What It's Like To Be a Jewish Student at Columbia Today

Key Findings:

This essay is a personal account of a Jewish Columbia University student's campus experience in the wake of the October 7 massacre by Hamas. Her writing aims to raise alarm about the repugnant stances taken by a score of individuals at the university. The author raises much larger concerns about the ideological influences present in the university, specifically in some classrooms and among certain student groups.

The author came into awareness of Hamas’s brutality in Israel on October 7 not by reading the news or word of mouth, but via social media posts by her fellow pro-Hamas classmates that glorified the massacres, rapes, beheadings, bindings and burning alive of Israelis. However, an argument persists that this revolting ideology can hardly be taken as a surprise given that endorsement of violence as a justifiable form of resistance to ‘decolonization’ is taught within some academic circles at Columbia.

Incidents such as (1) Columbia’s failure to discipline pro-Hamas Columbia professor Joseph Massad and his glorification of anti-Jewish terrorism (2) an attack on an Israeli student distributing posters of the kidnapped hostages, and (3) pro-Hamas open letters from student organizations further underline the presence of such ideologies on campus. In the digital arena, Columbia’s students (both Jewish and non-Jewish) are confronted by a frighteningly popular pro-Hamas Instagram post (and the supportive comments underneath it) by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine.

The idea that this could all align with Columbia’s academic values — that celebration of brutal murder and rape of civilians could be embedded within the curriculum as “legitimate resistance,” that such endorsements of Hamas’s actions should be tolerated under the guise of academic freedom, that self-styled intersectional feminists should be supporting violence against Jewish women — is intolerable. Attendance of classes with professors who support such ideologies is unbearable, given the kind of papers that students are expected to write in such an environment. Presence on campus as a Jewish student given the lack of a clear statement from Columbia University condemning acts of violence towards Jews is unfathomable.

The university’s lack of moral clarity indicates a deeper rot. Alumni must join Columbia’s current students, and those at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, to demand more than just bland remedial statements. Students demand serious, lasting change that ensures that everyone crosses the following (very) low bar: No student should come away from a class thinking that genocide is justified.