‘Open Season on Jews’: Not Much Has Changed on Campus Since Post-10/7 Antisemitic Uproar, Students Say

Not much has changed on American campuses since the explosion of antisemitism that followed the Hamas attacks of October 7, according to a group of Jewish college students who spoke to lawmakers about conditions on campus on Thursday afternoon.

Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos Kestenbaum, one of nine students invited to address the House Education and Workforce Committee, walked the committee through the antisemitism he witnessed over a three-week period to illustrate the point.

“By inviting me, you’ve already done more than Harvard University has ever done for its students, which is listening to them,” Kestenbaum began.

“On Thursday, January 4, I woke up to dozens of fellow Harvard students posting on the social-media app Sidechat that Jews are both baby-killers and pedophiles, lamenting the outsized role Jews play in media and politics, and arguing that ‘too many damn Jews run this country,'” he said. “On Sunday, January 21 — the day before the spring semester was to begin — every single poster calling attention to the kidnapped Jewish civilians in Gaza was vandalized, with Jewish victims being compared to Jeffrey Epstein and [being accused] of orchestrating 9/11.”

In one case, Kestenbaum told the committee, those who defaced the posters wrote “evidence needed — head is still on” over the photo of Kfir Bibas, an infant who turned one year old in Hamas captivity.

“On the morning of Thursday, January 25,” Kestenbaum said, “I received an email from a Harvard employee challenging me to debate him in a secluded underpass as to whether Jews orchestrated 9/11. That night, that same Harvard employee posted a video on his social media with a machete and a picture of my face, saying he ‘wants to fight’ and has ‘a plan.'”

For three days, he said, Kestenbaum required private armed security at his house, at Shabbat dinners, and at prayer services. That employee still has his job at Harvard.

“After I pointed out that a featured speaker advertised by Harvard students called the October 7 massacre a ‘glorious day’ and ‘about time,’ a fellow student responded — and I quote — ‘I am still comfortable promoting this event,'” Kestenbaum told the committee. “Bullying, intimidation, and ostracizing of Jewish students at Harvard is not only normalized; it is promoted. In fact, this week alone, we Jewish students, like the incredible Harvard Chabad organization, were forced to hire private armed security for a concert in honor of Jewish victims of antisemitism after a group of Harvard students encouraged the protesting of the event, shouting ‘globalize the intifada’ and ‘resistance is justified.'”

Harvard’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office did nothing, Kestenbaum said, instead telling him it “falls outside their purview.”

University of Pennsylvania student Noah Rubin also spoke at the roundtable. His university ousted its president after the December 5 hearing at which the leaders of institutions of higher education said that whether calling for the genocide of Jews constitutes harassment “depends on the context.”

“I have devoted countless hours when I should have been studying to meeting with the administration about addressing antisemitism,” Rubin said. “Every time, I’ve been met with nothing but meaningless words and empty promises. I’m also currently a member of the Jewish student advisory board. We’ve been given exactly three hours to meet this semester.”

Rubin described the attitude of the school’s administration with an anecdote about the campus Hillel building.

“I was told that Hillel — the Jewish cultural center — was one of the safest buildings on our campus,” he said. “Just two days later, Hillel was broken into and vandalized by a perpetrator who was yelling ‘f*** the Jews.’ Two months later, a bomb threat was received, and now I find myself looking over my shoulder, even at Hillel. Last semester ended with a mob of students, faculty, and extremists marching through our campus, vandalizing school buildings, lighting smoke bombs, and chanting vicious chants in English and Arabic. . . . It’s open season on Jews.”

Eden Yadegar, a student at Columbia University, described comments from a professor at her school in the aftermath of October 7.

“‘Stunning,’ ‘astonishing,’ ‘awesome,’ ‘jubilant,’ ‘achievement’ — these are the words that a professor at my university used to describe the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust,” she said. “This semester, I am unable to complete my Middle East studies major as intended because the only course offered on Israel is taught by the professor who referred to the massacre and raping of innocent people — of young women just like me — as ‘stunning,’ ‘astonishing,’ ‘awesome,’ ‘jubilant,’ ‘achievement.'”

Students at Columbia, Yadegar said, “suggested labeling local shops that support Israel’s right to exist ‘with a Star of David,'” evoking Nazi Germany.

Jacob Khalili, a student at the Cooper Union — where Jewish students sheltered in the library as pro-Palestinian students banged on the doors and called for intifada — told the committee, “some of my friends were crying. Several of us were texting loved ones and calling the police. Neither tech security nor the police removed the demonstrators.”

He said he was “shocked and horrified” to learn that the university president “had been offered yet refused police intervention, and that at some point she had ducked out a back exit to avoid the demonstrators.”

“To my knowledge,” Khalili said, “the school has taken no disciplinary action against them, which clearly conveys the message that anti-Jewish activity on campus will be tolerated.”

Hannah Beth Schlacter, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, told the committee about a riot that took place on her campus Monday night, when a pro-Palestinian group stormed a university venue and ultimately assaulted Jewish students.

“This is not a one-off,” Schlacter said. “This has been the mood and the situation at Berkeley since October 7. It is not safe to be a Jewish student at UC Berkeley. . . . Instead of providing a safe environment for education, Berkeley tells Jews to stay away from campus.”

