University staff in the UK are fostering, legitimizing, and at times actively participating in antisemitism, StandWithUs UK revealed in its new 2026 Voice of Students report. The Jerusalem Post obtained early access to the document.
The subtitle is “How UK Universities Are Failing to Address Anti-Zionism as Modern Antisemitism and Avoiding Accountability.”
It is the second consecutive year in which StandWithUs UK has published the Voice of Students report, the fundamental purpose of which is to reflect an “accurate, unfiltered, and sobering picture” of the reality on campuses regarding the state of antisemitism.
StandWithUs said that a critical and alarming development in this 2026 report, compared to its 2025 predecessor, was the growing and active involvement of academic staff in the infrastructure of campus hostility.
The report features shocking testimonies from Jewish students about the escalation in anti-Jewish racism and support for proscribed terror groups on university campuses, both from staff and students.
A Royal Holloway student received repeated anonymous calls in which the caller read out his home address and warned that “they” were “coming to get” him, alongside an explicit online threat to “blow up” the Jewish Society. “When a jihadist Instagram account threatened to blow up our Jewish Society, the university treated the report as a joke,” the student said.
“I received repeated anonymous calls from people who said they had been watching me all day, and on the final call, they read out my university address and said they were coming to get me. Although the university identified one caller, it refused to share the information with police, and the police dropped the case.”
Jewish student: 'I no longer feel safe on campus'
He added, “I no longer feel safe on campus. I am constantly aware of being watched. I cannot leave my accommodation without noticing hostile looks. Simple acts – walking to lectures, attending meetings, wearing a kippah – now feel risky.”
A professor at Bangor University physically attacked a Jewish student while shouting accusations of “baby killer.”
A King’s College London student was required to write a 1,000-word essay explaining why it had been “wrong” to display an Israeli flag on campus. This was not in accordance with any KCL non-academic disciplinary procedure.
A City St George’s student was ambushed from behind by a group who attempted to push him down a staircase.
A student at the University of Manchester said their lecturer defended hostage-taking as “the only way for Palestinians to negotiate.”
Four of the 12 testimonies are from students at University College London. Seven of the total testimonies are from students at other London universities.
In an official endorsement, 11 cross-party parliamentarians warned that “the explosion of antisemitism on the UK’s university campuses has become a national crisis” and is “damaging the heritage of Britain’s universities at a frightening pace.”
The parliamentarians, including Deputy Reform UK leader Richard Tice, called on vice-chancellors and senior university leadership to appear before relevant parliamentary committees to provide a clear account of their institutional responses and their use of existing disciplinary frameworks.
They also called on the prime minister to make an “unequivocal statement before Parliament clarifying that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism that must be prosecuted accordingly.”
“This will send a necessary signal to the Crown Prosecution Service and university administrations that the ‘semantic loophole’ for extremism is closed,” the parliamentarians said.
They used two high-profile cases from the past year to highlight that universities have the power to take decisive action.
The first was when UCL banned a university-linked academic who promoted medieval antisemitic tropes about the use of children’s blood, in a lecture about Zionism. The parliamentarians noted that this intervention by the university would likely never have happened had StandWithUs UK not revealed the incident.
The second was at the University of Oxford, where a student was suspended and criminal proceedings launched after students boasted of workshopping a chant calling to “put the Zios in the ground.”
The parliamentarians said it was not due to a lack of capability that universities were not taking action, but due to “the absence of will.”
StandWithUs said the report underscored that antisemitism today was no longer confined to traditional racial or religious hatred but had taken on a new form: Political antisemitism.
“Antisemitism is increasingly expressed through political frameworks, particularly extreme forms of so-called ‘anti-Zionism’ that deny Jewish self-determination and, in some cases, openly call for the destruction of Israel.”
It also said that the UK currently suffers from a “profound disconnect” between political rhetoric and campus reality.
“While the government and the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition formally recognize that modern antisemitism manifests as the call for the destruction of the State of Israel, this conceptual clarity has failed to translate into institutional action,” SWU said.
“The denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, the core of anti-Zionism, is not a mere policy critique; it is a targeted assault on Jewish identity. We must reject the pervasive double standard currently applied to Israel, where a selective and discriminatory application of university policy leaves Jewish students uniquely vulnerable.”
StandWithUs UK Executive Director Isaac Zarfati said: “StandWithUs UK’s report reveals the brutal reality of life at university for British Jews.”
“The UK’s historic university sector is now at risk of collapsing into hubs of radicalization and extremism. University leaders have failed to display the urgency and resolve needed to address this crisis and must be held accountable before tragedy strikes.”