Yesterday a notice went up on the Columbia University website noting that, on the first day of classes, there was already the need for an investigation into “incidents that took place today and over the weekend that involve potential violations of the University’s Student Anti-Discrimination and Discriminatory Harassment Policies and University Rules.”
There was no immediate explanation of the incidents, but the statement did say these were “actions designed to intimidate or harass specific groups of students.”
There was one incident documented on social media over the weekend that fits this description, whether or not it is one of the incidents that spurred the statement above. (Campus activists say it is indeed one of the incidents under investigation.) And while it didn’t put anyone in immediate danger, it is an example of a pervasive atmosphere of suspicion toward Jewish and especially Israeli students that should not be overlooked.
According to the Columbia Jewish & Israeli Students account on X, a past tentifada spokesperson was walking around campus with a sign that said “Some of your classmates were IOF criminals committing genocide in Palestine.”
The point of the sign is clear: Look around you and try to figure out who might be Jewish or Israeli and then treat that person as a war criminal. Obviously actions much worse than this have been happening constantly for the past two years on campus, but this particular version of the “spot the Jew” game that anti-Semites play reminded me of a conversation I had with Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, the Harvard Chabad rabbi, in the wake of Harvard’s feeble attempt to confront its campus anti-Semitism in May.
Perhaps because of the understandable amount of attention paid to violent anti-Semitism, the atmosphere of social isolation has been overlooked. But it stood out to me as Zarchi described how it plays out at Harvard, and this weekend’s events suggest it is a wider problem facing Jews on various college campuses—and it is a problem with no obvious solution.
One Israeli student at Harvard, for example, had struck up what seemed to be a genuine friendship with her fellow student. She then noticed this friend studiously avoided having her picture taken with this Israeli student, though she happily joined group selfies as long as the Israeli wasn’t there. Over time, the Israeli student figured out that it had become a costly faux pas at Harvard to post photographic evidence of your friendship with Israelis on your social media accounts.
Another student applying to join a campus board saw the interview process go suddenly cold when he revealed he was active in the school’s Jewish community.
Another tried to amiably appeal a grade on an assignment only to have the teacher make a snide comment about how “you people are always negotiating.”
This kind of demonstrative discomfort with Jews “became a mainstream reality,” Zarchi told me.
Anti-Jewish violence and open harassment are in some ways simpler to process—though of course not easier to deal with—than these examples, because the affected students know exactly where they stand. But in hearing the stories of life on campus one gets the impression that most Jews and Israelis go through Harvard—and apparently other schools—always wondering where they stand, where they fit in, where exactly the limits of their friends’ grace will be. It is the feeling of a community being merely tolerated—until it isn’t.
In class, meanwhile, Israel faces a cartoonish level of erasure. One master’s student at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies was told that Israel isn’t considered part of the Middle East—at least as the school sees it—and therefore courses on Israel would not be counted toward a degree in Middle Eastern Studies. Meanwhile, several professors refused to act as a thesis adviser if the project was on Israel, which meant a de facto embargo on the Jewish state in any meaningful way.
This social isolation is in one sense the least of Jewish students’ problems, except for the fact that it has routinely preceded the more dangerous stuff: displays of public anti-Jewish intimidation, violence, stalking, a limiting of educational opportunities based solely on a student’s being Jewish, and, at Harvard in particular, a system of mass surveillance of Jewish students and professors by a well-heeled network of Palestinian organizations.
Zarchi pointed out that this isolation at Harvard is reinforced by a process of tokenism. “Viewpoint diversity, so far, has come to exclusively mean that you find Jews or maybe even an Israeli who agrees with you,” thus creating a climate where those who refuse to denounce their fellow Jews or Israelis are seen as guilty. The saturation of campus with this anti-Zionist groupthink makes it unavoidable. A Jewish or Israeli student doesn’t have to be taking a Mideast-related class to be made to feel out of place. “It trickles well beyond these isolated spaces and creeps into the broader community,” Zarchi said.
The social isolation of Jews and Israelis, along with the erasure of Israel from open academic inquiry, may not be as headline-grabbing as the Charlottesville-style demonstrations by pro-Hamas groups on campus, but it virtually guarantees that the hostile climate that eventually produced those hate marches will remain in place.
