I'm a Jewish Student at Columbia. Campus After October 7 Is Disturbing

I can't even begin to explain the feeling of October 7, the most devastating and depressing day of my life.

Immediately, I scrolled through social media and saw peers posting within hours of the news breaking that the Israelis "had it coming after 75 years of oppression against Palestinians" and telling people not to be shocked by the violence.

I'm a student at Columbia's School of General Studies, which offers non-traditional tracks for university, and I'm on the pre-med track. I'm there because I did the school's dual degree program with Tel Aviv University in Israel, where I spent two years before coming back to the U.S.

Just a few days after the attack, a student protest was organized on campus by an anti-Israel group that said radical things like "glory to our martyrs" and praised October 7 as a "historic" victory.

Many people I know who otherwise would never have said those things attended because they had no other outlet to protest. This was the first step in their radicalization.

The protest was in the wake of so much morning for Jewish and Israeli students.

I had a close friend at the music festival. We hadn't heard from him for a few days and were hoping he was still alive and that maybe his phone had just died. He had escaped to a nearby kibbutz and hid in a bomb shelter.

But Hamas terrorists threw grenades into the shelter, dragged his body out, and beat him to death. One of his friends survived and gave testimony; another was kidnapped into Gaza.

The campus protests were happening when so many of us had just lost friends or family and feeling utter grief at the most violent day against Jews since the Holocaust. It was unclear what they were even protesting at that point.

We were face to face with people shouting "intifada" and "from the river to the sea" as we stood in complete silence for 22 minutes, spending one second for each victim of October 7.

It was mentally disturbing. I had to shut off my reactions to their shouts and cheers. Internalizing it would have driven me into a depression.

A lot of our students were made to feel like they had no room whatsoever to mourn, and that they didn't even have the right to be grieving.

Within literal hours we were forced to go from grieving the most traumatic losses to defending our right to grieve and even exist.

Much of the antisemitism on campus is not how you might traditionally define it. There have been physical assaults on visibly Jewish students, which is terrible, but they're relatively few in number.

It's a non-traditional interpretation, but I feel it is antisemitic to tell Jews that they have no right to grieve their losses. I've had many people tell me that Zionists are to blame for the world's antisemitism.

How could you blame the vast majority of Jews for the bigotry that is perpetrated against them? As if there was never antisemitism in the world before the modern state of Israel was declared independent. This is in and of itself antisemitic.

A lot of us are psychologically still dealing with grief that we were never allowed to process.

Columbia has a lot of students who are Israeli veterans because of the dual degree program. After October 7, some of my closest friends had to pick up and leave, disrupting their young lives and academic careers.

They received death threats from Columbia students for going back and fighting in the IDF. As if the threat of death on the front lines is not enough.

But many feel morally compelled to protect their country after a terrorist invasion and they are needed; they had well-established roles in the IDF or were in charge of units.

To know they might come back to a hostile campus after being on the front lines of battle is really upsetting.

Peaceful Coexistence

I had the most amazing two years of my life at Tel Aviv University (TAU) studying life sciences.

TAU is incredibly diverse with thousands of Arab students and I made close friends with some of them. I loved that opportunity. There was a very peaceful coexistence between Jewish, Arab, and Muslim students at TAU.

I remember Muslim students held a big party for Eid after Ramadan and they invited all of us. We danced together. It sounds idealistic or unbelievable, but it was beautiful and real.

After October 7, I got messages from my Arab and Palestinian friends asking if I was OK and expressing sorrow for our loss. They did that much more quickly than any of my non-Jewish friends here in the U.S., and that upsets me and gives me hope at the same time.

There's a motion from anti-Israel groups at Columbia to close down the dual degree program with TAU on the grounds that it is collaborating with an "apartheid regime". It's just not true.

What's not properly understood is how impactful the multi-denominational and cross-cultural connections students like me make at TAU.

If I hadn't done the program, I probably would never have met Palestinians or Arab-Israelis in this close way. My professors were Arab-Israeli or Palestinian. We just coexisted and were there to learn and to have a good time.

The Same Bomb Shelter

I was in Tel Aviv during an Israeli operation after tensions in the West Bank and Sheikh Jarrah. Hamas and the PIJ launched rockets into Israel, and Israel struck terror targets in Gaza in return.

I remember during the day there was a large protest by the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian students at TAU condemning settlers in the West Bank and Israeli police for using inappropriate force at the al-Aqsa mosque.

That night, Tel Aviv was bombed and all the Jewish, Palestinian, and Arab students were in shelters together hiding from this attack by Hamas.

It was mind-blowing for everyone; at the most divisive moment for Arabs and Jews, here we all were together in the same bomb shelter, hiding from an attack we as civilians wanted nothing to do with.

Around that time, I did have some difficult conversations with my Palestinian friends, but I respect them so much that I take them for their word about their experiences and opinions because they live it.

We never really argued. We both understood that we are entitled to how we perceive our experiences. We just shared our conflicting ideologies about what to do. But there was never disrespect.

That is so different from Columbia. I can't go into conversations with people on the same level of mutual understanding or respect because they have never experienced what it's like to live under an oppressive terrorist regime or next to it.

They just regurgitate whatever they've read online, which is usually very biased. They don't realize that their anti-Israel protesting only emboldens Hamas, which does a major disservice to my Israeli-Arab and Palestinian friends.

What they think supports Palestinians only endangers them, and this angers me beyond anything else.

