The Trump administration on Thursday stripped Harvard University of its ability to enroll foreign students, citing Harvard’s collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party, in what the Department of Homeland Security described as an act of accountability for the university “fostering violence, antisemitism and pro-terrorist conduct from students on its campus.” 

The move is an escalation in President Donald Trump’s battle with Harvard, just one front in his war with elite higher education institutions. He has already revoked billions of dollars in federal funding from Harvard, as well as several other universities. Trump has also sought the deportation of hundreds of foreign students on college campuses over their alleged support for terrorism and antisemitism.

But this is the first instance of the White House completely cutting off a university’s ability to admit international students. Harvard currently hosts more than 10,000 international students, according to university data. 160 of them are from Israel. Current students must transfer schools or lose their visa. 

“It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments. Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement. 

Last month, Noem asked Harvard to provide data on the disciplinary records of foreign students on campus and their record of participating in protests. Noem said the information shared by Harvard in response was “insufficient.” 

Harvard Hillel’s executive director, Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, expressed concern about the impact on Israeli students at Harvard.

“The current, escalating federal assault against Harvard — shuttering apolitical, life-saving research; threatening the university’s tax-exempt status; and revoking all student visas, including those of Israeli students who are proud veterans of the Israel Defense Forces and forceful advocates for Israel on campus — is neither focused nor measured, and stands to substantially harm the very Jewish students and scholars it purports to protect,” Rubenstein told Jewish Insider. 

A university spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Barak Sella, an Israeli educator and researcher who earned a master’s degree from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2024, said the action will “be detrimental for the entire higher education system.”

“Never did any Jewish [organization] ask to ban the ability to accept foreign students, especially when a lot of the antisemitism is perpetrated by American citizens — aka the shooting last night,” Sella told JI, referring to the killing of two Israeli Embassy officials outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. The alleged perpetrator is an American citizen. 

Harvard is likely to take legal action in response, according to The Crimson. 

Jewish Insider reporter Haley Cohen contributed to this report. 

In his second consecutive day of hearings on Capitol Hill, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he expects that additional Arab countries will join the Abraham Accords by the end of the year, if not earlier.

“We do have an Abraham Accords office that is actively working to identify a number of countries who have lined up and already I think we may have good news, certainly before the end of this year, of a number of more countries that are willing to join that alliance,” Rubio said a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday.

The comments are consistent with other recent remarks by President Donald Trump and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

Rubio added that the administration is currently working on selecting an ambassador for the Abraham Accords, as required under law, to submit for congressional confirmation.

He said that there is “still a willingness” in Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel, but “certain conditions are impediments,” including the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel and the ensuing war.

Rubio’s testimony largely reinforced and added on his comments the day before, on issues including Iran and Syria.

He again insisted that all elements of the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Witkoff, are unified behind the position that Iran cannot be allowed to maintain its capacity to enrich uranium.

And he affirmed that U.S. law requires that any deal with Iran be submitted to Congress for review and approval, noting that he had been in Congress when that law was passed.

At an afternoon hearing with the House Appropriations Committee, Rubio again said that sanctions relating to Iranian proxy terrorism or other malign activities will not be impacted by a nuclear deal that does not address those subjects. Republicans in the past have questioned the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear sanctions, particularly as part of the original 2015 nuclear deal, which took a similar approach. And they’ve argued that any sanctions relief would allow Iran to expand its support for regional terrorism.

Rubio said the administration is continuing to ramp up sanctions on Iran, and said that European parties to the deal are “on the verge” of implementing snapback sanctions on Iran. He said that the administration would support legislation to implement additional sanctions on Iran’s oil sector.

He denied knowledge of a Tuesday leak by administration officials that Israel was making plans to strike Iran’s nuclear program, adding, “I also don’t think it’s a mystery, though … that Israel has made clear that they retain the option of action to limit Iran from ever gaining a nuclear capability.”

Expanding on comments he made the day before, Rubio said that he favors moving the mission of U.S. security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian territories under the authority of the U.S. ambassador to Israel so that it can be a better-integrated part of the U.S.’ Israel policy. But he vowed that the core function of the office will continue.

