April 24, 2024

Over the past 72 hours, the campuses of Columbia University, Barnard College, and Yale University have become increasingly hostile and unsafe spaces for Jewish students and staff, as threatening and unlawful antisemitic, anti-Israel protests have been allowed to rage unchecked. 

At these schools, Jewish and Israeli students, faculty, and speakers have been repeatedly verbally harassed, subjected to death threats, warned that the atrocities of October 7 will be inflicted on them 10,000 times over, barred from entering central areas of their campuses, and in the worst cases, physically assaulted and sent to the hospital. The situation at Columbia has deteriorated to the point that the school’s president announced at 1 a.m. today that all in-person instruction would be canceled and moved online. 

The extreme tactics of those creating these encampments and related protests are unacceptable at every level: They are denying students access to safe learning opportunities and campus life. They are flagrantly violating clear campus policies and rules with impunity. They are fostering hate and discrimination, often targeted specifically at Jewish and Israeli students who are part of their campus communities. And while we fully support robust dialogue, debate and other expressions of free speech, these abuses are not even remotely within the bounds of free speech principles. 

Responsible expressions of free speech allow for and depend on time, place and manner restrictions that the encampments and associated protests are brazenly defying. Instead, these impermissible tactics are creating precisely the type of hostile and discriminatory learning environment prohibited by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and they cannot and must not be allowed to persist. 

Today, as millions of Jews around the world, including hundreds of thousands of Jewish college students, celebrate the first night of Passover — the holiday that commemorates the Jewish people’s escape from persecution in Egypt en route to the Promised Land of Israel — we call on and insist that all college and university presidents and administrators take more aggressive action to re-take control of their campuses and ensure the safety of their Jewish students and other students being subjected to the threats, risks, and abuses posed by these growing encampments:

1. Aggressively enforce your institution’s existing rules, regulations, and codes of conduct. These rules exist for the safety and well-being of all students. A failure to enforce them simply leads to further license for students and outside actors to assert their control over your campus (see below). 

2. Restrict outside agitators from accessing your campus and fomenting violence and discrimination. It’s clear that many of the participants in unlawful protest activities are agitators from outside groups. You have every right to prevent them from co-opting your campuses for their political ends, and must implement the aggressive security measures necessary to restrict their access to your private campus spaces. 

3. Anticipate and plan for a variety of scenarios involving potential protests and disruptions, and establish a clear delegation of responsibility for student affairs, law enforcement, and related university functions to respond to each scenario. Given the clear objective of groups like SJP to replicate unlawful encampments at other campuses, take the initiative to prepare for and prevent these abuses. In addition to your own campus security, you can also draw on the resources and expertise of the Secure Community Network (U.S.) and the Community Security Initiative (NY).

4. Prevent protests from targeting known Jewish locations, student groups, and individuals. Take all necessary steps to protect Jewish facilities such as Hillel and Chabad centers, Jewish Greek life buildings, and other locations where Jews congregate together as a community. Here too, don’t wait for outside agitators and student protest organizations to target these locations, as so many already have — be proactive in getting ahead of these risks. 

These aggressive protests, featuring pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, and frequently anti-American rhetoric, are not random, and they are not spontaneous. They are part of a highly coordinated, planned and communicated campaign by SJP and related groups to further demonize and ultimately eliminate the nation of Israel, the world’s lone Jewish state (regardless of what actions Israel does or doesn’t take); and to harass, silence, and threaten Jewish and Israeli students and staff who dare to express their Jewish identities in a way that recognizes the significant role of Israel within Jewish history, faith, practice, and community.

As we prepare to host tens of thousands of Jewish students at Hillels tonight for the first Seder, and continue to think of and pray for the 129 hostages still held in Gaza, now is the time for moral clarity and decisive action. We call on all colleges, universities, and campus officials to do their part to ensure the safety of their Jewish students, and all students.

Hillel International

April 22, 2024

Reprinted from a post on X.

Mr. Cas Holloway:

Cas, you’re a really great guy. 

I know it. I saw it in your eyes today. This is why know that, deep-down, you know I’m right. You may not like my style, but I know you agree with almost everything that I have been saying. I just know it. I am still trying to understand how you could stand just stand there, look me in the eyes, and not let me on to campus. 

How could you keep a straight face when you capitulated to the pro-Hamas mob, refusing entry to the most vocal voice for the Jewish and Israeli students, staff and faculty at Columbia? I think I know how. 

