“My students often tell me that they feel scared on campus,” Ohr Ranim, an Israel fellow at San Diego State University (SDSU) said at a webinar held by the Jewish Agency for Israel on November 8.
“Some students are afraid to go to class,” said Ranim, who spoke on the Zoom call, titled, “Antisemitism on College Campuses Since Oct. 7th.” “Others feel uncomfortable sleeping near roommates who posted on social media something about Hamas or anti-Israel.
“Jewish students are taking down their mezuzahs in their dorm rooms. They are afraid to speak up because of the responses that they know they will get: Whether from their friends, from their coworkers and even from professors.”
Students who attend Harvard Business School have been taking off their kippot because they do not feel comfortable wearing them on campus, Sapir Reznik, the Jewish Agency’s Israel fellow at the Harvard Hillel, said.
Even Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years in prison in Soviet Russia, just for wanting to make Aliyah, said on the call that he, “was absolutely shocked that the first reaction on many American college campuses the awful pogrom of Oct. 7 was a statement of 34 organizations at Harvard and then [similarly hateful] statements from professors at Columbia University, Cornell University and many others who publicly expressed enthusiastic support for Hamas.”
Sadly, this is “the result of all of academia’s social liberation movements is to blame Israel for all of Hamas’s atrocities” said Sharansky, a former chairman of the executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel.
“It is awful, and at the same time eye-opening [for many Jews] that antisemitism and anti-Zionism go together as part of the leading progressive ideologies at the universities.”
– Natan Sharansky
“It is awful, and at the same time eye-opening [for many Jews] that antisemitism and anti-Zionism go together as part of the leading progressive ideologies at the universities,” said Sharansky, who identified the three D’s of anti-Zionist propaganda: the Demonization of Israel, the Delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist, and Double Standards applied to Israel that would not be applied to any other country under attack.
“Those who claim to be for progress can, in fact, turn very quickly, into the very primitive, neo-Marxist, antisemitic approach,” he said.
Hamas’s recent attacks on Israeli civilians were so brutal, that through those barbaric attacks, “Hamas removed themselves from the family of human beings,” Gonen Ben Yitzhak, a longtime intelligence officer of Israel’s Shin Bet and political leftist, told Ami Magazine.
Nevertheless, in Los Angeles, just nine days after Hamas terrorists mutilated 1,200 innocent Israeli civilians and kidnapped 239 more Israelis who were celebrating Simchat Torah, the loudest, angriest students at UCLA were the pro-Palestinian activists.
“Israel, Israel: You can’t hide,” many pro-Palestinian supporters on campus shamelessly chanted as they marched to an ominous drumbeat. They yelled, “We charge you with genocide,” which is now the pro-Palestinians’ widespread tragic mischaracterization of Israel’s counter-attack to protect its citizens: something any other country would do.
After hundreds of UCLA faculty witnessed pro-Palestinian students “celebrating” the gruesome massacres and kidnappings Hamas committed in kibbutzim and other Israeli communities that border Gaza City, 300 UCLA professors signed a letter that expressed their horror while witnessing pro-Palestinian students engaging in “explicit calls for violence.”
At UCLA, where pro-Palestinian students advertised events that featured images of weapons and violence,” and were chanting “Intifada,” the UCLA faculty called on UCLA Chancellor and CEO Gene Block, “to condemn the protests that cross the line from protected speech to unlawful incitement.”
Thus far, Block has issued only bland statements that warn against acts of “antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Arab hate” as if they are occurring at equal rates at UCLA.
Recently, Brandeis University was the first college in the country to ban a campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), known for their violent hate speech that claims to be free speech.
Columbia University announced the school has suspended the campus chapters of SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace, but just “for the remainder of the fall term.”
Many experts allege that the same sources of billions of dollars that originate in Qatar to fund Hamas’s terror activities also successfully influences many American liberal academics by funding prestigious chaired positions and making other large donations to America’s elite colleges.
While professors and college administrators have said nothing in response to their students’ vocal support for Hamas, some elite professors are not only attending the rallies, but encouraging their students to join them, Reznik reported.
Five Jewish students at Harvard, for instance, were left alone in a class, after one professor asked his students to join him at a pro-Palestinian rally, Reznik recalled.
“Everyone else had left, and so the five Jewish students left because they thought that class had been canceled,” she said. “But then, the professor and all the other students returned to continue class, without the Jewish students.”
Ori, a SDSU student who was born in Israel, said that lately, as he walks into the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house, which proudly flies an Israeli flag, he finds himself, “looking over his shoulder.”
When Ori wears a t-shirt that bears a graphic of the Israeli flag, he finds many classmates “look at him like they want to punch him in the face,” said Ori, who is the president of his fraternity.
Just last week, along with a few of his friends, Ori was putting up posters to raise awareness of the 239 kidnapped Israelis, when “a few girls came just to tear the posters down, smile, laugh at us and harass us,” he said.
What helps Ori and many other Jewish students the most are the places and people who provide and strengthen Jewish community, connection and support at refuges like Hillel houses, Chabad houses and the Israel fellows of the Jewish Agency.
“On Oct. 7, Ranim dropped everything to speak with all of the students he could to process what was going on, what was the situation, and how can we help,” Ori said with gratitude. “And every day since, Ohr has helped us.”
Ranim, a young lawyer and entrepreneur, who serves in the Israeli reserves, wanted to serve as an Israeli fellow “to motivate students to combat misinformation about Israel and most importantly: to always be proud to be Jewish,” he said.
“I didn’t expect to see students fighting every day to be Jewish.”
As most college students consider themselves “progressive,” Jewish college students are trying to understand how they fit into the idea of what they thought was a liberal democracy, Reznik explained.
“Students’ modern values to which they feel obligated — their Jewish identities and their relationships to Israel — are now clashing at Harvard and other colleges,” she said.
To help foster unity, Reznik has helped students to create vigils, and she has organized speakers, and rallies, but the most important part of her job right now, she said, is to reach out to the Jewish students.
“We are talking to students one-on-one,” Reznik said. “We are trying to show students that their college Hillel, which is the Jewish home away from home, can reach out to them and be a safe environment.”
She continued, “The students feel trapped and are trying understand what to do. I am here.”
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