Goldsmiths College in London has apologised to Jewish staff and students after an 93-page independent inquiry uncovered a culture of antisemitism on campus.
Shocking incidents revealed in the report include graffiti featuring swastikas and the phrase “Gas the Jews” found on campus, along with accounts of at least two Jewish staff members breaking down in tears due to a hostile environment.
In another disturbing account, one Jewish student felt pressured to leave college accommodation after their mezuzah was removed and desecrated, and a fellow non-Jewish student cooked pork using their pan and utensils. When the Jewish student explained why they could no longer use their kitchen equipment, they said they were “abused”.
The inquiry, launched in May 2023 and chaired by Mohinderpal Sethi KC of Littleton Chambers, was commissioned to determine whether Jewish students and staff had experienced antisemitism at the college since 2018. Goldsmiths opened a call for evidence that month, inviting students, staff and organisations to submit their responses.
In his conclusion to the inquiry, Sethi said that Jewish students and staff had been subjected to antisemitism and that Goldsmiths had failed to do enough as an institution to ensure its Jewish community feels “welcome, included and safe” from anti-Jewish discrimination.
“A culture has built up over the years at Goldsmiths that, at the very least, has resulted in Jewish students legitimately feeling significant discomfort on campus,” he said.
“It is apparent that from the evidence reported to me that Jewish students have likely been subjected to antisemitism.
“This is plainly not unique to Goldsmiths, but this Inquiry relates to Goldsmiths and I consider that it has not done enough as an institution to ensure its Jewish students and staff feel safe and welcome.”
Goldsmiths, part of the University of London, said it “fully endorsed” the findings of the inquiry and confirmed it had appointed Professor Adam Dinham to lead a “two-year antisemitism action plan”.
Reacting to the inquiry, Professor Frances Corner, Vice-Chancellor of Goldsmiths, said she was “sorry that our community and culture fell short of the behaviours we expect”, adding that the report sets out a “disturbing picture”.
Jewish students reported posters on campus showing antisemitic caricatures, their lecturers appearing to endorse Hamas, and statements being thrown around by their peers such as “all Jews are rich and own all the banks in the world” and that “antisemitism is a “capitalist theory”.
One Jewish student said they had stopped wearing a kippah since October 7, 2023, while another wearing a Star of David necklace was told by a peer that it was “the symbol of a terrorist state and equivalent to a swastika”.
The inquiry found evidence of several instances of far-right antisemitism, such as a swastika graffitied on the “Welcome to Goldsmiths” sign near the college, and in the library and toilets along with other symbols associated with neo-Nazi symbols. The phrase “Gas the Jews” was also daubed in graffiti in the college library. Another student reported QR codes on campus with the caption “what you need to know about the Jews”. Scanning the QR code led them to photographs of concentration camps.
As well as far-right anti-Jewish hatred, the inquiry found evidence of incidents related to criticisms of Zionism and Israel. Jewish members of staff raised concerns about hearing “triggering” chants in their workplace, such as “Intifada til Victory” and “from the river to the sea”. Due to pro-Palestine activists occupying certain areas of the institution, the staff member was unable to access a part of the college which they described as “at the heart of [their] career”.
Another staff member was brought to tears after hearing students chant “2, 4, 6, 8 Israel is a terrorist state,” and reported feeling unsafe and unsupported by senior management amid student protests.
The inquiry cited how slogans such as “Intifada until Victory” had been reposted by the Goldsmiths’ Marxist Society, and the college’s Islamic Society had posted a religious text which “appeared to imply that the 7 October attacks were justified by or a message from God”.
The inquiry concluded that college management even appeared to “reward” some of the behaviour of the pro-Palestine student activists, who staged an occupation of the Professor Stuart Hall building in spring 2024, by “making significant concessions to their demands rather than sanctioning their conduct”.
In May, following the protests by Goldsmiths for Palestine (G4P), the university published a set of commitments it would make to the pro-Gaza campaign group, including the installation of an exhibition wall in the Professor Stuart Hall Building to memorialise the occupation, and announced its support for a proposal to rename one of the lecture theatres after Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh who was killed in 2022 while reporting on the conflict.
A key finding of the inquiry was the decline and eventual dissolution of Goldsmiths’ Jewish Society, which ceased to exist in the last academic year.
According to the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), the society had played a prominent role in campus life up until 2018, though at one point the society had its funding threatened.
UJS told the inquiry that the society’s diminishing membership may be due to the fact that Goldsmiths’ Freshers’ Fair was consistently arranged on a Saturday in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, meaning the group could not man a stall at the fair, leading to diminished membership. In 2023, the date of the fair was also the first day of Rosh Hashanah.
Several Jewish members of staff described feeling isolated at the workplace. In one historic example before 2018, a staff member said a Head of Department had refused to speak to them for three years. They felt “excluded from the community of scholarship and frozen out” and that the reason for that treatment was because they researched antisemitism.
One Jewish staff member raised concerns that they had been denied a professional promotion to the position of “Reader”, because their research focused on antisemitism, but the inquiry was unable to determine the veracity of this claim.
In March, nine organisations including Goldsmiths Students Union (SU), the Muslim Association of Britain, and Forensic Architecture withdrew their engagement with the inquiry, claiming it “marginalises Palestinians”.
One of the incidents that preceded the inquiry occurred in March 2022, when Goldsmiths’ then-student union president accused academic Dr David Hirsh - a sociologist and expert on antisemitism - of being a “far right white supremacist.”
In December 2024, the Community Security Trust (CST) revealed that university-related antisemitic incidents had increased by 117 per cent over the last two academic years, coinciding with the fallout from the October 7 terror massacre in Israel and the conflict in Gaza, which triggered a spike in anti-Jewish hatred.
In response to the inquiry, Goldsmiths has committed to making several changes by the end of the academic year in 2027, including training staff and students to understand and notice antisemitism and procedures for robust prevention and intervention.