Rubio denied reports of talks between the United States and Saudi Arabia about potential nuclear cooperation outside of a “gold standard” deal, which would include banning domestic enrichment.

The secretary of state reiterated comments about the critical necessity of providing sanctions relief to Syria to help contribute to stability, but he said that continued sanctions relief “does have to be conditioned on them continuing to live by the commitments” that the Syrian government has made verbally, including to combat extremism, prevent Syria from becoming a launchpad for attacks on Israel and form a government that represents, includes and protects ethnic and religious diversity.

He indicated that the U.S. is not actively working to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, but pledged that the United States will not be providing any further aid to or through that organization and will use its power and funding to look for alternatives.

He said it will be up to other countries whether they continue working with UNRWA, though he noted that the U.S. has been the agency’s largest donor.

Rubio said that he would be supportive, in concept, of legislation to expand current U.S. anti-boycott laws to include compulsory boycotts imposed by international organizations. That legislation was pulled from a House floor vote after right-wing lawmakers falsely claimed it would ban U.S. citizens from boycotting Israel.

Pushing back on calls for the U.S. to withhold weapons sales to the United Arab Emirates over its support for one of the parties involved in the Sudanese Civil War that the U.S. has found is committing genocide, Rubio said that the U.S. is not fully in alignment with the UAE but argued that it’s critical for the U.S. to continue engaging with and maintain a strong relationship with the UAE for its broader foreign policy goals in the Middle East.

He said that maintaining such a relationship and expanding the U.S.’ diplomatic and economic relationship with Abraham Accords countries is also important to ensuring that the Accords continue to be successful.

Rubio said that the State Department had approved restarting aid programs for Jordan that remained frozen — though he noted most were initially exempted from the administration’s blanket freeze. He acknowledged that the frozen programs had been “a source of frustration for [Jordan], and frankly for me.” He continued, “Ultimately, we’re going to get all those programs online, if they’re not online already.”

In a heated back-and-forth with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who was brandishing a pocket Constitution, Rubio again defended the administration’s policy of revoking student visas from individuals accused of involvement in anti-Israel activity on college campuses, saying that they are coming to the United States to “tear this country [apart]” and “stir up problems on our campuses.”

Addressing the case of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University graduate student that supporters have said was detained solely for writing an op-ed in a student newspaper criticizing Israel, Rubio claimed the situation is not as has been represented. “Those are her lawyers’ claims and your claims, those are not the facts,” Rubio said.

Asked by Jayapal about a comment — “Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group” — made by an Afrikaner refugee recently admitted to the United States from South Africa, Rubio said that he would “look forward to revoking the visas of any lunatics you can identify.”

But when presented with the fact that the individual in question was admitted as a refugee, not on a visa, Rubio said that refugee admissions are “a totally different process,” adding “student visas are a privilege.”

Sydney Altfield, a champion of STEM education, has been tapped as national director of Teach Coalition, an Orthodox Union-run organization that advocates for government funding and resources for yeshivas and Jewish day schools, Jewish Insider has learned. She succeeds Maury Litwack, who founded the coalition in 2013 and served as its national director since. 

Altfield, who has held various roles with Teach Coalition for the past seven years, most recently served as executive director of its New York state chapter. In that position, she spearheaded STEM funding for private schools in the state and helped establish state security funding programs — two areas she intends to expand on a national level in the new role, which encompasses seven states: New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Florida, Pennsylvania, California and Nevada. 

“We’re at a very pivotal moment in Jewish day schools where the continuity of the Jewish people relies on Jewish education and having access to such. That also has to come at a quality education,” Altfield told JI in her first interview since being selected for the position. “It’s so important to understand that it’s not just about STEM but it’s about the entire Jewish education being high quality, something that’s accessible for everyone.” 

Amid rising concerns about security in Jewish schools, Altfield said she looks forward to taking “the wins we’ve had in places like Florida,” referring to universal tax credit scholarships, to ensure that funds are effectively used to protect Jewish students and staff. 

