jewish philosophy place

So much was written about Jewish student experience of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism during the anti-Israel protests after October 7 during the 2023-2024 academic year. Much of what was said paid little mind to students themselves. What do Jewish students say and what did they think?What do they know and what don’t they know about Jewishness and Jewish history, and about the politics of Israel and Palestine into which they are swept up, as if suddenly? Jewish student response to the politics of Israel and Palestine on campus over the course of the year revealed two things: [1] the structural, i.e. political, bonds that define Jewish identity and [2] the ultimate impossibility of meaningfully relating to Israel without taking critical sides in the internecine politics of the country.

In my own attempt to gauge Jewish student experience, I am bracketing the judgment of faculty-colleagues (including my own judgment). This is because we weigh in on campus life from relatively privileged institutional positions that (more or less) protected us from the negative impact of the last recent months. I am especially bracketing organized parent and alumna groups and rightwing Jewish NGOs whose members have little direct familiarity with campus life and for whom any critical word about Israel counts as anti-Semitism. I am dismissing out of hand gaslighting in the media and on campus that the protests were anti-war (as opposed to being very anti-Israel) and pat claims by student protestors and their supporters that “Israel is not the same as Judaism,” and “anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.”

Jewish students are the best gauge of their own varied experience.

Across the United States and Canada, student protests and anti-Zionist activism were structurally variegated into set of triads.

From campus to campus and across any individual campus, one could have discerned 3 intensities of anti-Zionism impacting Jewish students after October 7: [1] persistent-constant-manifest; systemic across campus life: at main quads, classrooms, departments and programs, student orgs, dorms, libraries, dining areas, social media platforms, [2] incidental expressions; ebb and flow; more or less easy to navigate depending on context, [3] nothing or next to nothing and easy to ignore. 

Jewish student response to the protests varied from being [1] very pro-Israel, [2] very anti-Israel, and [3] more or less apathetic, more or less curious. 

Among students in general and Jewish students in particular, there were [1] protest-insiders, [2] protest-outsiders, and [3] those skirting the margins.

In assessing accounts of Jewish student experience, I am relying on 2 primary sources. [1] University task force reports on anti-Semitism and on Islamophobia whose faculty members devoted hours meeting with impacted students who selected to meet with them. [2] The mainstream-liberal, Jewish, and campus press. To my mind, Judy Malz and Linda Dyan at Haaretz, Gabe Stutman at the Jewish News of Northern California, and Arno Rosenfeld at the Forward were unfailingly excellent in their reporting. Reports and interviews at the New York Times and Guardian were an invaluable measure of Jewish student experience precisely because these sources are not known for being pro-Zionist outlets and because they consistently include in their reporting Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian student voices. Of unique interest are the Islamophobia taskforce reports + Israel-critical and anti-Zionist Jewish voices providing an important index both by way of what they say directly and what they say between the lines about the impact of the protests on Jewish students.

Official Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia task forces confirm the reporting by journalists, whose work supports the findings of the task forces. The general impression is that a great many if not most Jewish students were shocked by the massacres on October 7 and the intensity of anti-Israel protest on campus. Many Jewish and nearly all Israeli students, faculty, and staff on U.S. campuses were personally impacted by October 7. Many and maybe most Jewish students supported the right of Israel to defend its people without expressing “pro-war” sentiment as such. To one degree or another, they were repelled by fellow-students supporting the destruction of Israel and calling for “Zionists off campus.” At the same time, it is not always clear how students understand the definition of “anti-Zionism.” Some self-identified non-Zionist and self-identified anti-Zionist Jewish students (not protest-insiders) expressed serious critical reservations about the extreme anti-Israel messaging that defined or at least marked the protests at many campuses.

Reports in the media made mention of some harsh anti-Palestinian, or at least anti-Hamas expression on the part of some very pro-Israel Jewish students as well as campus-outsiders. This expression seems to have been largely incidental. Press reports and Islamophobia task forces in no way suggest that Jewish and Israeli students systematically harassed Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim fellow-students. As per below, the Islamophobia task forces reported relatively little direct anti-Arab-anti-Palestinian-anti-Muslim abuse and harassment from fellow student or from faculty and TA’s on campus overall. (Their main complaint was with doxing by outsiders and with university administrations and policy negatively impacting what for them was free expression of pro-Palestine political speech). At UCLA, students and the campus Hillel publicly condemned violence directed at their fellow students who were part of protest encampments in May 2024 by counter-protestors from the Los Angeles Jewish community. So did members of the LA Jewish Federation. Many, but certainly not all, pro-Israel students across the country expressed ambivalence and even opposition to police action on campus against their fellow students, while also expressing satisfaction when the encampments were eventually disbanded. Against the current, Jewish students and faculty found it difficult to find common ground and civic comity on campuses polarized by pro-Palestine-anti-Zionist protests after October 7.

