A consultant who helps students get into elite colleges tells NR that her Jewish clients no longer feel their kids will be safe at top schools.
Even if he were offered a full-ride scholarship to an elite university, Anton Frenk “would turn it down in a heartbeat.” The high-school senior from New York City would “have loved to go to Harvard, Yale, or any Ivy League School,” just a few weeks ago but that all changed after the Hamas attack of October 7.
“Seeing what’s happening on those campuses, I don’t feel that it would be worth it to have to fear for my life every single day just to get a quality education that I could find in an environment without that sort of cutthroat antisemitism,” the teenager, sporting black nail polish, a gaming headset, and flowing black hair, told National Review.
Frenk’s parents fled the former Soviet Union looking for a better future for their son. Although not raised strictly observant, like many American Jews, he goes to synagogue on high holidays, had a Bar Mitzvah, and wears a Star of David necklace. “I’ve had to hide it recently when I’ve been going into the city for various because I almost got attacked.”
After seeing college campuses devolve into open displays of support for terrorism and Jewish students sheltering in libraries from mobs, Frenk considered forsaking the university experience altogether. “Seeing all those attacks, all this hate on these campuses, I’m not sure if I even want to go,” he reflected. In the end, the aspiring engineering student applied to several schools but didn’t even bother applying to the Ivy League because “I don’t really want to get accepted and then have to transfer out of fear for my life because of antisemitism.”
Frenk is not alone.
Liza Libes, an educational consultant, founded Invictus Prep in 2021 to help high schoolers gain admission to the top colleges in the country. But after October 7, Libes’s clients began to shy away from the elite universities they had previously aspired to.
“We’ve had an overwhelming amount of parents now send us emails saying I don’t want my kid to apply to Columbia anymore. I don’t want my kid to apply to Cornell because of all that’s happening on campus.” The shift in sentiment left Libes and her colleagues “scrambling to figure out what’s going on, why this has been such a problem, and what’s causing so much grief.”
Both schools were front of mind for Ariana Calderon, a Jewish parent alarmed by skyrocketing antisemitism on college campuses. Her daughter is interested in attending a five-year professional architecture school, a specific program offered at a select number of U.S. colleges.
After seeing what happened at Cornell, with death threats made against Jewish students, the family decided to “pull the plug.” Columbia, which the Calderon family has a “strong family legacy” at, also disappointed her. Although the Manhattan-based school doesn’t have the architecture program her daughter is interested in, “I cannot imagine, at this time, sending her to Columbia. It breaks my heart, but the lack of support from the school administration is unacceptable.”
Calderon is part of a growing cohort of parents who no longer want to send their children to the country’s most prestigious schools. Libes relayed another conversation she had with a friend of Frenk’s, whose parents insisted their child not “apply to Columbia anymore.” “Basically, what they said, is we’re so confused why it’s so difficult to condemn terrorism and why it’s so difficult to provide a safe space for Jewish students.”
Since October 7, Columbia has become a byword in American Jewish circles for rampant antisemitism. In the past two months, an Israeli student was assaulted on campus, and people have screamed “F*** the Jews” at visibly religious students. An LGBTQ club on campus hosting a “Black Lesbian Film” event explicitly advertised, “Zionists aren’t invited.” Pressed to explain the decision, the student group president responded, “white Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” adding “WHEN I SAY THE HOLOCAUST WASN’T SPECIAL, I MEAN THAT,” and “Israelites are the Nazis.”
Reports in the student paper have noted that an Israeli student, introducing themselves on the first day of class, was told by a professor, “So you must know a lot about settler colonialism. How do you feel about that?” Another academic reflected, “It’s such a shame that your people survived just in order to perpetuate genocide.” The journalist, Rebecca Massel, spoke with dozens of Jewish students on campus and found over half felt unsafe or targeted, a significant percentage of whom were personally harassed and hid their religious identity as a result.
