My Kids Are at Columbia and Harvard - This Is What They’re Seeing

With our daughter at Columbia University and a son at Harvard, our family is in the thick of the current wave of anti-Israel protests roiling campuses.

The hate began immediately after Hamas’ murderous rampage on October 7, 2023 in which Hamas terrorists broke a ceasefire and raped, tortured and murdered 1,200 Israelis and took approximately 240 Israelis hostage. My college kids were subjected to outrageous anti-Israel statements, posters, comments, and social media posts. For them and Jewish students across the country, college doesn’t feel the same.

Does a classmate hate me?

“I sat next to someone who came straight from the Encampment this morning,” my son Jacob told me yesterday. He’d just flown home for the end of Passover and a welcome respite from some of the tensions roiling Harvard’s campus. “I feel he hates Jews.”

My son tried to ignore his seatmate’s presence and concentrate on the final they were taking, but it wasn’t easy.

Anti-Israel protests at Harvard, like those across the country, are turbocharged these days.

Last Wednesday, April 23, 2024, dozens of tents appeared in Harvard Yard, the heart of the undergraduate campus. The university warned students not to erect the “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” that have sprung up on dozens of American universities in the past weeks, and recently have appeared as far afield as Australia and France. Students rushed into the Yard anyway, setting up camping tents in just minutes, before security guards could stop them.

My son describes their chants as “incendiary.” He hears them shouting “One solution: Intifada, Revolution!” referring to the campaign of terror in the first and second Intifada terror campaigns that rocked Israel in the 1980s and 1990s and again in the early 2000s, resulting in thousands of injuries and deaths. As he sits in class, he can hear shouting in Arabic: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Arab -- Min il-Mayye la-l-mayye, Falastin ‘arabiyye.”

Unlike many of his fellow students, Jacob knows what the real terror behind these words looks like. Three years ago, when spending a gap year studying in Jerusalem, he was visiting relatives when Jerusalem came under attack from Hamas. As Hamas fighters launched rockets at Jerusalem, he and his elderly cousins sheltered in our cousins’ stairwell, seeking protection. Later, he was unable to fly home for his brother’s bar mitzvah due to Hamas rockets and mortars targeting Ben Gurion International Airport that shut down all flights. His empty seat at our bar mitzvah celebrations were a poignant reminder that for many people, threats to wipe out the Jewish state are all too real.

I feel betrayed that our son has to hear his peers screaming chants that call for a destruction of Israel.

Now, my son attends university with people who parrot back the slogans of Hamas. Instagram and TikTok are filled with raw antisemitism and hatred for Israel. I was shocked my some of the recent posts by Harvard students that he shared with me. Here’s a small sample: “Sometimes, violence is the only answer.” “I would like us to all reflect on how much power the Jewish population has over the media….” “...the truth is that all Israelis are descendants of westerners. They just hated them SO MUCH that they decided to throw them into Palestine. There’s a reason ppl in Israel can’t get their ancestry tested.” In a thread about Iran backing Hamas: “Iran has the right to defend itself.” And while the October 7 massacres were still going on: “It’s Partytime!”

I feel betrayed that our son has to wonder which of his fellow students wrote these comments and has to hear his peers screaming chants that call for a destruction of Israel. This is not debate or protest; it’s harassment.

“Return home as soon as possible”

Rabbi Eli Buechler and his wife run the Orthodox Union Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus at Columbia University, and help make Columbia a warm, welcoming place for our daughter and other Jewish students. I’m used to reading his positive updates but now Rabbi Buechler’s correspondence has taken a darker turn.

Recent campus protests “have made it clear that Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety… It deeply pains me to say that I would strongly recommend you return home as soon as possible and remain home until the reality in and around campus has dramatically improved,” Rabbi Buechler wrote to Columbia’s Jewish students last Sunday, April 21. It followed a Shabbat and Saturday night in which students and outside agitators openly called for Israel’s destruction and harassed groups of students who were identifiably Jewish as they walked back to their dorm rooms at the end of Shabbat. Columbia’s Chabad leader, Rabbi Yuda Drizin, organized groups of students to walk home together in the face of the threatening mobs.