Soon after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, Teach Coalition launched Project Protect to write and implement federal- and state-level security grants. 

“A lot of people thought that after Oct. 7 the rise in hate crimes and antisemitism, and specifically the rise in security threats, would go down but we’re seeing just the opposite,” Altfield said. “It’s very important for us to realize what is ahead and what is needed … to ensure that the financial burden of an antisemitism tax is halted as soon as possible.” 

According to a Teach Coalition survey published in April, security spending among 63 of the coalition’s member schools in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Florida increased a staggering 84% for the 2024-2025 school year, with these schools now spending $360 per student more on security than before Oct. 7. The costs ultimately get passed on to families in the form of security fees or increased tuition. 

Altfield credits herself with building “very strong” multifaith coalitions while overseeing the New York chapter. 

“I feel that New York is just scratching the surface,” she told JI. “I really do believe that our struggles as a Jewish community in ensuring a quality Jewish education is the same when it comes to Islamic education or Catholic schools, and if we have a united voice we can work together and move the needle faster. It makes our voice that much louder.” 

Under Litwack’s leadership, Teach Coalition ran several successful voter mobilization initiatives in Westchester and Long Island elections. Altfield said that while she plans to work with Litwack on some initiatives, “Teach will be going back to the basics of quality, affordable education.” 

Meanwhile, “there’s a new wave of needing a Jewish voting voice across the nation,” Altfield said, noting that the transition will allow Litwack to continue that effort in a separate organization he has formed, Jewish Voters Unite. 

“It has been a privilege founding and building Teach Coalition into the powerhouse organization that it is today,” Litwack told JI. “I’ve had the privilege of working alongside Sydney for years — someone whose vision, integrity, and dedication have helped shape what the organization has become.”

“The Orthodox Union community — along with other faith communities — is committed to educate its students in our day schools and yeshiva, where their faith and values are nurtured while they receive a well-rounded education. Especially as our community faces record antisemitism, that high-quality Jewish education needs to be made more accessible,” Rabbi Moshe Hauer, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, said in a statement, adding that Altfield’s promotion “represents the redoubling of our commitment to helping Jewish Day School and Yeshiva families and those that aspire to attend these schools.” 

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams also took note of the work Altfield has done locally. “Governor Hochul has forged a close partnership with Teach NYS throughout years of advocacy and collaboration, continuing this administration’s ironclad commitment to fighting antisemitism and supporting Jewish New Yorkers,” a spokesperson for Hochul said in a statement.

“Sydney is a true bridge-builder and her leadership at Teach NYS helped deliver real results for our families,” Adams said. 

Altfield said she takes the helm of the organization at a time when it is “becoming even more important and more visible” than ever.

On a federal level, for instance, “it’s very interesting to see where the Trump administration is going when it comes to education funding,” she said.

“They are very supportive of educational freedom and choice and that’s what we’re about so we’re very excited to see the changes that are coming, whether that be through the administration or even through a federal tax credit program that’s currently being discussed in Congress,” Altfield continued. 

Last week, the topic of Jewish education was brought to an international stage when podcast host and author Dan Senor said that Jewish day schools are one of the strongest contributors of a strong Jewish identity — one that provides the tools that are needed at this precarious moment to “rebuild American Jewish life” — as he delivered the 45th annual State of World Jewry address at the 92NY. 

“I’ve been saying this for so long and Dan gets the credit for it — as he should,” Altfield said with a laugh. 

“People always ask me why I do what I do,” she continued. “Even before Oct. 7, I said I believe that the continuity of the Jewish people lies within Jewish education. You cannot stress that any more than what has been seen after Oct. 7.”

Altfield pointed to increased enrollment in Jewish day schools nationwide. “A lot of what the Jewish community is going through is under a microscope,” she said. “Now that microscope is blowing up the understanding that Jewish education is basically the savior of what’s going to help us through these next few years.”

Harvard University’s long-awaited dual reports on antisemitism and Islamophobia, released on Tuesday, reveal a campus beset by tension and simmering distrust — as well as a university struggling to handle competing claims of discrimination, animosity and exclusion made by Jewish and Muslim students. 