The accounts concerning campus life as I have gathered from them below underscore the basic claim that Jewish identity is inherently political and collective. The State of Israel is a massive social object, a center of gravity in Jewish life, a basic and even dominant component part of the global Jewish political body. For its part, in the United States, a campus community is a closed-in public defined by a unique set of norms, rules, and bodies that characterize institutions of higher learning. Jewish students, both those who directly engaged the political moment and those who were caught up in the swell of the protests against Israel after October 7, were forced, in one way or another, to confront vital questions about the politics of inclusion and belonging in Jewish communal and campus life. It is no surprise that Jewish students struggled particularly on those campuses distinguished by especially insular on-campus student cultures and legacies of institutional prestige and privilege.

TASK FORCES

The three major task forces on Anti-Semitism and on Islamophobia were at Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford: private and prestigious institutions where students reported significant impacts on Jewish student life and participation on campus in the face of anti-Israel protests after October 7. Both task forces spoke in support of bedrock principles of free speech. Unlike the Islamophobia task forces, the Anti-Semitism task forces also addressed concerns relating to the time, place, and manner of free speech, directing attention to the tension between free speech and hate or abusive speech, and campus norms of inclusion, especially as these norms conform to Title VI mandating equality of participation on federally funded campuses. Both the Anti-Semitism and the Islamophobia task forces offer institutional confirmation regarding the failure of universities and colleges to teach Israel and Palestine, as well as Islam and Judaism. The Anti-Semitism task forces and its members highlight the seriousness of the problem of anti-Semitism on impacted campuses as well as a correlation of anti-Semitism and extreme anti-Zionism.

The Columbia Task Force on Antisemitism issued an op-ed at the Columbia Spectator in March 2024 informing the university community about the work of the committee. Under the title “We Hear You,” the op-ed related to the general environment created by the protests and to the cardinal importance of free speech as a value in university life. The op-ed mentioned threatening and ideationally violent rhetoric at protests, shunning from students and faculty, gaslighting from Administration. It described the affect on campus blurring anti-Israel animus with anti-Jewish hate, the use of Zionism as an epithet, singling out Jewish and Israeli students in classrooms, and litmus tests pressuring Jewish students to renounce Zionism and conform to anti-Zionist principles as a condition to participation in aspects of university life (clubs, student government, etc.). The op-ed makes the claim that Zionism is deeply embedded into Jewish life.

The first official report from the Columbia Task Force on Antisemitism focused on University rules safeguarding the rights of free speech and protest, on the one hand, versus time-place-manner limits on that speech, particularly as it relates to discrimination and protection of Jewish students from harassment on the other hand. A second report is expected to detail the experience of Jewish students on campus. (I will update this post when that second report is issued.) As per here at Haaretz   “one of the key points emphasized by task force members is that, unlike past protests at Columbia, which were directed at the establishment and at the university itself, this protest has in many ways been aimed at students who lack the tools to cope with the intensity of the anger directed against them.” About faculty conduct, “Unfortunately, there are still many faculty members who do not believe that there is antisemitism on campus, and some claim that antisemitism is being weaponized to protect pro-Israel views.” (All of this was confirmed by a sorry incident during which three deans at Columbia were discovered mocking Jewish privilege during a community forum meant to address Jewish student and communal concerns.)

You can read the 4th report of the task force at Columbia, focused on student experience in the classroom.

The Subcommittee on Antisemitism and anti-Israel Bias of the Jewish Advisory Committee at Stanford University reported on the impact of the protests on Jewish student life related to classrooms, behavior of faculty and TA’s, social media, dorms, pressure to conform to anti-Zionist orthodoxy, calls supporting violence and the celebration of violence of October 7, disrupted classes and events, extreme polarization, personal invective, and poor university response to complaints as per here and here.    

