Jews on campus face include antisemitism, timetables clashing with religious festivals and lack of access to kosher food, a new report has highlighted.
Faith and Belief on Campus: Division and Cohesion, a report by the Theos think tank, said British universities still had “considerable work to do” in order to create safe spaces for Jewish students.
It identified a “lack of consistency between universities” in making special arrangements, for example for exams which fall during religious festivals, or lectures on Friday afternoons in winter, when Shabbat begins early.
Lack of access to kosher food was also an issue, “exacerbated by…a tendency to assess the relative importance of different religious practices from a Christian perspective”, with assumptions that prayer would be more important to a Jewish society than observance of dietary rules.