You were just doing your job. You were just doing your job when you denied a Jewish professor access to campus (by the way, all I wanted to do was to read the names of the 133 hostages, thanks for asking). You were just doing your job when you sided with those that support Hamas. 

You were just doing your job when you couldn’t say for a full minute whether Hamas is a terrorist organization. (Remember that meeting? It’s all recorded. You were just doing your job.)

Look, I get it. You’re scared. You are worried about how the pro-Hamas extremists (and the brainwashed cult they’ve amassed) will react if you try to disperse them. But that’s exactly how terrorism works. It’s an ideology that forces you to act in certain ways through explicit and implicit threats.  

Look, I get it. You’re scared. You are worried about how the pro-Hamas extremists (and the brainwashed cult they’ve amassed) will react if you try to disperse them. But that’s exactly how terrorism works.

Hamas doesn’t need to bomb all the buses in Israel for me to be scared of riding a bus in Tel Aviv. It’s the same at Columbia. At this point, the pro-Hamas mob at Columbia has broken basically every possible rule of the university (and possibly multiple state and federal laws). The NYPD has stated that they are ready to act, if President Shafik lets them in. 

And you’re the person who needs to make that call. That is damn scary. But being scared is not an excuse for not doing the right thing. Being scared is not an excuse for choosing the pro-Hamas mob and their violent chants over the Jewish professor who believes in co-existence. The problem is that you are not alone. 

There are thousands of administrators like you all over U.S. campuses who are also scared. Like you, they want to stay out of it. Like you, they are just doing their jobs. And there were millions of Germans like you in the 1930s. Good Germans, upstanding Germans, who were just doing their jobs. 

Who do you think ran the universities of Berlin and Munich and Heidelberg and Frankfurt in the 1930s? Who helped the Hitler Youth check out books by Jewish authors to burn outside of campus? Administrators. Just like you. 

Cas, what I am trying to say is learn from history. Now is not the time to just “do your job.” The entire nation is looking at you. You have the opportunity to show your kids, show your family, that when the time came, you stood up for what’s right. 

Do the right thing: 1. Disperse the illegal encampment 2. Expel the radical extremists who are brainwashing this pro-Hamas mob (and start enforcing the suspension of those leaders who are miraculously back on campus) 3. Dismantle all the student organizations in CUAD (the coalition behind all the antisemitism and calls for terrorism on campus) and suspend all their leaders. 4. Deal with your pro-Hamas faculty. Do something about them. Seriously. 5. Restore my right to be Jewish in public wherever I want to be. 

I have every right to be on campus. Don’t bow to those who cheer on Hamas. Don’t just “do your job.” (By the way — If they won’t let you do this, quit. Show the world what you stand for. Be a hero. I know it’s scary, but I promise — if you do the right thing, I will have your back. It’s never personal for me. Never has been, never will be.)

Shai Davidai is an Assistant Professor at Columbia Business School. 

Within a few short days, the scenes at Columbia University, my alma mater, have escalated from meddlesome to downright hostile, threatening, and antisemitic. Despite the insistence of so-called activists that the members of the “Gaza Liberation Encampment,” as they’ve coined the zone of tents, signs, and keffiyehs in front of the campus library, are merely peaceful protesters, a steady stream of videos has emerged of Jewish students being targeted and harassed. Notable examples include mobs telling Jews to “go back to Poland” and “stop colonizing,” hordes marching towards “Zionists” trying to enter the encampment and chanting in unison that they will “push them out” so they don’t “destruct their community,” and a blonde-keffiyeh clad woman, identified as Isabella Giusti, the daughter of millionaires from Georgia, standing in front of a Jewish group with a sign reading “Al-Qassem’s Next Targets.”

The scenes are a deep moral stain on the university, which bears full responsibility for creating a culture in which such open antagonism can freely fester. This despicable culture didn’t happen overnight—it is the result of countless horrible decisions by university management, from the professors who freely spew antisemitic rhetoric to the trustees who accepted millions of dollars from Qatar. Their culpability is a lasting shame—and the greatest disgrace is the way Jewish students must pay the price of their failures with their on-campus safety. Far from rushing to rectify their self-made situation, the administration of Columbia University is still failing to act appropriately, leaving the students of the Gaza Liberation Encampment free to act unfettered while footage emerges nightly of their insane behavior and targeted antisemitic threats.