According to the Stanford advisory task force, “[A]ntisemitism exists today on the Stanford campus in ways that are widespread and pernicious. Some of this bias is expressed in overt and occasionally shocking ways, but often it is wrapped in layers of subtlety and implication, one or two steps away from blatant hate speech… Antisemitism and bias against Israelis as a nationality group are not uniformly distributed across campus. We found schools, departments, dorms, and programs that seem largely unaffected, where Jewish students, faculty, and staff did not report issues with bias, harassment, intimidation, or ostracism. But a few portions of the campus appear to have very serious problems that have deeply affected Jewish and Israeli students. The most succinct summary of what we found is in our title, ‘It’s in the air.’ We learned of instances where antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias reached a level of social injury that deeply affected people’s lives: students moving out of their dorms because of antisemitic acts or speech; students being ostracized, canceled, or intimidated for openly identifying as Jewish, or for simply being Israeli, or expressing support for Israel, or even for refusing to explicitly condemn Israel; students fearing to display Jewish symbols or reveal that they were Jewish for fear of losing friendships or group acceptance. Some of the examples we heard did not involve singular actions or expressions but a pattern of bias and intimidation that need to be energetically addressed. Students also complained of begin ‘tokenized,’ viewed as ‘a representative of the Jewish people all the time.’ Graduate students also complained of “a lack of any mechanism to support us,” a fear of retaliation if they reported what they were experiencing, and a lack of confidence that anything would be improved if they did report.” “The imposition of a unique social burden on Jewish students to openly denounce Israel and renounce any ties to it was, we found, the most common manifestation of antisemitism in student life. It was not only students who felt unsafe. A few faculty and staff members told us that they had begun to feel physically unsafe for the first time in their many years or decades at Stanford. More often, Jewish students (and some faculty and staff) felt isolated and abandoned, with no clear expression of support from the University (or from their school or program) for the pain and trauma they were feeling after the October 7 attacks, or for the intimidation and hostility they encountered in their programs or residences.” According to the taskforce, “The core problem is the broader deterioration of norms that once stigmatized antisemitism. The trend in recent years, but especially since October 7, has been a normalization of antisemitic and anti-Israeli speech on campus, and an ‘impression of indifference’ on the part of the University—or at least many actors within it—to antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias.”

The Stanford Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Communities Committee report reflecting on the pressure on campus experienced by Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students and their allies offers an inverse impression. The committee recommends “vibrant discourse” and a culture of “disagreement across difference” instead of “civil discourse,” defined as “the rarefied intellectual conversation of a classroom or an event hall stage,” taking account of “both sides.” The report supports acts of student disruption and rejects restrictions imposed on speech related to time, place, and manner, dismissing the “discomfort” this might cause Jewish students. Mandated to report on the experience of Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students, the task force ignored instances of hate speech and abusive speech directed at Jewish students, or statements promoting violence against Jews in Israel. One page highlighted in red dedicated to “Jewish anti-Zionists and Anti-Semitism” acknowledges the alienation of Jews at Stanford because of anti-Semitism, which it sees as a failure of the university. The taskforce then quickly pivots to anti-Zionist Jews highlighting their exclusion from Jewish community on campus. The report focuses almost entirely on the administration. The task force criticized the administration for forbidding the placement of the official university logo/name on flyers and materials relating to political events, for not “[embracing] or [celebrating]” protests. The task force criticized the framing of the violence in Gaza as an “Israel-Hamas war,” placing anti-Semitism before Islamophobia in official statements relating to the war and protests, condemning calls for the genocide of “Jews or any peoples,” and framing speech at protests as “hateful and intolerant” as opposed to intersectional, inclusive and peaceful. The task force report states that, in some cases, administrators explicitly targeted speech supportive of Palestine on the basis of its viewpoint in “violation of the university’s obligations to protect freedom of speech and principles of academic freedom. Administrators leveraged existing time, place, and manner restrictions on speech—and created new ones—to limit discourse around Palestine.” The taskforce includes a few reports on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian abuse suffered by students on Stanford campus in class, dorms, social media. This includes a 1929 article in the Stanford Daily and an op-ed at the conservative Stanford Review. What the task force does not indicate is a pattern of systemic or pervasive exclusions resulting from actions on campus by students, faculty, and staff.

In the words of the Stanford Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Communities Committee, “For these groups, as we heard in our listening sessions, safety encompasses their physical safety, mental and emotional wellbeing, and economic security— that is, their ability to feel secure in their employment.” The primary concerns revolved around doxxing and a “Palestine Exception to Free Speech.”“From the disbanding of student organizations advocating for Palestinians, to the cancellation of political events and film screenings, to the violent police response to protests around the country, we have seen university administrators around the nation squelch speech—time and again—when it champions Palestinian rights or challenges Israeli state violence. Sometimes, administrators justify these restrictions as an effort to spare other students from discomfort; sometimes, they justify them as regulating the time, place, and manner of speech on campus; sometimes, they assert they are protecting campus safety….To some of us, it seemed that Stanford might do better than other institutions because California state law extends First Amendment protections to student speech on campus, and because university leaders regularly reaffirm the values of freedom of speech and academic freedom. In certain respects, it did, as in permitting the Sit-In to Stop Genocide to continue on White Plaza for four months. But our listening sessions also revealed explicit viewpoint-based discrimination targeting pro-Palestinian speech, the leveraging of time, place, and manner restrictions to repress Palestine activism, and the policing and criminalization of our students for peaceful protest.”

