PhD student Jonathan Ben-Menachem, who is Jewish, has been fielding worried calls from his family after a protest camp exploded on the grounds of Columbia University in solidarity with Gaza. Ben-Menachem, who is among the many Jewish students who joined the protests at Columbia and other universities across the US, said he has watched with amazement as the media and political figures have attempted to characterise the protests as antisemitic and dangerous, despite Jewish student organizations playing a central role in them.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia and other US universities “antisemitic mobs” that are taking over “leading universities,” on Wednesday. House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Columbia University on Wednesday and called those protesting “lawless agitators” and “antisemitic.”
Ben-Menachem said his experience on campus had been completely different. “There has been this discourse that Columbia is this hotbed of antisemitism, but it’s just a bunch of nerds sitting on the ground playing games, chanting and doing homework. There was a Passover Seder held on Monday,” Ben-Menachem said. “It’s crazy how bad faith that discourse has become.”
Sarah, a Jewish student at Columbia who asked for only her first name to be published, was among those arrested for taking part in the encampment. She was held by the NYPD for eight hours, with her hands in zip ties, after they moved in on the camp on Thursday. She was suspended the next day, but snuck back onto campus a few days later to take part in a Passover Seder celebration with fellow protesters.
“It was definitely one of the more joyful experiences I’ve had at Columbia,” she told The Independent. “So many of us got arrested or suspended, it was really nice to see so many Jewish faces at the Seder.”
Sarah said she too had been appalled by attempts to smear the Columbia protests as antisemitic, saying that the term had been “weaponized in a really deceitful way by political opportunists who insist on conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”
“There’s never any substantive response to people like me who are anti-Zionist Jews,” Sarah noted. “There’s a long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism. I have so much love for the Jewish people of my community, we just have a political dispute, and that’s it.”
The crackdown on protests has also drawn criticism from staff. Nara Milanich, professor of history at Barnard College, which is partnered with Columbia University, was among nearly two dozen Jewish faculty members to write to Columbia president Nemat Shafik before the protests broke out, ahead of her appearance at a Congressional committee on antisemitism on campus, warning against the “weaponization of antisemitism” at Columbia by politicians eager to stoke division.
She told The Independent it was the university’s decision to bring the NYPD onto campus that “inflamed” the situation and “shut down spaces of debate.”
“It’s not the students who have created the chaos,” said Professor Milanich. “It’s the leadership of the university that has participated in this ridiculous police raid and has thrown the faculty and students of the university under the bus.
“Are Jews on campus, or anyone else, safer because hundreds of police in riot gear with firearms were invited to come onto campus and haul our students off in zip ties? I don’t feel safer,” she said.
Professor Milanich said the protesters at the encampment had written a code of conduct for inclusion and held training events on de-escalation to prevent extremists from outside causing trouble. Protestors also have a clear set of demands, asking for the university to divest from companies that help fund Israel’s war in Gaza, which Columbia College students voted on in a referendum and passed with over 75 per cent of the vote.
“The story is fundamentally not one of ‘pro-Hamas mobs’ running rampant on campus,” said Professor Milanich. “The story is of an administration that’s thrown the values of the university to the wind.”
