The chants — which many interpret as euphemisms for violence against Jews — were not directed at Stein, an Orthodox Jew. But Stein’s professor saw they were distracting him.
“He came over and said some comforting words: ‘Don’t worry. Just focus on your test,’” Stein said.
To Stein, the anecdote underlines how such virulent anti-Zionism and antisemitism have become an inescapable menace on his campus and across North America following the proliferation of Jew-hatred unleashed by the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel on October 7.
Before the war, Stein said, recognizably Jewish students could avoid the “Israel issue” altogether if they wanted. But now, “The best you can hope for is to not be on the forefront. You can’t avoid it: You feel the death stares; you see people noticing you’re Jewish.”
Stein, 22, is one of about 20 students from top-tier universities in North America who are visiting Israel this week as part of a delegation with a two-pronged mission: expressing solidarity with Israel and studying Hamas’s atrocities. They spoke with The Times of Israel at Tel Aviv’s so-called Hostage Square, where the Hasbara Fellowships group on Wednesday met with relatives of some of the over 100 hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.
The students on the mission, which the Fellowships co-organized with the IsraelAmbassadors.com pro-Israel initiative, aim to use the knowledge they gain to argue Israel’s case on their campuses and abroad.
Doing so can be dangerous. Several violent incidents in connection with Israel have been recorded on or just outside US campuses in recent weeks. In Louisiana’s Tulane University, a man holding a Palestinian flag used the pole to beat a pro-Israel protester after that protester tried to snatch away an Israeli flag that pro-Palestinian activists were about to set on fire.
Columbia University student Andrew Stein tried to block out the sounds of hundreds of fellow students’ chanting while completing his final exam on religion earlier this month. At the anti-Israel rally that was taking place outside the exam hall, students were calling for an “intifada” to “free Palestine.”
The chants — which many interpret as euphemisms for violence against Jews — were not directed at Stein, an Orthodox Jew. But Stein’s professor saw they were distracting him.
“He came over and said some comforting words: ‘Don’t worry. Just focus on your test,’” Stein said.
To Stein, the anecdote underlines how such virulent anti-Zionism and antisemitism have become an inescapable menace on his campus and across North America following the proliferation of Jew-hatred unleashed by the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel on October 7.
Before the war, Stein said, recognizably Jewish students could avoid the “Israel issue” altogether if they wanted. But now, “The best you can hope for is to not be on the forefront. You can’t avoid it: You feel the death stares; you see people noticing you’re Jewish.”
Stein, 22, is one of about 20 students from top-tier universities in North America who are visiting Israel this week as part of a delegation with a two-pronged mission: expressing solidarity with Israel and studying Hamas’s atrocities. They spoke with The Times of Israel at Tel Aviv’s so-called Hostage Square, where the Hasbara Fellowships group on Wednesday met with relatives of some of the over 100 hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.
The students on the mission, which the Fellowships co-organized with the IsraelAmbassadors.com pro-Israel initiative, aim to use the knowledge they gain to argue Israel’s case on their campuses and abroad.
Doing so can be dangerous. Several violent incidents in connection with Israel have been recorded on or just outside US campuses in recent weeks. In Louisiana’s Tulane University, a man holding a Palestinian flag used the pole to beat a pro-Israel protester after that protester tried to snatch away an Israeli flag that pro-Palestinian activists were about to set on fire.
At the University of California, Berkley, Jewish groups say that two protesters struck the head of a Jewish undergraduate draped in an Israeli flag with a metal water bottle. The university is facing a lawsuit by the Jewish groups, which accuse the institution’s leadership of ignoring and inciting antisemitism. UC Berkley’s administration denies these claims.
“I wear a kippa. There’s this feeling that when you walk around people, there’s just tension,” said Stein, who is studying philosophy and computer science at Columbia after transferring there from the University of Pennsylvania.
All about the ‘context’
UPenn has been at the center of an international scandal involving antisemitism, along with Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This month, the presidents of those universities said during a congressional hearing that “context” was needed to determine whether calling for genocide against Jews violated their own codes of conduct.
An uproar prompted Liz Magill to step down as UPenn’s president after she apologized for her failure to condemn such calls. Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, also apologized and in a statement said that calls for genocide against Jews are “vile,” “have no place at Harvard” and “those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”
Gay, who is facing criticism also over alleged plagiarism, has resisted calls to resign, as has MIT President Sally Kornbluth, who is Jewish. Kornbluth has not apologized. An MIT spokesperson in a statement said that the institution “rejects antisemitism in all its forms.“
Several students on the delegation to Israel attributed the university presidents’ December 5 assertions to bad political performance rather than any affinity for antisemitism.