The Harvard University Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism issuedan initial report in June, 2024, reported here at the JTA: “The situation over the past year has been quite grave, and unless we take significant steps forward by the beginning of the coming academic year, we could be in a position similar to last year, which we want to prevent.” The task force     detailed multiple accounts of personal abuse, shunning, exclusion resulting from actions by students, faculty, teaching fellows, on social media, clubs, including litmus tests which should be “subject to disciplinary action when it occurs.” The report includes accounts of anti-Israeli bias + an op-ed by at the Harvard Crimson written by task force members Ellias and Penslar who identify a correlation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism on campus.

For its part, the preliminary report from the Harvard University Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab Bias included the following: “Safety and Security Concerns: The listening sessions revealed a deep-seated sense of fear among students, staff, and faculty. Muslims, Palestinians, Arab Christians, and others of Arab descent as well as pro-Palestinian allies described a state of uncertainty, abandonment, threat, and isolation, and a pervasive climate of intolerance. People of color from other groups and identities — often Black and South Asian students – shared experiences of racism and hatred because they were allies, or because they were misidentified as Arab, Muslim, or Palestinian. Muslim women who wear hijab and pro-Palestinian students wearing keffiyehs spoke about facing verbal harassment, being called “terrorists,” and even being spat upon. The issue of doxxing was particularly highlighted as a significant concern that affects not only physical safety and mental well-being, but also future career prospects. Institutional Response: There was significant concern about the University’s perceived lack of response to pressures and damaging attacks from external agents, such as some high-profile donors. As a result, participants expressed a heightened sense of insecurity and felt unsafe, as the University seems to lack the requisite independence to protect them. Freedom of Expression: Participants raised concerns about restrictions on freedom of expression, resulting in their feeling unable to share their views frankly. Many Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian students, staff, and faculty, including Jewish allies, said they continue to fear negative consequences if they speak publicly on issues they care about.”

One quick takeaway from the taskforces is that the discourse on campus is, indeed, not civil and that campus communities are ill-prepared to negotiate the tension between free speech and hate speech, in general, on the part of students and faculty relating to Israel and Palestine, in particular. The regnant affective charge on campus is structured in such a way as to make impossible any attempt to disconnect pro-Palestine solidarity from anti-Zionist animus. What for the Islamophobia taskforces was the free expression of “pro-Palestine” solidarity is experienced by Jewish students as “anti-Israel” and “anti-Jewish.” The Jewish and the Muslim community task forces make an identical case, which is that the discourse of Israel and Palestine on campus is experienced personally by the most impacted students in terms of hatred and fear.

JOURNALISM

Unlike task force reports, which are by nature schematic, the Jewish, Israeli, and mainstream press conveyed more of the contextual complexity determining student experience. Jewish student responses are hard to pigeonhole. As reported, most Jewish students seemed averse to conflict. A great many seemed ill-equipped to engage the politics of Israel and Palestine in a deep way. There was lots of generic support for Israel, and very little by way of anti-Muslim-Arab-Palestinian statements, at least as reported in the press (and as confirmed by the Islamophobia taskforces at Harvard and Stanford). Speaking to their own experience, Jewish protest-insiders inside the anti-Zionist camp expressed enormous frustration with the way the protests were framed in the media and by members of the Jewish community on-campus and off-campus. These were the Jewish students who accepted protest-movement norms, even those excluding or ostracizing students, primarily other Jews, who did not accept movement norms. Statements by anti-Zionist Jewish students only confirmed reports from pro-Israel students who recounted instances of intimidation, social ostracism, and, in extreme cases, blocked access to parts of campus by anti-Israel activists. Ambivalent, even some self-identified anti-Zionist Jewish students (not protest-insiders) experienced moments of extreme discomfort inhibiting their own participation in the protests and other avenues of campus life. They were critical of Israel and the government of Israel, but not necessarily anti-Israel, while being horrified by the Hamas atrocities. For the most part, Jewish students wanted to find middle ground. Their overall experience undercuts the ready-made claims by anti-Zionist students, faculty, and their “Jewish allies” that one can separate Zionism from Judaism. Across the entire political divide, reading Jewish students in their own words highlights the underlying inability to disconnect politics and Jewish identity and the impossible work of reaching across Zionist and anti-Zionist difference under these polarizing conditions.

