Portland, OR – Student editors of a campus humor publication and the president of Reed College in Portland, Ore., are apologizing for a fake article that said students at nearby Lewis & Clark College killed all the Jews on their campus.
Join our WhatsApp groupSubscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
The article, meant as a satire, appeared last week in The Pamphlette, a student-run newspaper at Reed College. It carried the headline “LC students kill Jewish people.”
a student-run newspaper at Reed College. It took aim at students at Lewis & Clark College, another private liberal-arts college in Portland. Anti-Semitism is a sensitive issue at Lewis & Clark, where swastika graffiti was found in the library bathroom a few weeks ago.
The article carried the headline “LC students kill Jewish people.”
It begins: “In what is being called a ‘tragic, but all too predictable’ event, the staff of The Leaphlette, a student humor publication at Lewis & Clark College, have been accused of rounding up and gassing all of the Jews on their Portland, OR, campus.”
The phony article goes on to describe students asking the chemistry department for a chemical to conduct “Jewsperiments” and a “towering crematorium” where the library once stood.
The same edition of The Pamphlette had another article titled, “Getting ready for Black History Month.” The satirical list of preparations included: “Photoshop myself into other people’s Kwanzaa pictures and put them up around my house.”
Reed President Colin Diver apologized to Lewis & Clark’s interim president, Jane Atkinson, last week. He also criticized The Pamphlette in an e-mail to campus for displaying a “remarkable insensitivity to the deeply held feelings engendered by some of the most horrific and painful episodes of our collective history.”
College leaders have no plans to censor the paper because it is against Reed’s principles to do so, Diver said.
Lewis & Clark spokeswoman Jodi Heintz said the article was “really disturbing.”
“And given what we’re trying to do as a community on our own campus around this issue, that definitely was not helpful to us,” she said.
However, Heintz said the incident involved only a few Reed students and does not reflect Reed College as a whole.
Glenn Harrison, a student editor and writer for The Pamphlette said in an e-mail to The Oregonian newspaper that editors didn’t know about the swastika incident at Lewis & Clark when the story ran.
He said the article was a response to a commentary published in Reed’s regular student newspaper. A previous Pamphlette article had spoofed Anne Frank’s diary, which resulted in the other paper’s criticism that satirizing the Holocaust “enables real genocide,” said Harrison, a 21-year-old senior and sociology major.
“We found this claim ridiculous, and the real goal of our article was to satirize this notion by driving it to its logical extreme,” he said.
Harrison said The Pamphlette’s staff has repeatedly apologized for hurting or offending people on campus with the article.
“We were negligent as editors and members of the community,” he wrote. “We are now more aware of the effect of our writing, and we will be exercising more cautious editorial judgment going forward.”
More than 200 students, staff and faculty from Reed and Lewis & Clark attended a forum on the Reed campus Tuesday night to talk about the article and the reaction at both colleges.
They were sorry they were caught. WHEN are these sick people going to admit their anti-semitism? To pretend it was a mistake & say “Duh! I didn’t realize” is BS & we all know it.
If they said openly “We hate Jews” then we can react. But when the damage is done & fake apologies & protestations of innocence are delivered every week somewhere by someone, we’re left wondering how do we counter it?
Don’t tell me “education.’ These anti-semites are plenty educated, thank you very much! They know EXACTLY what they’re saying/doing & they get the reaction they want. Good publicity! But if this paper changed Jew to Muslim, you be damn sure it would be shut down.
Living in the NW for many years, there is an undercurrent, easily felt, of racism and anti-semitism. When I first moved to the area some thirty years ago and wore a black hat, the people most offended were Jews who really though that being frum was another”cult.” Today, in Portland and other NW cities, one can see anti Semitic, anti Israel posters and pro “palestinian” sign and graffiti even in neighborhoods away from college campuses. The so called liberal and “progressive” teachers augment this behavior, while pleading that they have no bias.
What a surprise, another case of anti-Semitism on a college campus, I am shocked.
Seriously guys…this is not anti-semitism. this is satire. the implicit joke is that everyone knows that killing jews is a ridiculous concept (it’s called irony). unfortunately, it’s a joke in bad taste–considering the fact that anti-semitism does still exist and the holocaust did happen. these kids are innocent and simply a little too smart for their own good (people apparently don’t understand irony). really, has anyone ever read satire? jonathan swift (the famous anglo-irish author of gulliver travels) once wrote a piece called “a modest proposal”, in which he suggested that the english sell irish babies as a food that could be served as a delicacy (as a solution to the problem of the poor and starving irish which england was largely ignoring). again, swift wasn’t being serious. he just made a well reasoned and rational argument for something completely absurd to prove a point (that england might as well be eating irish babies…the irish would be better off…than the way england was exploiting them). these kids don’t hate jews–they simply thought everyone would understand that it was obviously a joke–and their point (that satire does not enable genocide) is well proved by the amount of outrage the article has caused… (by the way, i didn’t realize you guys were regulators before I wrote this…i was going to give you my name, but now i will choose to remain anonymous…and the “PC” rules totally add context to your posts…i don’t think i agree with them).
WHH
True, Colin Diver says that it is not the policy of Reed College to censor anything that comes out of the minds, mouths and anywhere else from the students, however, Reed college does have a formal judiciary process run by students whereupon those who feel they have been wronged by any activity can bring a “J-case” against the offending party. They have the power to execute any judgment they feel fits the crime. Many of the professors of Reed College are jewish, and I assume ergo, that many of their supporters are as well. I suggest a well constructed letter to their alumnae support as well as a j-case and a formal declaration of unsatisfactory conduct to the administration. These disgusting little pranks are not to be tolerated, and most definitely have a course of redress. Although Reed is a good college, known for its superior classes, many who go end up as lost as they came in and don’t get very far. One has to wonder if perhaps the step back and let the animals play policy of Colin divers isn’t what stands in the way of Portland’s best and brightest?