CNN anchor Bianna Golodryga, who is Jewish, blasted the leadership of colleges and universities across the country who have been silent in the face of virulent anti-Semitism on their campuses.
“Bianna, what we’ve seen, particularly on college campuses, over the course of the last several weeks, I don’t know if there’s much precedent for it in recent history,” CNN host Phil Mattingly prompted.
“I don’t remember seeing anything like this; we surely didn’t when we were on college campus,” Golodryga, 45, who was born in Moldova and attended the University of Texas in Austin in the late 1990s, responded. “I mean, shame on these university heads and leadership at these schools from all over the country because we’re seeing these images —”
“Why, though?” Mattingly asked. “Why are leaders, school presidents, school boards at these large universities afraid to speak unequivocally about things like this?”
“I don’t know,” Golodryga answered. “There are plenty of other issues they’ve felt they could address head-on, and yet when it comes to the issue of anti-Semitism, there’s always this veiled, ‘Well, it’s complicated; it’s Israel; it’s Zionism.’”
“No,” she declared. “It is unadulterated anti-Semitism, and when you’re speaking out about Hamas murdering, not just Israelis; they murdered Jews. You have to just say that outright. That is an issue that’s affecting Jews around the world and now has created a scenario — and we’ve talked about it on this show and God bless the United States of America, and I am so happy to live in the U.S. as a Jew — but to have conversations with family members, with friends, with loved ones, ‘What are you doing? Are you taking your mezuzah down? What are you talking to your college students about?’”
“It is unacceptable. Are we kidding ourselves?” she continued. “In 2023, there’s no other issue, whether they’re social justice movements, anything else that we’ve looked forward as progressive citizens of the world that we haven’t addressed head-on, and yet this is the one issue we keep coming back to that we have to be sort of equivocal about here. There’s nothing to hold us back from standing up for the rights of Jews, the rights of Muslims, the rights of all minorities, and say in this environment, in this day and age, it is unacceptable to be saying ‘Death to Jews. Death to Israelis. Death to Zionism,’ whatever it is.”
“But every morning, there’s a pit in my stomach waking up and seeing these headlines,” she admitted.
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She was asked, “If we’re going to say ‘Never Again,’ we have to remember what was October 7? That was the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust in a single day.”
“There wasn’t even a 24-hour period of mourning before it became victim-blaming, ‘Two sides to the story,’” Golodryga pointed out. “No. It is not difficult for college campus leadership to come out and say, ‘What happened on October 7 was a massacre and it is unacceptable, and we will do everything we can to protect our Jewish students just as well as we protect our Muslim students and every other minority on our campus.’”
Congress and the White House are weighing in on the spike in anti-Semitic incidents across the globe, and notably on college campuses across the U.S., which have escalated since Hamas' attack on Israel. @biannagolodryga joins to discuss: pic.twitter.com/yPjj6pGV0F
— CNN This Morning with Kasie Hunt (@CNNThisMorning) October 31, 2023