Anti-Zionist Jewish students (protest-insiders) rejected accounts from other Jewish students about in-person and online harassment and abuse the latter experienced from fellow students. They flatly rejected anti-Semitism as anything but a marginal phenomenon rejected by the protesters themselves. A Jewish Students Encampment Solidarity Open Letter from across the country described a positive pro-Jewish vibe, reporting that Jews were welcome at demonstrations and encampments:  “The narrative that the Gaza solidarity encampments are inherently antisemitic is part of a decades-long effort to blur the lines between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. It is a narrative that ignores the large populations of Jewish students participating and helping to lead the encampments as a true expression of our Jewish values. The beautiful interfaith solidarity by Jewish students observing Passover seders and Shabbat at encampments across the country show that the rich Jewish tradition of justice is on full display inside the encampments. The denial of Jewish participation in this movement is not only incorrect, but it is an insidious attempt to justify unfounded claims of antisemitism. As neo-Nazis are marching in the streets and fascist politicians are campaigning on the antisemitic Great Replacement theory, we wholeheartedly reject the lie that these student activists are targeting Jewish students in their protest.”

But, a discordant note expressed by protest-insiders themselves indicates a difficult crux: Four pro-Palestine-anti-Zionist Jewish graduate students at Columbia pushed back against the “We Hear You” op-ed issued by the Columbia Anti-Semitism Task force. Against the larger Jewish communal current, they argue here that Judaism and Jewishness are not, in fact, the same as so-called apartheid Zionism. The letter-writers reject contentions that “the state of Israel and Jewishness are difficult to separate,” and oppose the notional claim that “for many Jews, the ‘Jewish state is inextricably part of their identity.’” They say scores of Jews were part of the protests and deny that Jews qua Jews were under any threat on campus. “[A]ll of us support Columbia University Apartheid Divest’s demands, and none of us feel ‘ostracized or threatened’ as the task force would have people believe” (emphasis added).

As if politics and Jewish identity were indeed separate, the discordant note is made when the four graduate student op-ed writers go on to say that being ostracized for political beliefs does not count as “discrimination.” This is the crux. Underscoring the political nature of Jewish identity, many Jews, in fact, experienced being ostracized for “political beliefs” as “discriminatory” (a term with loaded legal consequences in U.S. civil rights law). Many Jewish students, perhaps the large majority, do not separate in any neat or obvious way Jewishness and Judaism from Israel and Zionism. In an op-ed against the four graduate students, an undergraduate at Columbia insisted, just as sharply, that so-called token Jewish students are actually mispresenting anti-Zionism as being simply “critical of Israel.” As seen be her, anti-Zionism represents instead complete opposition to the existence of the State of Israel in any territorial configuration as a Jewish national home. In the op-ed “On Tokenism and the Denial of Antisemitism,” the undergraduate writer was alert to the exclusionary litmus test signaled by the four graduate students,   “Therefore,” she writes, “when they claim not to have felt ostracized on campus, I believe them. That is because they fit the pro-Palestinian movement’s mold of what kind of Jew belongs.”

Zionism has become the shibboleth, the password that determines friend from foe, determines who can enter an ideological camp that seeks to dominate and define the politics of Israel and Palestine on campus, who belongs on campus, and who does not. The LA Times cited Jewish students here regarding checkpoints set up at the UCLA encampment: . “Some Jewish students said they felt intimidated as protesters scrawled graffiti — ‘Death 2 Zionism’ and ‘Baby Killers’ — on campus buildings and blocked access with wooden pallets, plywood, metal barricades and human walls. The pro-Palestinian student movement includes various strains of activism, including calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, support for Hamas and demands that universities divest from firms doing business with Israel. But on campuses across the country, no word has become more charged than ‘Zionist.’”

The LA Times cites an undergraduate protester affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace, “‘We are committed to keeping each other safe,’ said AL, 22, a fourth-year art and art history student and member of Jewish Voice for Peace. Anyone who agreed to the UC Divest Coalition’s demands and community guidelines, she said, was welcome. ‘What is not welcome is Zionism,’ she added. ‘Or anyone who actively adheres to a very violent, genocidal political ideology that is actively endangering people in Gaza right now.’ For pro-Palestinian activists who are Jewish, the camp was a peaceful space to promote justice, a welcoming interfaith community with therapist-led processing circles and candlelit prayer services. Blue tarps and blankets were put down in the middle of the lawn for Islamic prayers and a Passover Seder and a Shabbat service. On the first evening, about 100 activists, many Jewish, sat in a circle to pray, sing, drink grape juice and eat matzo ball soup, matzo crackers and watermelon. ‘It was really beautiful…We were trying to hold these spaces to show that Judaism goes beyond Zionism.’”

