Some 20 American, Canadian, and Latin American students who experienced extreme anti-Zionism and antisemitism on campuses across the United States and Canada opted to complete their studies in Israel.
Nearly all are now enrolled in courses at Tel Aviv University.
On Thursday, the students came to the President’s Residence in Jerusalem to meet with President Isaac Herzog and his wife, Michal, who both happen to be TAU alumni.
One female student wept as she related the harassment she had endured at Columbia University.
Wanting to understand what made the Palestinian students and their supporters so negatively disposed towards Jews and Israel, she went to Palestinian lectures where she was confronted with an anti-Zionist manifesto. She also discovered that many of the Palestinian students did not pay tuition fees.
A male student from Latin America who comes from a Sephardi, Orthodox, Zionist family, started out in a university in his home country, but there was nothing on campus to serve the needs of Jewish students, so his family looked for the best top-quality American campus with the most vibrant Jewish community and decided on Columbia.
He enrolled just before Rosh Hashanah.
As he was walking home from synagogue on the first night of the Jewish New Year, someone ripped off his kippah; this was his initiation into antisemitism on campus.
Campus antisemitism after October 7
“After October 7, it got worse,” he said.
Because his mother is Lebanese, the young student also joined the Arab Student Association in addition to the Jewish groups in which he became active.
But after October 7, he was not permitted to stay with the Arab students. They told him to leave because he was Jewish. The student responded that he was a proud Jew and that he wanted to be more informed about the Arab thinking that guided anti-Zionist attitudes.
But he found no tolerance on the other side. Instead, he was stalked on social media, ostracized by people who had been his friends, and the mezuzah was ripped from his doorpost.
A Canadian student, who, like her mother and grandmother, had enrolled at the University of Toronto, said her mother had warned her about anti-Zionism. Toronto, and Canada as a whole, has a large Arab population, so she was expecting some anti-Israel feeling but did not anticipate that a resolution would be taken by the student population to ban kosher food on campus.
The student found a place nearby where she could eat, and while coming back on the evening of October 7, she came into contact with participants in a pro-Palestinian rally. It was very scary.
The university management and the students’ association eventually realized that there was something amiss with banning kosher food, so the resolution was annulled, but Hillel on campus, which was short on funds because most Jewish philanthropy was being directed to Israel, could not assist much with the provision of kosher food.
While studying in the library, the Canadian student heard some other students talking about the “tremendous success of October 7 for the Palestinian people.”
Listening to the conversation and others in which people claimed that Israel was exploiting the survivors who were victims of sexual violence and was using them as a political tool to cover Israeli violence against Palestinian prisoners made her physically ill. She also suffered a lot of emotional stress.
The harassment and violence that permeate campuses in the US are not only confined to these places, said a graduate who comes from New York and lives in Tel Aviv. He has a non-Jewish Polish girlfriend who is studying anthropology in Stockholm.
After visiting her boyfriend in Israel and posting photos of her time in the country on social media, the Polish girl came under strong verbal attack on her return to Stockholm. How could a Polish girl go out with a Jewish boy!
The boy in question has an older sister who had a top-notch job in New York. After October 7, her fellow workers would not look at her or engage her in conversation and subsequently would not work with her. She has since made aliyah and is now working in advocacy.
A female student of political science spoke of a sign in her classroom that read, “No Zionists allowed here.” The faculty was not supportive of her, and the textbooks were full of inaccuracies regarding Israel, such as claiming that the Jewish state did not agree to the partition of Palestine, when it was, in fact, the Arabs who had disagreed.
The student, who now studies at TAU, had also received a letter from a former friend in which she wrote, “I love you, but I hate your country and your people.” A male student from Denver related how pork fat had been smeared on his door and how he and other Jewish students had been ousted from the college after they complained.
“It’s difficult to hear these stories,” said Michal Herzog, commenting that what happens in Israel affects every Jew in the world. However, she was very happy to see the students in Israel and expressed the hope that they would have good experiences here and choose to stay.
Even though he was well aware of antisemitism and anti-Zionism on American university campuses, President Herzog was shocked to hear of the personal experiences of his guests. “It is unbelievable that this is happening in the great United States,” he said.