Joe Gindi, a student at Rutgers University, had similar things to say about his school.

“It has become clear that some members of the school’s administration and faculty are complicit in allowing — and even encouraging — this hate to grow,” Gindi told the committee. “On November 17, the Students for Justice in Palestine stormed the Rutgers University College Avenue student center and took it over. I was just standing outside of the student center. I was shouted at, I was called a murderer. People screamed at me: ‘We don’t want Zionists here.’ They called me a ‘European colonizer’ because I am Jewish, the irony of this being my family came to America from Aleppo (Halab), Syria.”

Gindi described a second incident in which the administration not only ignored antisemitism but actively facilitated it.

“On November 27, SJP decide to march in and take over the business school, chanting, disrupting classes, and turning the building into an area Jews were afraid to enter,” he said. “This was not only allowed but literally encouraged by members of Rutgers’ administration. One administrator literally held the door open as SJP agitators violated school conduct and entered the building.”

Talia Khan, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — yet another university featured in the December 5 hearing — had similar stories about unpunished harassment that she and her fellow Jewish classmates have faced since October 7, but MIT seems to have gone a step further: The university has changed its rules in a way that appears to discourage pro-Israel speech.

“Six days after I and others put up Israeli flags and banners that say ‘No Excuse for Terror’ and ‘We Stand with Israel’ in our personal on-campus offices to show solidarity with Israel in the wake of the October 7 attacks, the MIT administration created an anti-flag and -banner rule,” Khan said. “The rule has almost exclusively been enforced to take down Israeli flags; though we have filed several reports of Palestinian flags around campus in other personal offices and laboratories, no action has been taken, and these flags, along with flags of many other nationalities except Israel, remain.”

Kevin Feigelis, a doctoral student at Stanford University, told the committee that when he began his studies in 2016, he had found heaven on earth. Now, eight years later as he finishes his Ph.D., he sees “the smiles on [students’] faces as they march in their thousands across campus calling for the death of Jews,” students “celebrating the carnage” of October 7 and “praising Hamas’s actions.”

“That very day,” he said, “banners sprouted up across campus saying ‘Israel is Burning.'”

And Yasmeen Ohebsion, a student at Tulane University — a school with one of the largest Jewish populations in the country — described both the instance in which a classmate of hers, Nate Miller, was hit over the head with a flagpole at a pro-Palestinian rally and the verbal abuse she has faced.

“The university continues to enable anti-Zionist forms of antisemitism by labeling it as ‘political’ speech and refusing to recognize the deliberate effort to malign, disparage, and ostracize Jews on campus who define their Jewish identity as including the Jews’ shared ancestral and ethnic connection to Israel,” Ohebsion said. “When a woman on campus shouted ‘F*** you Jew’ at me, she did not first ask my opinion on Palestinian human rights. The individuals who viciously attacked my friends did not first inquire what their position was on a two-state solution.”

Rubin, the University of Pennsylvania student, told National Review that security is his first priority.

“Our Jewish institutions still do not get basic university support on security, and the fact that I’m still asking for that over and over again is outrageous,” he said. “But the fact is we’re not safe. We’re not being supported. And that’s the most important thing right now.”

Khan, the MIT student, told NR that her administration seems not to believe this is a real problem.

“Acknowledgment that this is real and that we’re not making it up is the most important thing. That needs to stop,” she said. “When the administration is constantly saying things like ‘we’re working on it, it’s going through the disciplinary process, and these things take time,’ I really don’t care. The guy who’s walking next to me has said that he thinks it’s okay to kill Jews.”

Kestenbaum had a similar suggestion for Harvard, telling NR that the university needs to take the issue seriously.

“I’ve emailed the antisemitism task force 40 times and haven’t gotten a single response,” he said. “Harvard created a task force because it’s very easy for them to absolve themselves of moral responsibility by saying, ‘Well, we have a task force,’ but that hasn’t fixed any of the underlying problems.”

Representative Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), the chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, told NR that what she heard from the students at the roundtable Thursday resonated with her on a policy basis, to be sure, but also hit home on an emotional level.

“We heard facts backed up by emotion. I mean, you could feel the pain and hear that emotion from the students, and that really touched my heart as a mother and a grandmother,” Foxx said. “None of these students should feel unsafe on these campuses, and that gets to the point we keep bringing across: These campuses are all being supported by the taxpayers of this country.”

Foxx said the United States must be able to counter the surge of antisemitism the same way it was able to defeat other forms of bigotry at different points in its history.

“We’ve dealt with these issues in other ways, as Congressman Scott said,” Foxx told NR, referring to comments from ranking member Bobby Scott (D., Va.) about, for instance, anti-black racism during the civil-rights era, “and I think we’ve pretty much taken care of those, but now we have this horrible antisemitism rearing its ugly head again, and we’ve got to deal with it.”

Foxx told NR that the United States in particular must be free from the hatred flourishing in academia.

“We cannot have this in the United States of America in 2024,” she said. “If Jewish people cannot be safe in this country, in this year, there is no place for them to be safe.”