What is not welcome in the utopian place of the encampment is “Zionism,” not Jews. But that argument goes only so far, because for many and maybe most Jewish students, Zionism and Israel are persistent component parts of Jewish identity in ways that are just as often unclear to the students themselves. What’s perfectly clear is the hostility evoked by Zionism and Israel at the protests. The LA Times report from UCLA notes, “Other Jewish students were more wary as they navigated the camp. EP, who moved to the U.S. when he was 12 and identifies as a Zionist, was alarmed when he scanned the quad on the first day. He saw signs saying ‘Israelis are native 2 HELL,’ he said, and banners and graffiti showing inverted red triangles, a symbol used in Hamas propaganda videos to indicate a military target. ‘Do people know what that means?’ he wondered. Tucking his Star of David under his T-shirt, EP said, he entered and approached activists, introducing himself as an Israeli citizen. ‘Maybe we can find common ground,’ he said, ‘one human being to the other?’ Some students put their hands up, he said, blocking him as they walked away. Others treated the conversation as a joke. One protester, he said, told him that everything Hamas did was justified. EP said he had one good conversation: An activist who identified as anti-Zionist admitted not being 100% educated on what Zionism was, but agreed that Israel should exist. They came to the conclusion the activist was a Zionist. But most of EP’s exchanges, he said, ended negatively when activists realized he was defending Zionism. He said he was called a ‘dirty Jew’ and ‘white colonizer.’ Other students — even those who did not fully support the encampment — said they did not experience such slurs.”

As reported in the press, many if not all of the encampments were closed ideological spaces, often monitored by designated protest leaders and sometimes even by sympathetic faculty. On principle, protesters rejected dialogue with “Zionist” students. As reported here at the Forward, “This disregard for any attempt at reconciliation was perhaps best observed at the University’s so-called ‘Day of Dialogue’ in February, during which lectures by both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel speakers were to be given and discussed in small discussion groups. The program was readily welcomed by several friends and I at the Jewish Theological Seminary, who hoped to see more respect for and interest in our pro-Israel beliefs. But Columbia University Apartheid Divest — the student group that drove the recent wave of protests at the university — announced a boycott of the event, declaring on their Instagram that, ‘Students say NO to normalization,’ with groups of students chanting and marching directly outside of the room where the symposium was taking place.” 

Jewish students at Columbia wrote a long open letter that got a lot of attention both at Columbia and in the media. The letter touched upon binary exclusions that many Jewish students experienced on campus; while underscoring what is arguably the non-separation of politics and Jewish identity. “In Our Name: A Message from Jewish Students at Columbia University” gathered over 600 on-campus Jewish signatories. Writing in the first person plural, the letter writers say, “protestors on campus have dehumanized us, imposing upon us the characterization of the ‘white colonizer.’ We have been told that we are ‘the oppressors of all brown people’ and that ‘the Holocaust wasn’t special.’ Students at Columbia have chanted ‘we don’t want no Zionists here,’ alongside “death to the Zionist State” and to ‘go back to Poland,’ where our relatives lie in mass graves. This sick distortion illuminates the nature of antisemitism: In every generation, the Jewish People are blamed and scapegoated as responsible for the societal evil of the time….And today, we face the accusation of being too European, painted as society’s worst evils – colonizers and oppressors. We are targeted for our belief that Israel, our ancestral and religious homeland, has a right to exist. We are targeted by those who misuse the word Zionist as a sanitized slur for Jew, synonymous with racist, oppressive, or genocidal…We came to Columbia because we wanted to expand our minds and engage in complex conversations. While campus may be riddled with hateful rhetoric and simplistic binaries now, it is never too late to start repairing the fractures and begin developing meaningful relationships across political and religious divides.” 

On the one hand, statements and reports in the press indicate variegation, complexity, and ambivalence on the part of Jewish students. On the other hand, they indicate the experience of fractures, binaries, and ideological ostracism as a force of social exclusion on campus. A wide sweep of Jews on campus were caught in the anti-Zionist litmus test. Not all of them were necessarily “Zionist.” The NYT reports here from Columbia, “This pressure, some students say, has forced them to choose between their belief in the right of the Jewish state to exist and full participation in campus social life. It is brought to bear not only on outwardly Zionist Jews, for whom the choice is in some sense already made, but to Jews on campus who may be ambivalent about Israel.” The article interviews a non-Zionist Jew who attended a Jewish event at a Jewish center on campus; an anti-Zionist Jew who stopped participating at the radio station WKCR after a student board member expressed ambivalence about making a program featuring Israeli music; and a Columbia senior who participated in Jews for Ceasefire, and said she was “uncomfortable” protesting alongside members of the encampment because of the chant “All Zionists off campus now.” The Arab and Palestinian voices in the article openly supporting the shunning of “Zionist” students only makes the case in point. According to Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Palestine-Israel program at the Arab Center in Washington, “That’s going to put people in the Jewish community who are dealing with these tensions in an uncomfortable situation. They’re going to be asked to pick between a commitment to justice and a commitment to Zionism.” A PhD student in Physics is quoted, “I think anyone who subscribes to the Zionist ideology should be viewed as you would view one who proclaims to be a white supremacist,” 

