I think you’re right that things used to be better in California. It started getting worse toward the late 90′s, and things got really bad after 2000. For the past decade, San Francisco, Berkeley, and all the other California colleges that tend to be heavily inspired by them, have become very unpleasant places in some ways. It might have started out being about politics in some way, but it crossed the line a long time ago into just being about Jews.

You’re absolutely right to call out that for some reason, this does seem to happen in the most open minded, liberal, freedom- and equality-oriented places. Somehow, in San Francisco and its environs, people seem to have somehow forgotten that freedom of speech and religion are supposed to mean the freedom to say and be things that other people don’t like, free of violence, threat, or fear.

Just in the 3 years that I was in college at UC Berkeley, we had a cinder block thrown through the Berkeley Hillel windows, eggs thrown at people existing Yom Kippur services, and 2 instances of serious beatings of Jews around campus, both ending people up at the hospital, and at least one accompanied by Nazi salutes. The antisemitic graffity around town, both in Berkeley and at UC Santa Barbara, wasn’t even worth talking about. In 2001, I remember the UC Davis Hillel roof being set on fire.

It was extremely common for guys leaving Shabbat services to walk to their dorms or frat houses, to very conspicuously remove their yarmulkas, saying they weren’t brave enough to walk around campus with them in the evenings.

I know many of us think that all that stuff is over and done for, and never happens in the United States anymore, and maybe that’s even true in Minnesota (although I wonder about the police protection at every large Jewish community event), but it certainly isn’t true in liberal, open-minded Northern California, at least on the college campuses.