Members of Alpha Epsilon Pi, U.C. Berkeley’s Jewish fraternity, are used to passing 2 a.m.-drunks shouting out the occasional off-color comment, but this was a whole other level.
On the morning of Monday, Feb. 13, fraternity brothers discovered the word “kike” painted in 54-inch white letters on their deck. It was the first incident of this sort since someone hurled a cinder block through the window of Berkeley Hillel and scrawled “F—k Jews” on a nearby recycling container in 2002.
“Everyone was really shocked at first. Some people then became very sad. I personally became depressed about it. A lot of other guys were angry, but it’s hard for me to be angry because we have no idea who did this or why,” said Joe Rothberg, the fraternity’s president.
AEPi is a squarish, multistory structure lacking any vestiges of Judaism and undifferentiated from the many fraternities and sororities on Berkeley’s “Frat Row,” Piedmont Avenue. This, surmised Rothberg, means the graffiti incident was not a spur-of-the-moment decision.
“It means that someone is familiar with where we live,” he said.
Added Josh Baron, the president of U.C. Berkeley’s Jewish Student Union, “Whoever did this knew what that frat was and clearly had some kind of ties within the Berkeley student community.”
The JSU invited members of the Anti-Defamation League to attend one of its regular meetings last week in which strategic responses were discussed. Baron said he plans to hold some sort of activity on Sproul Plaza next week, when the campus will be full of students returning from the long weekend, as well as penning letters to the school paper.
“It’s not productive to say, ‘Someone wrote “kike” on the door, and that’s wrong.’ That message is true, but I don’t think it serves the purpose that we want. We want to say that we need to work harder to understand each other, to tolerate each other. Something didn’t happen. Somebody wasn’t taught,” he said.
“I’m hoping the person who did this didn’t do it because he truly hated all Jews. If this was some kind of a foolish prank, that person had no idea what kind of emotional ground he was treading on.”
Adam Weisberg, executive director of Berkeley Hillel, said things have been very quiet since the tense atmosphere at the time of the Hillel vandalism four years back, and this incident came out of the blue.
The epithet left on AEPi’s deck appeared to have been sloppily poured from a paint can, not spray-painted. Rothberg reported that none of the house’s 25 residents saw or heard anything, and added that he’s considering installing additional lighting in the area.
“Honestly, we just cleaned it up off our deck and really want to try to move on and live our lives as normally as possible,” he said.
“The Jewish Student Union views it as a larger community issue, which I agree with. They plan to take more action and we’ll support them whatever they do.”