How broad based was the hostility expressed by Munayyer or by the PhD student in Physics on campus? Jewish student statements and students interviewed in the press suggest that students across the board were more often than not or just as often than not open-minded with each other. They were more open-minded and curious, less ideologically closed than the protest leaders and faculty mentors. A student from UCLA was quoted at the LA Times, “RB, a senior who described herself as a non-Zionist Jew, disagreed with the call for divestment and academic boycotts, especially of UCLA’s Nazarian Center, an educational center for the study of Israeli history, politics and culture. Entering the camp after a classmate vouched for her, RB was disturbed by anti-Israeli signs and graffiti that named Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson for the military wing of Hamas. But she also bonded with protesters, including a woman in a hijab. ‘Of course, some protesters deny Oct. 7 or condone violence as long as it can be put under the guise of decolonial resistance, which is obviously horrific,’ RB said. ‘But that’s not the case of many students inside the encampment.’”

Viewed in the round, one gets mixed impressions, the sense of a rough but elusive middle ground. A panel here at the Guardidan gathering statements from four American Jewish students reflects the push and pull around the protests, around Israel and anti-Zionism. There is one student who supports “Palestinian liberation” but for whom anti-Zionist hostility is a sticking point. There is the anti-Zionist Jewish student who says everyone is welcome at encampments as long as they abide by anti-Zionist principles. And there are two students supporting a two-state solution who got mixed response at an encampment; they reject extreme pro-Hamas messaging, but continue to hang around the edges, engaging fellow students, and refusing an us/them binary.

The attempt to navigate a middle path in such a polarized environment is the better part of naïveté. It would, in fact, require the patient consideration of contradictory statements and a willingness to remain open to different points of view while rejecting others. At the Guardian, a student recounts his experience at the edge of the protests. “However, at NYU and across the country, protestors regularly chanted ‘From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab’ in Arabic. There were chants of ‘Settlers, settlers [referring to all Israeli Jews] go back home, Palestine is ours alone.’ They were justifying and normalizing the egregious crimes Hamas committed against civilians on October 7 and glorifying Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis under the banner of ‘by any means necessary.’ The protesters’ dream of a liberated Palestine looked a lot like pure revenge, rather than justice. I understand the desire for revenge, particularly for those between the River and the Sea. But I hold my peers – privileged US-based college students disconnected from the violence and existential antes — to a different standard. I support justice, freedom, liberty for the Palestinian people, but I could not and would not stand by a message filled with so much hate so I never joined the protests. However, I kept sticking around on the outside of the encampment because I did agree with a fair amount of what protesters were saying and wanted to see what was going on. I witnessed and heard many awful things said by both Pro-Palestine protesters and Pro-Israel counter-protesters. But then, something magical happened. I started having conversations with others at the protests where I realized how much we have in common. I realized that a sizable number of people did not in fact want the expulsion, subjugation, or death of Israeli Jews. Most important, these were conversations with Palestinians! In fact, I found the people I had common ground with the most were Palestinians. While eliminationist rhetoric divides us, I believe it is possible for the non-extremists on all sides to unite behind two goals: ending the war and bringing justice, freedom, and equality to Palestinians not at the expense of or dehumanization of Israelis.” 

The protests were not, however, about ending the war, freedom for Palestinians, and recognition of Israel and Israeli humanity. It would have been a completely different experience had they been so –conducive to dialogue, cooperation, etc. One understands the trauma experience by Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students over the course of the year. But the protests were kicked up in the very first days after October 7 before Isarel committed ground troops in Gaza after Hamas. At a moment of crisis, a large part of the student body naturally came to the support of their fellow students who were demonstrating against Israel and “Zionism.” Perhaps just as important, they were protesting against university administrations perceived to have been acting with a heavy hand against the exercise of free speech. It might also have been the case that extremist messaging by protest-insiders was, for all their prominence, the point of view of a vocal minority of protest-insiders and leaders who dragged the campus along with them. The composite of reflections from Jewish students gathered here might be trueer than not of a larger mood on campus: more open and curious than binary and closed. To push the conversation in a direction recognizing Palestinian and Israeli rights and mutual recognition, would require political skill and inter-cultural competence that most students lack. This is the work of a university education and liberal citizenship, but for which there are, at this moment, very few models on campus from student leaders and faculty across the political divide.

