Just a month after terrorists from Hamas invaded Israel and killed hundreds of people, the initial mood of outrage on America’s college campuses has shifted.
On Wednesday night at the University of Pennsylvania, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported, two pro-Palestinian groups posted on their Instagram stories photos of messages projected onto campus buildings: “Let Gaza live,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Penn funds Palestinian genocide,” and more, including at least one directed at the school’s president: “Liz Magill is complicit in genocide.”
Magill told the Pennsylvanian that university cops were investigating and called the messages “vile.”
“For generations, too many have masked antisemitism in hostile rhetoric,” she said in a statement. “These reprehensible messages are an assault on our values and cause pain and fear for our Jewish community.”
Similar messages were displayed on the walls of Gelman Library at The George Washington University in D.C. earlier this month, including the phrase “Glory to Our Martyrs.” And across the country, Jewish students have reported increased harassment since Hamas’s October 7 attack and the Israeli government’s all-encompassing response in Gaza.
Max Strozenberg, a freshman at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, told the New York Times he was shocked to hear fellow students chanting “Hey, Schill, what do you say, how many kids did you kill today,” a paraphrase of a chant from the anti-Vietnam War movement. The chant was directed at the school’s president, Michael H. Schill, who is Jewish.
Strozenberg, whose paternal grandparents escaped the Nazis in Europe while other family members were lost to the German death camps, told the Times that the mood on campus “is not pro-Palestinian, it’s antisemitic.”
Last month at the Cooper Union, a private college in New York City, Jewish students locked the doors of the library where they were studying while protesters pounded on the doors and windows, shouting angry slogans, Politico reported.
“I’m scared to walk outside,” Simone Shteingart, a senior and vice president of Cornell Hillel, the Jewish campus group, said. “I’m scared that my name is out there as a leader of the Jewish community, and I’m scared for all my peers.”
New York Police, however, downplayed the incident.
“There [were] no direct threats, there was no damage, there was no danger to any students in that school,” NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said during a press briefing, Politico reported.
A week before, Columbia University postponed a fundraising drive after an Israeli student was assaulted when he confronted a woman who was tearing down posters bearing the names of photos of the hostages Hamas took on October 7.
On the George Washington campus, officials said they had suspended a student who pulled down posters of the hostages, the GW Hatchet reported.
Jewish students and campus officials say the slogans and chants accusing them of being Nazis have been particularly galling. Many of them say they do not support the government’s response in Gaza, but that the dismissal of Jewish concerns is harmful.
Reckoning With Antisemitism at Yale by kc wildmoon on Scribd
Jason Rubenstein, the senior rabbi of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, wrote in a letter to the prestigious school’s Jewish community that he was “no defender of many of Israel’s policies.”
“Nothing could be more beside the point: No one is inevitably forced to kidnap babies, or massacre wheelchair-bound revelers at a rave — it is a choice, and a heinous one, that Hamas commanders and militants made, and for which they, and no one else, just answer.”
Rubenstein continued to define antisemitism:
“The key here s that antisemitism isn’t primarily about hurting or killing Jews, and it’s not based on some theory of racial inferiority (or superiority). Instead, antisemitism is a fear, and hatred of Jewish power — expressed primarily as a residence to believe that Jews, when organized and acting together on a large scales, are dangerous, the very essence of evil.”
Pro-Palestinian groups, meanwhile, say that claims of antisemitism are aimed at stifling their right to protest intolerable conditions in Gaza, which is run by Hamas, and the West Bank, where Israeli settlers increasingly encroach on Palestinian lands with the backing of the Israeli government.
“We stand staunchly against all forms of racism and bigotry,” Anna Babboni, a senior at Scripps College in Claremont, California, and a leader of the local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, told the Times.
Her group, Babboni said, is anti-Zionist and not antisemitic.
“We are fighting against a root cause, which is white supremacy, and trying to build a world which is beyond Zionism, beyond racism, beyond white supremacy,” she said.
Palestinian campus groups are reporting an uptick in attacks on Muslim and Arab students as well. On the George Washington campus, for example, students have reported having hijabs ripped off or being spat upon to the school’s Office for Diversity, Equity and Community Engagement, the Hatchet reported.
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[Featured image: WTXF screenshot. The station blurred out images of all the messages except this one]
