement issued by the president of the university that was kind of a holocaust denial type of thing,” Post said. “Overall, it’s been pretty quiet this year. You never know, it could change tomorrow.”

Hillel at UW-Milwaukee created an informational pamphlet following the article in their newspaper and the vocal student, stressing the difference between free speech and ethical speech. Post said the pamphlet was distributed to freshman seminar courses and reached nearly 60 percent of new freshmen.

Post said Hillel and the University are working together to foster a better relationship between Jews and people from other cultures.

“One of the things we are doing is that a couple of the [Hillel] students are working with the Muslim Student Association and the Muslim American Student Association to try to do some intergroup programs and discussions and work on their relationship,” Post said.