In the 300-page antisemitism report, which was made public amid alumni frustration and pressure from the Trump administration, Harvard commits to partner with an Israeli university; provide additional resources for the study of Hebrew and Judaic studies; host an annual academic symposium on antisemitism; ask the leadership of Sidechat, a social media app that allows college students to post anonymously, to enforce its content moderation policies; and launch a pilot program in the business school addressing contemporary antisemitism.

The authors of the antisemitism report described “severe problems” that Jewish students have faced in the classroom, on social media and through campus protests. The report announced the hiring of an Office for Community Conduct staff member expected to consult on all complaints relating to antisemitism, as well as the release of an annual report on the university’s response to discrimination or harassment based on the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. 

In a letter publicizing the reports, Harvard President Alan Garber called the 2023-2024 academic year, following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, “disappointing and painful,” and said the reports “reveal aspects of a charged period in our recent history.” He condemned both antisemitism and Islamophobia, and pledged that the university will take action to counter both forms of hatred. 

Many of the recommendations in both the antisemitism and Islamophobia reports are the same: working to create a pluralistic campus environment where differing opinions are respected, committing additional resources to the university’s Title VI office, providing greater halal and kosher food options and shoring up university policy around protests and activism. 

But the instances of hate or discrimination that were described by Jewish and Muslim students differ. Often, what one group views as bigotry, the other views as acceptable behavior, or an expression of their freedom of speech.

For instance, a Muslim staff member described Harvard as “embarrassingly, shamefully biased” for shutting down the anti-Israel encampment in Harvard Yard last spring. Yet some Jewish students described “being followed and verbally harassed” as they walked near the encampment. 

In the recommendations and commitments made by the antisemitism task force, Harvard pledged to follow the guidance of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism in its Non-Discrimination and Anti-Bullying Policies. But the authors of the Islamophobia report say the IHRA definition — which identifies some criticism of Israel as antisemitic — “sparked concerns” and created “apprehension that this may suppress pro-Palestinian protest.” 

Garber’s letter, and the recommendations issued by the task forces, do not address how the university will act when pulled in different directions by the Jewish and Muslim student populations.

The antisemitism report authors wrote that after more than a year of conducting listening sessions with the university community, it was clear that since Oct. 7, Jewish and Israeli students believed that their “presence had become triggering” to peers and in some cases, faculty. Many Jewish Harvard students were frequently asked to clarify that they were “one of the good ones” by denouncing Israel. The campus climate began to rapidly deteriorate while Hamas’ invasion of southern Israel was still underway, the authors wrote — when 33 Harvard student groups co-signed a letter saying Israel was “entirely responsible” for the terrorist attack.  

The recommendations were divided into three areas: strengthening academic and residential life, supporting belonging and promoting respectful dialogue and revising and implementing campus policies, procedures and training. 

The report called on department deans to work with faculty to “maintain appropriate focus on course subject matter; ensure students are treated fairly regardless of their political/religious beliefs; promote intellectual openness and respectful dialogue among students; and maintain appropriate professional boundaries in instructional settings by refraining from endorsing or advocating political positions.” 

The reports come as Harvard, the world’s wealthiest university, finds itself embroiled in a high-stakes legal battle with the White House. The university is suing the Trump administration in protest of a series of demands issued by President Donald Trump earlier this month, aimed at reforming Harvard’s handling of antisemitism, as well as its governance structure, admissions policies and teaching practices.

The 15-member antisemitism task force’s final set of recommendations were initially expected to be issued last fall, following the release of preliminary recommendations in June, which several Jewish faculty and alumni told Jewish Insider at the time fell short of expectations. The reports were set to be released in early April, according to the Harvard Crimson, but their publication was again delayed as the university came under scrutiny from Trump. 

Amid the Trump administration’s funding freeze and ongoing legal battle with Harvard, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights instructed the university earlier this month to send the report to the government. 

The university has not commented on what led to the delay in issuing the final task force reports. 

