Note: This column will appear in the November 19 issue of The Phoenix.

When emerging from beneath the progressive security blanket of Swarthmore College, even fairly minor changes in the level of religious, sexual, and cultural toleration can be startling. Which is why, when I found swastikas drawn all over the walls of a bathroom stall in my college last week, I was all the more shocked. But before I get to that, some background about Wadham College…

This week at Wadham is Queer Week. At Swarthmore, this wouldn’t necessarily be regarded as a big deal. Between the Sager Symposium each spring and the fourteen different groups serving each tiny slice of the queer population on campus, being gay is a pretty intrinsic part of how Swarthmore operates. But at Oxford, that’s very much not the case. With all but eight of Oxford’s constituent colleges having been founded before the 20th century (and some dating back to the 13th century), progressivism isn’t central to the university’s culture. Most of Oxford’s colleges didn’t admit women until the 1920s. Even in August of this year, The Guardian found that women with equal credentials are still less likely (by a factor of 1.5) to be admitted to Oxford than men. “Traditional” is synonymous with “straight white male privilege” here — and tradition is a big part of how the Oxford educational system operates.

Which is why Queer Week (and the QueerFest bacchanalia that follows it) is such a big deal. Progressivism, in the way that we think of it at Swarthmore, isn’t as common at Oxford — not because the students are any less enlightened than their liberal Swattie counterparts, but because the historical legacy of this institution doesn’t allow them to be. Wadham, as I discovered shortly after arriving here, is widely regarded as the exception to this rule. Despite being founded in 1610, it’s seen as the most progressive college at Oxford, and accordingly, it’s the one that should feel the most like Swarthmore.

And so, going back to the swastikas in a Wadham bathroom, I had to ask myself: what the fuck is going on? Isn’t this supposed to be the liberal college? And more than that, I had to ask myself whether this bathroom stall was an isolated instance of hatred, or if the problem runs deeper in British society. The answer remains elusive.

Earlier this week, the British blog CiF Watch published a series of unlabeled quotes taken either from moderated comments on The Guardian’s website (The Guardian being a rather progressive paper, by any standard) or from Stormfront, a forum for neo-Nazis. The task for readers was to try to determine which comments were from which site. The results were shocking: a comment referring to Israel supporters as “ZioNazis” was from The Guardian, as was one calling Jews “the real Holocaust deniers.” Well over 80 percent of readers identified a comment referring to Jews who speak out on the subject of Israel as “the Zionist thought-police” as originating in The Guardian — even though it was actually posted on Stormfront.

The problem here isn’t that people post hateful things on the internet (although, undoubtedly, internet hate speech is problematic in its own right). The real issue is that the line between neo-Nazi hatred and moderated, presumably hate-free comments on a mainstream progressive British newspaper’s website has been blurred to the point where thousands of people are quite literally unable to tell them apart. Comments that would be regarded as grounds for a no-holds-barred panic attack on the part of Jewish groups at Swarthmore are unexceptional in discourse on Judaism and Israel in the UK.

In 2008, the Community Security Trust, an organization devoted to combatting antisemitism throughout England, announced that just under 550 incidents of antisemitism had been reported on British college campuses, of which 163 were violent or destructive to property. None of this was headline news. Even finding local media coverage of a Leeds University incident in which “Kill the Jews” was repeatedly written in a bathroom was an adventure in futility. This isn’t to say that the British at large are necessarily more antisemitic than Americans (although the sheer number of British antisemitic or anti-Zionist blogs that are in popular circulation here seems to suggest this), or that Wadham didn’t take the swastika I found seriously (it was painted over a few days later) — it’s just reinforcement of the reality that, culturally, the UK is a brave new world.

Fundamentally, there’s a disparity between the severity of incidents as I perceive them and the extent to which they register as serious issues at British universities outside of their Jewish communities. From the perspective of a Jew who grew up in Boca Raton, Florida (the most Jewish place imaginable, outside of Jerusalem or New York) and then attended Swarthmore, this was (and still is) appalling.

The take-away for students considering studying abroad isn’t that it’s unsafe, unpleasant, or not worth doing. Instead, it’s essential to approach diversity abroad with the mentality that things are going to be very, very different from what you’ve become accustomed to at Swarthmore. Being Jewish or queer or a woman in the rest of the world is a vast departure from what it’s like within the bubble, and in a sense being here requires being more vigilant and outspoken on these issues than at Swarthmore. It’s easy to be comfortably Jewish or comfortably gay at Swarthmore. In England, at least, identity politics is a much less passive enterprise.