It was a sight I never thought my kids would see: Jewish students fearing for their safety on an American college campus. One mother in a Columbia parents’ group chat I’m on was dismissive of any angst that Jewish students might feel. “It’s not like they (the protestors) are rioting,” she recently posted. But for Jewish students at Columbia, the daily chants, the demonstrations, the crowd of non-students who have begun gathering outside Columbia’s gates to spew venom against Israel and Jews, have changed Columbia’s character. Some students are even considering transferring or moving off campus to avoid the disruption and hate.

The Original “Gaza Solidarity Encampment”

The day before Columbia University’s President, Dr. Minouche Shafik, testified before the US House of Representatives’ Education Committee, which is investigating antisemitism on college campuses, on April 17, 2024, students reacted by setting up an Encampment on the university’s South Lawn.

While the student organizers claim their protests are peaceful, their chants and the signs they display paint a very different picture. Chants have included: “We don’t want no Zionists here.” “We say justice, you say ‘How?’ / Burn Tel Aviv to the ground / yeah Hamas, we love you / we support your rockets too.” “Al Qassam (Hamas’ army, which carried out the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis), we love you, we support your rockets too.” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.” “I wish I was a martyr.” “Israel will fall, brick by brick , wall by wall, Zionism will fall.” “We don’t want no two state / We will take all of it.” “I’m going to do just like they did to the soldiers on October 7 / Did you see how many soldiers we got?” Can you imagine what it would be like for your child to hear this all day long?

When Columbia students staged a counter-protest last week, waving Israeli flags and singing Israel’s national anthem Hatikva, a Columbia student stood next to them holding a poster with an arrow pointing to the pro-Israel students and declaring “Al Qasam’s next targets.” A leader of Columbia’s protests has claimed “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” (He was subsequently expelled on April 27.) The school, which felt so welcoming to Jewish students last year, has seemingly transformed.

Now similar scenes are being repeated now across the US and around the world. As I’m writing this, approximately a thousand students at Northwestern University, near my own home, are at that school’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, chanting “Hey, hey, ho ho, Israel has got to go!” and “Long live the Intifada.” Students in many Encampments are demanding that universities divest from Israel, boycott, and cut all ties with the Jewish state.

This movement seeks to demonize the Jewish state and its supporters, painting Israelis and Zionists as somehow uniquely evil and malevolent. It’s an incredibly dangerous narrative, one that’s spreading like wildfire on campus after campus.

Leave or Fight Back?

In the face of this spasm of anti-Jewish hatred, some American Jewish students are voting with their feet.

Yeshiva University in New York and Brandeis University outside of Boston, two Jewish schools which have taken a strong stand against antisemitism, have announced they’re extending their transfer deadline to accommodate Jewish students who want to find a place to learn where they don’t have to put up with the sort of abuse described above. Applications to YU have risen 65% this year. A survey in April 2024 - before the current anti-Israel protests - found that fully 87% of American Jewish parents report that antisemitism on campuses after Hamas’ October 7 attacks had a direct “impact” on their child’s university choice; 64% reported that their children are not applying to some schools because of campus antisemitism.

Fighting back can feel daunting and downright dangerous. At Columbia, an Israeli student was attacked by a hulking transgender female student who was tearing down pictures of Israeli hostages being held captive in Gaza; the Israeli wound up with a broken finger. On April 20, 2024, a Jewish student journalist was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag on Yale University’s campus. Many students fear that even worse violence is possible, God forbid.

Yet my own kids are planning to return to Harvard and Columbia once Passover is over. “I think it’s important for pro-Israel and Jewish students to remain on campus,” our son says. He tunes out the anti-Israel rhetoric and tries to ignore Harvard’s Encampment and its violent threats. “It’s ridiculous to give up the chance to get a world-class education because of antisemites. Leaving would be tantamount to letting them win. Besides, building a thriving Jewish life on campus is the best answer to antisemitism.”