For a brief moment, it looked like 2024 all over again: Tents were erected at Yale University’s central plaza on Tuesday night, with anti-Israel activists hoping to loudly protest the visit of far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to campus. Videos of students in keffiyehs, shouting protest slogans, started to spread online on Tuesday night.

But then something unexpected happened. University administrators showed up, threatening disciplinary action, and the protesters were told to leave — or face consequences. So they left. The new encampment didn’t last a couple hours, let alone overnight. The next day, Yale announced that it had revoked its recognition of Yalies4Palestine, the student group that organized the protest. (On Wednesday night, a large protest occurred outside the off-campus building where Ben-Gvir was speaking.)

Meanwhile, at Cornell University, President Michael Kotlikoff announced on Wednesday that he had canceled an upcoming campus performance by R&B singer Kehlani because of her history of anti-Israel social media posts. He wrote in an email to Cornell affiliates that he had heard from many people who were “angry, hurt and confused” that the school’s annual spring music festival “would feature a performer who has espoused antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiments in performances, videos and on social media.” 

The quick decisions from administrators at Yale and Cornell to shut down anti-Israel activity reflect something of a vibe shift on American campuses. One year ago, anti-Israel encampments were, for a few weeks, de rigueur on campus quads across the nation. University leaders seemed paralyzed, unsure of how to handle protests that in many cases explicitly excluded Jewish or Zionist students and at times became violent. That’s a markedly different environment from what’s happening at those same schools so far this spring. 

“In general, protest activity is way down this year as compared to last year,” Hillel International CEO Adam Lehman told Jewish Insider. 

There is no single reason that protests have subsided. Jewish students, campus Jewish leaders and professionals at Jewish advocacy organizations attribute the change to a mix of factors: stricter consequences from university leaders, fear of running afoul of President Donald Trump’s pledge to deport pro-Hamas foreign students and the issue generally losing steam and cachet among easily distracted students. 

Last spring, an encampment at The George Washington University was only dismantled after the university faced threats from Congress. Now, no such protest is taking place — which Daniel Schwartz, a Jewish history professor, said was likely due in part to the “sense that the university was going to be responding much more fiercely to anything resembling what happened last year.” 

“For the most part, the enforcement of rules, the understanding of what the rules are, what you can do, what you can’t do, requiring people to get permits for protests, has really calmed things down [from] the sort of violence that we saw last year,” said Jordan Acker, a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan, who has faced antisemitic vandalism and targeted, personal protests from Michigan students.

Michael Simon, the executive director at Northwestern Hillel, came into the school year with a “big question mark” of how the school’s new policies, which provide strict guidance for student protests and the type of behavior allowed at them, would be applied. “I’m going to say it with a real hedging: at least up until now, I would say we’ve seen the lower end of what I would have expected,” he said of campus anti-Israel protests.

Many major universities like Northwestern spent last summer honing their campus codes of conduct and their regulations for student protests, making clear at the start of the school year that similar actions would not be tolerated again. In February, for instance, Barnard College expelled two students who loudly disrupted an Israeli history class at Columbia,. 

“For the most part, the enforcement of rules, the understanding of what the rules are, what you can do, what you can’t do, requiring people to get permits for protests, has really calmed things down [from] the sort of violence that we saw last year,” said Jordan Acker, a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan, who has faced antisemitic vandalism and targeted, personal protests from Michigan students.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has pressured top universities to crack down on antisemitic activity. The president’s threats to revoke federal funding if universities don’t get antisemitism under control has drawn pushback — Harvard is suing the Trump administration over its decision to withhold $2.2 billion in federal funds from the school — but it has also led universities to take action to address the problem. 

Sharon Nazarian, an adjunct professor at UCLA and the vice chair of the Anti-Defamation League’s board of directors, said there is “no question” that “the national atmosphere of fear among university administrators for castigation and targeting by the [Trump] administration is also present” at UCLA and other University of California campuses.

“My sense is that being anti-Israel is not as much of the popular thing anymore,” Evan Cohen, a senior at the University of Michigan, said at a Wednesday webinar hosted by Hillel International for Jewish high school seniors. “On my campus, there are other hot topic issues. There might be more focus on what’s happening with U.S. domestic politics.” 

