ISURVIVED Jerusalem.

Unfortunately, that's how my mother and many of my friends and other family members in America translate the fact that I spent the past six months in Israel's capital and lived to tell about it. They think only luck--or, better yet, divine intervention--can explain my "survival" in a city best known these days for stabbings, shootings and other messy manifestations of the Palestinian Israeli conflict.

They're wrong.

As for luck, any present or former Radcliffe student can attest to my absolute lack thereof. As for life-saving help from the Good Guy in the Sky, I'm the first to acknowledge having received a bit in the past. How else can I explain making it through Social Studies sophomore tutorial last year?

But after a half-year in a place that over the millennia has known its fair share of miracles, I don't count my continued existence as one of them. In fact, given what's been happening in America lately, I might even say I stood a better chance "surviving" over there than I do back here.

"PLEASE BE ESPECIALLY careful walking in the neighborhood at night," read the top item in last week's Currier House newsletter. "There have been a number of muggings in the area this month, most notably on Shepard Street near Hilles Library and on Linnaean Street only 200 feet from Currier."

It wasn't a particularly nice welcome home greeting. But it wasn't too surprising.

Over the past year or so, the Harvard community has hardly been immune to violence. In the most tragic case, Bunting Institute fellow Mary Jo Frug was stabbed to death near Brattle Street last April. That same week, a woman was raped near the Quad. Two weeks later, a Boston resident was knifed outside the Border Cafe, just a one-minute walk from the Yard.

Last October, while I was studying in Jerusalem, a Law School student was violently attacted at a Harvard party. Even journalists aren't safe. The same month, Crimson editor J. Eliot Morgan '92 had his life threatened by CUNY Professor Leonard Jeffries.

Statistics give a more complete picture of crime at Harvard. In 1990 there were 70 reported assaults, three armed robberies, seven unarmed robberies and one sexual assault on University property.

That's just what's reported to Harvard police. Many victims of crime--particularly rape survivors--never inform the authorities. One in four women college students will be raped at some point in her four years.

At other colleges, crime is just as rampant. At Yale, one student has been shot dead on a campus that has come to resemble a firing range. At New York's City College last month, a combination basketball game and rap celebrity event ended when an out-of-control crowd crushed nine people to death.

A look at the real world is even more nauseating. In Milwaukee, Jeffrey Dahmer cruised the streets, luring gay men to his apartment. He murdered them--at least 16 young males--before sodomizing and mutilating their bodies. In one case, Dahmer admitted to boring a hole in a young man's head and pouring acid into his brain.

Back home in Cambridge, the police reported over 1000 incidents of violent crime last year. And in cities like Detroit and Washington, D.C., simple murder is old news unless there's a sex scandal or a psychopathic weirdo as a backdrop to the killing.

Forget about cruising California's freeways, riding New York's subways or eating in small-town Texas cafeterias that may attract deranged men with machine guns. You'd probably be safer in Jerusalem.