This despicable culture didn’t happen overnight—it is the result of countless horrible decisions by university management, from the professors who freely spew antisemitic rhetoric to the trustees who accepted millions of dollars from Qatar. 

One might ask, why has the NYPD not stepped in to help Jewish students and quell the campus unrest? After an initial wave of student arrests, the university now apparently refuses to allow the NYPD onto campus to remedy the situation, despite its well-documented escalation into antisemitic harassment. In his statement condemning the hate speech on campus, Mayor Eric Adams made clear note of the university’s unwillingness to call in the police to restore security—let alone make arrests—pointing out that Columbia is a “private institution on private property” and therefore that “the NYPD cannot have a presence on campus unless requested by senior university officials.”

Instead, the university’s plan for keeping Jewish students safe seems to be relying on the internal security force, who have proven lamely ineffective not only at lowering the intimidating tenor inside Columbia’s gates but also at enforcing the campus lockdown meant to keep bad actors out of the school in the first place. Just take the videos that emerged Saturday night of Nerdeen Kiswani, the leader of Within Our Lifetime, a “pro-Palestinian” organization that routinely celebrates violence, antisemitism, and terror, leading a crowd in front of the school’s library in a chant of “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution.” Kiswani’s inflammatory presence on campus, when she is obviously not a student who holds a Columbia ID, underscores the administration’s clear inability to enforce even its own middling policies, leaving Jewish students vulnerable to the incursion of hostile figures from outside the school.

The university was happy to ban one “protester” from campus, however—the Jewish Israeli professor Shai Davidai, who has been tirelessly exposing the antisemitism at Columbia. Davidai’s ID was deactivated by campus officials, preventing him from walking through campus or entering any buildings beyond the business school where he still teaches class, with Columbia’s COO writing in an email that his presence was an “obvious risk to the safety of students. “Meanwhile, the same morning that Davidai was banned, the pro-terror professor Mohammed Abdou, who notoriously endorsed Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad right after the October 7 attack, was still roaming the Liberation Encampment and freely engaging with students. And the same morning, signs still abounded across the tents with slogans like “Glory to He Who Makes the Occupier Taste Bitterness” and “A Message to the Scum of Nations and Pigs of the Earth,” a line taken from the manifesto of the Palestinian terrorist group Lion’s Den.

The Columbia administrators have clearly lost control. Their cowardice and inability to act has ceded the campus to the antisemitic mobs, who delight in making Jewish students feel unwelcome and unsafe. The university must end this situation now—ideally by first imposing their own disciplinary measures on students, expeling and immediately revoking campus access for those who do not cooperate, even if there are dozens, and then by sending in the NYPD or even the National Guard if they continually fail to comply. Once the encampment is dealt with, Columbia must then turn to the much more difficult challenge of fixing its culture of hate masked as progressivism. Hateful professors who stoke violence must be fired, students who violate policies must be appropriately disciplined, and Jewish students must receive the same protection and attention from university officials as they would extend to any other marginalized group, rather than the clear double standard of neglect that has so far been happening.

Just imagine if there was an angry mob calling for black students to “go back to Africa” because they “have no culture,” or if a white woman was standing in front of a group of black students with a sign reading “KKK’s next victims.” The university—and the student body—would go into overdrive remedying the problem and disciplining the bad actors, and for good reason. But there is no ideological consistency when it comes to slights against Jewish students, who are not only ignored but are also, to use the language of the left, gaslit by their peers and the broader university while they invalidate and minimize the impact of antisemitic harassment. The double standard between Columbia’s treatment of all other marginalized groups and the way it treats Jews is sickening, and remedying it through the equal application of discipline and morals is another good step in fixing its long-rotting problems.

But the double standard also comes from students leading the protests, who want to have it both ways—to espouse violent rhetoric and call for sophisticated political action like adults, and to escape consequences like children. Columbia University must tell them that this is no longer acceptable—despite the arts-and-crafts signs and call-and-response songs in the encampments, these students are adults, not overgrown children, and they must face full accountability for their actions. While it may take generations for the university to undo all the damage it has done, the project of enforcing rules, holding bad actors accountable, and making Jewish students safe can—and should—start today.

Dr. Sheila Nazarian is a Los Angeles physician whose family escaped to America from Iran. She stars in the Emmy-nominated Netflix series “Skin Decision: Before and After.“