At TAU, there was no convincing to be done. We just shared our different experiences or different opinions on how to move forward, and sometimes they didn't align.

Some moments felt tribal, each of us feeling some larger responsibility to our respective "group". But I acknowledged their experiences and that I have absolutely no right to tell them they're wrong.

At Columbia, there's a huge movement for making the Palestinian cause an issue of intersectionality, and asserting that no minority group is free until they're all free.

Putting every single conflict in the framework of oppressed and oppressor leaves no room for nuance when discussing these issues.

Jewish and Israeli students should be doing more to rally allyship in the same way that anti-Israel groups have.

I firmly believe Zionism is an indigenous rights movement, and I think if Jewish and Israeli students were to push for understanding of the narrative—that Jews are indigenous to Israel—it could be powerful for allyship between indigenous groups.

It makes you reflect on how real or obvious the oppressed-oppressor relationship is here. There's far too much nuance in the history to just be black and white about it. Ignoring those nuances in any context will only push us backward, not forwards.

Jewish Pride as a Shield

Something has changed since October 7. I don't know when we'll return to just having consistently normal thoughts throughout the day. It's all still so fresh in everyone's minds. Time is passing slowly.

But I sense a shift in the Jewish community. The atmosphere is much stronger. There is a lot of pride in being Jewish, almost to shield against how much hatred there is in the world for Jews. I use my pride in being Jewish to ignore how much people might hate me for it.

I've made some incredible friendships in the Jewish community at Columbia; people who I might otherwise have never talked to. The small silver lining is the number of supportive new connections with people who understand me and feel the way I do.

In a lot of cases in history, Jewish communities come back stronger after experiencing trauma.

It has become obvious how little many non-Jewish people necessarily care about Jewish grief and how we're doing. I do have some incredibly strong non-Jewish allies, who I love, but in general in America, it seems like if something doesn't affect you directly then you just don't care about it.

This is why intersectionality is so important—it makes people believe that these issues truly affect them when parallels are drawn between two conflicts or struggles that otherwise have nothing at all to do with each other.

Painful Realization

I wasn't surprised by the Congressional hearing with college presidents on antisemitism. Those presidents have such tight talking space and are given certain things that they can say, and it was obvious they didn't want to say anything outside of those few lines.

It's upsetting because the answers should be clear, in my opinion. But, just as in many cases in history, Jews have had to come to a very painful realization: We're going to have our strong allies, but, at the end of the day, it is us who will have to stand up for ourselves.

I'm incredibly proud of the Jewish organizations on campus because they're doing what school administrators can't and won't do by standing up for themselves, speaking out, and being present for other Jewish students in mourning or having difficulty reconciling what's going on in the world.

But I know some students who really wish university administrators were taking a stronger stance against antisemitic rhetoric and intimidation.

The anti-Israel groups on campus at Columbia blatantly broke university policy in such an easily avoidable way. There are simple rules and steps you have to follow to get events authorized to be held on campus. Student groups I'm in follow the same ones.

They went through with an event that was not authorized by Columbia administrators to be held on campus, and so they were suspended.

They have since started protesting the suspension rather than protesting for justice in Palestine, making this entirely about themselves. I find the entitlement a bit embarrassing.

Columbia in its statement about the suspension also cited "threatening rhetoric and intimidation." I appreciated that. But I wish that they were suspended on grounds of antisemitic speech and rhetoric.

At the end of the day, they broke university policy and that's why they were suspended.

The suspended groups have advertised and taken part in other similar events with allied groups on campus, and, as far as I'm aware, nothing has been done about that. I think Jewish students perceive this as administrators not standing by their word.

None of this is surprising to me, and so it's not upsetting because, again, we have a strong enough community to be able to stand up for ourselves.

Building Relationships

I have conflicting feelings about the future.

On the trajectory we're headed, I don't know if Jews alone will be able to stand up for themselves within America. We'll need more and stronger allies in universities and in government.

One thing I grapple with is whether this situation is bad enough that I should just get out. My great-grandmother, after whom I got my name, left Poland well before the war started and went to Mandatory Palestine, where my grandfather was then born.

I wonder what warning signs she saw and if she would've seen the same signs now that I might be missing. I know a lot of students here feel excited to leave Columbia and be done with it.

But there's a very strong argument to be made for staying in America and in American universities, to have a presence here and be able to speak for ourselves.

So, despite how uncomfortable it is, we need to build a stronger Jewish presence in America and globally to give light to what we're going through and forge greater allyship outside of Israel.

There are a lot of movements that started in the Middle East but are now branching into America that are focused on Arab and Israeli relations, even just interpersonal relationships, bringing people together to just talk about their experiences and life, and just to know each other.

We have a huge need for that. A lot of hatred is based on ignorance and if people don't have empathy for "the other", they never will unless they get to meet and talk to them.

I have quite a few Arab and Muslim friends at Columbia who aren't necessarily pro or anti-Israel. But because we're friends they respect me like I respect my Arab friends at TAU, and know I am entitled to my own perception of my experiences.

Those relationships in America are incredibly important. I'm working on building some alliances within Columbia between Jewish and Muslim students to just get to know each other and push past the polarization forced upon us by external forces like social media or the loudest people at rallies.

I don't know if I'm hopeful or pessimistic. I think the future will be entirely what we make of it.

Sonya Poznansky is a student at Columbia University in New York.

All views expressed are the author's own.

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