University of Delaware student charged with hate crime for vandalizing Holocaust memorial, officials say

NEWARK, Del. (CBS) — A University of Delaware student was charged with a hate crime and banned from campus after vandalizing a Holocaust memorial and going on an “antisemitic tirade,” the attorney general’s office announced Monday. 

Jenna Kandeel, 23, was charged with several misdemeanor offenses after vandalizing the Holocaust memorial sponsored by a Jewish student group at the University of Delaware last week on Wednesday, May 8. 

Kandeel was arrested by the University of Delaware Police Department after witnesses reported she damaged “several flags at a Holocaust memorial on the UD Green and made vulgar statements about the Jewish community and the Holocaust,” according to officials. 

Kandeel admitted to the vandalism after she was taken into custody, according to officials.   

Antisemitic incidents have been on the rise across the country since the Hamas attacks against Israel in 2023. 

“We have a proud history of protecting free speech in this country, including and especially political dissent,” Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings said in a release. “But we need to be lucid enough to recognize the daylight — miles of it, in this case — between protest and hate. The Holocaust is not ancient history. 80 years later, the world’s Jewish population still has not recovered; its survivors are still with us; and I fear that we still have not learned its lessons. Seeing this ignorance on display, particularly in an increasingly antisemitic climate, should be a wake-up call. We still have work to do.”