Columbia’s mishandling of antisemitism has led the administration to take dramatic actions to signal its prioritization of Jewish student safety. In early November, the school suspended Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” The move came days after the school announced the creation of an antisemitism taskforce. By month’s end, law school dean Gillian Lester resigned, overshadowed by her public statement issued two days after the 10/7 atrocities abstractly referring to “violence that erupted in Israel and Gaza.”
Columbia, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania are all under investigation by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights over complaints that their administrations have not adequately responded to rising antisemitism. At Cornell, a 21-year-old Junior was arrested for allegedly threatening to rape and murder his Jewish classmates. And, the day after the Hamas attack, a professor celebrated the atrocities as “exhilarating” at a rally just off campus.
The headlines are having an effect, Libes says.
One mother asked Invictus Prep to recraft a college essay for her child, removing references to their Judaism and overcoming antisemitism for fear that it would hurt the teen’s admission chances. “That was really shocking to me,” Libes reflected.
Anna Feldman, a recent Columbia econ graduate, told NR that even before October 7, being a Jew on campus felt like walking around on “eggshells whenever the topic was Jewish people or Israel. I always felt like I couldn’t say what I had to say about Israel or the Middle East in general.
“This was always the case.”
Feldman refrained from writing essays about Israel or current events touching on the Middle East and sought to avoid the subject “at all costs” out of fear of being branded a bigot or racist.
However, none of the recent displays of antisemitism at Columbia felt “new” to Feldman “post-October 7.” The symptoms were always there, driven by appeals to “anticolonialism” and other left-wing philosophies. Conversations she’s had with Jewish students since the atrocities are unnerving to Feldman, particularly those who are stuck in classes with professors who signed a public letter justifying the Hamas atrocities. “Thank God I’m not on campus now,” Feldman reflected. “I don’t think I’d be able to be in that room with someone who wants me dead, to put it bluntly.”
Feldman’s experience resonated with Libes, a fellow Columbia alum, who became bothered by how the school had become a magnet for antisemitism well before the latest Hamas attack. She distinctly remembers the mainstreaming of decolonization discussions in which Jewish people were castigated as part of the “settler-colonialist” group, stripped of their ancestral roots and connections to the land of Israel.
Now, as an education professional, Libes sees antisemitism metastasizing across vast swaths of elite education. “It’s not just curriculum you would get if you’re in Middle Eastern studies.” Libes specifically highlighted English literature, philosophy, history, “and I think even, to some extent, economics departments.”
A week after the horrific Hamas attacks, Libes wrote a message to the Invictus community, underscoring how troubling the Hamas attack was for Jews around the world, and committed 10 percent of all proceeds from “our College Readiness profits for the month of October to Magen David Adom,” the Israeli medical non-profit. “This past week, the nation of Israel and the Jewish community has been shaken with acts of horrific violence and terrorism,” Libes wrote on October 13, prior to Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip, as the world still reeled from the gruesome videos recorded by Palestinian terror groups gleefully filming their sadism.
“Invictus Prep strongly condemns any and all acts of antisemitism, violence, hatred, and terrorism. We are concerned for many of our Jewish students who plan to matriculate to college this fall,” the public note explained, an important message of solidarity for the company’s Jewish parents who, according to Libes, represent nearly half of their students.
However, the sentiment was not received well by all Invictus clients. One parent even directly chided Libes, insisting she “read the history of Palestine and Israel. History should be your best guide, not the corrupt media. 2 million Palestinian civilians are being bombarded right now as we speak. Don’t spread hatred and divide people to earn business.”
The person’s inability to sympathize with the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, alongside ugly displays of antisemitism on campus, shook Libes deeply.
Until the environment on campus changes, it seems that a growing number of wealthy, academically gifted Jewish students will be looking elsewhere for their education.
“There are absolutely schools that I would cross off the list. I am sickened by what is happening on college campuses,” Calderon told NR.