In short, the real and perceived experience of Jewish students in relation to anti-Semitic expression and anti-Israel bias has been subject to a lot of distortion by radical political actors on the left and right across the American social divide. A recently published study by Brandeis University researchers at the Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies clears up maybe most of the gaslighting. What is for real and what is not and where? You can read about it here at the JTA. On the one hand, the study tracks a real uptick of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias among a large and somewhat vocal minority of non-Jews on campus. On the other hand, the reality is that a majority of non-Jews on campus express no such anti-Jewish or anti-Israel animus. The authors of the study conclude, “We do not find a climate of universal anti-Jewish hatred, nor do we find that Jewish students’ concerns about antisemitism are unfounded…Instead, we find that Jewish students’ experiences of a hostile environment on campus is driven by a minority (but significant share) of students who hold patterns of beliefs that are hostile toward Israel and/or Jews” (emphasis added). For the authors of the study, this represents a challenging but open political space for Jews on campus at this terrible moment.

A TAKEAWAY

Anti-Israel protests after October 7 have clarified in a unique way that Jewish identity is itself political. Social ties between Jews are the core constitutional ligament that explains the deep imbrication of Israelism and Zionism into mainline Jewish life in the Diaspora. Indeed, the Jewishness of anti-Zionist Jews is no less monopolized by the politics of Zionism and Israel. Latent commitments and principles that were inchoate were suddenly made manifest after the massacres and in response to anti-Israel protests. Across the ideological spectrum, these commitments require critical focus and careful sharpening. Against ready-made talking-points on the radical anti-Zionist left, it is impossible to excise Israel, the national and political home of some seven million Jews, from the global Jewish body politic. Against rightwing and centrist mainstream pro-Israel community, it is just as impossible to excise from Jewish life in the Diaspora the volatile politics of democracy and religion, state and society in the State of Israel, especially regarding what Edward Said called “the question of Palestine.”

Who belongs to the campus community and who belongs to Jewish communal life on- and off-campus? The political conundrum after October 7 confronted by many Jews on campus was evident in the bind caught between two students, one progressive Zionist and the other anti-Zionist, at Washington U.  As reported here, the one spoke to being excluded from progressive organizations on campus because of “Zionism,” the other to being excluded from Jewish spaces because of what she identifies as “anti-Zionism.” Both struggle with Israel and occupation. But what exactly are “Zionism” and “anti-Zionism”? Are there not distinctions in any country between state and society? Does Zionism demand uncritical support for the State of Israel and the non-recognition of Palestinian political rights? Do all self-identifying anti-Zionists at the protests (as opposed to protest-insiders) demand the destruction of Jewish statehood and society in Israel? The politics of Jewish life in the United States remains mired by the radicalization of the right and religious right in Israel since the 2000s and which now dominates the radical rightwing-religious government of Israel engineered by Netanyahu in an extreme act of political cynicism. The only governments that younger generations of Jews and non-Jews, Americans and Israelis, and Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims recognize as officially representing “Israel” and “Zionism” are overtly racist, religious, and rightwing.

This is the conundrum in Jewish life on campus today. Jewish identity is political. But not knowing much about Israel and Palestine, most Jewish students do not know how to take a position beyond generic support of the country. This leaves Jewish student discourse on campus flat and unnuanced, ill-informed and mal-informed; unequipped to confront and respond to questions ranging from critical to malicious relating to the history and politics and culture of Israel. On either side of the political debate, students bring intelligence and insight without, however, understanding the meaning of words like Zionism, anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism. Across the political spectrum, students confuse criticism of Israel with being anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-Zionist.

This leaves Jewish students caught between a rock and hard place. Unwilling to dig deeper than shopworn cliches, Jewish communities, in the name of “Jewish unity,” consistently fail to model Israel education in ways that indicate the real political divisions and conflicts that define the country. University faculty who organize against Israel are, as a group, no less beholden to groupthink, ideological posturing, and uncomprehending hot takes. Part of much larger problem relating to universities and neoliberalism, students are responsible for their own education in a larger university ecosystem that does everything to undermine the humanities and humanistic social sciences in favor of STEM and professional schools. It’s little wonder that discourse on campus keeps getting dumb and dumber.

Students will grow out their political positioning over time. What Jewish students need in the meantime are better models for how to navigate the politics of Israel and the politics of Israel and Palestine. Such models build upon clearly articulated principles and commitments to equality and democracy. Israel is today led by an ultra-rightwing government whose values, racist and religious, are at odds with the values of mainstream American and, increasingly, mainstream Israeli Jews. In its own way, this is an opportune moment. For Jewish students, the massacres of October 7 and the war in Gaza make critical engagement necessary; while the government, the most extreme and unpopular in the history of the country, which so many Israelis and their supporters in the United States understand is itself responsible for the unprecedented disaster of October 7 and the war against Hamas, the unprecedented toll in human lives, makes possible more, not less, careful and critical circumspection regarding the politics of Israel and Palestine and Jewish life in the Diaspora. Students in the United States will not solve on their own the crises of national identity and human rights in Israel and Palestine, but they need to understand it better alongside their own place and responsibilities in the world.