Rule-breaking student activists also face a heightened risk of law enforcement action. A dozen anti-Israel student protesters were charged with felonies this month for vandalizing the Stanford University president’s office last June. On Wednesday, local, state and federal law enforcement officials in Michigan raided the homes of three people connected to anti-Israel protests at the University of Michigan. Protesters’ extreme tactics  have scared off some would-be allies.

“I think some of the most activist students went too far at the end of last year with the takeover of the president’s office and a lot of pretty intense graffiti in important places on campus,” said Rabbi Jessica Kirschner, the executive director of Hillel at Stanford. “I think a lot of other students looked at that and said, ‘Oh, this is perhaps not where we want to be.’”

Students’ priorities shift each year, and other issues beyond Israel are also vying for their attention. Trump’s policies targeting foreign students are drawing ire from students at liberal universities, many of which have large populations of international students.

“My sense is that being anti-Israel is not as much of the popular thing anymore,” Evan Cohen, a senior at the University of Michigan, said at a Wednesday webinar hosted by Hillel International for Jewish high school seniors. “On my campus, there are other hot topic issues. There might be more focus on what’s happening with U.S. domestic politics.” 

But the lack of protests does not mean that campus life has returned to normal for Jewish students, many of whom still fear — and face — opprobrium for their pro-Israel views.

“It’s easy to avoid the protests but if you are an Israeli student or a Jewish student perceived to be a Zionist, you should expect to be discriminated against in social spaces at the university,” Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, told JI. “That is the most powerful way students are impacted by all of this.”

Ken Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which since Oct. 7 has represented dozens of Jewish students in Title VI civil rights cases against their universities, said that campus-related lawsuits are only faintly slowing down this semester. 

“A lot of the staff and the administration think that, ‘OK, since there’s no protest outside, all the Jewish students must feel OK, and let’s put all this stuff that happened in the spring behind us.’ It’s really not the case,” said Or Yahalom, a senior at Northwestern University who was born in Israel. “That doesn’t mean that it’s all better for students. Jewish students are increasingly afraid to speak openly about their identity or connection to Israel, except in private, safe Jewish spaces.”

“Some campuses have been less intense than during last year’s historically awful period, but others have been bad enough,” Marcus told JI. “I believe that the federal crackdown, coupled with the impact of lawsuits and Title VI cases, has had a favorable impact at many campuses, but the problems have hardly gone away.”

Or Yahalom, a senior at Northwestern University who was born in Israel, recently attended a dinner with Northwestern President Michael Schill, who has faced criticism from Jewish Northwestern affiliates — including several members of its antisemitism advisory committee — for what they saw as the administration’s failure to adequately address antisemitism. 

“A lot of the staff and the administration think that, ‘OK, since there’s no protest outside, all the Jewish students must feel OK, and let’s put all this stuff that happened in the spring behind us.’ It’s really not the case,” said Yahalom. “That doesn’t mean that it’s all better for students. Jewish students are increasingly afraid to speak openly about their identity or connection to Israel, except in private, safe Jewish spaces.” 

Even without massive encampments, disruptive anti-Israel protests and campus actions have not gone away entirely, though they have been more infrequent this academic year. A Northwestern academic building housing the school’s Holocaust center was vandalized with “DEATH TO ISRAEL” graffiti last week. The office of Joseph Pelzman, an economist at The George Washington University who authored a plan calling for the U.S. to relocate Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and redevelop the enclave, was vandalized in February. The Georgetown University Student Government Association is slated to hold a campus-wide referendum on university divestment from companies and academic institutions with ties to Israel at the end of the month. Smaller-scale protests continue at Columbia, with students chaining themselves to the Manhattan university’s main gate this week to protest the ICE detention of ​​Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil, two foreign students who had led protests last year. 

Leaders of the University of Michigan’s anti-Israel coalition held a sham trial for the university president and Board of Regents members in the middle of the Diag, the main campus quad, this week. The event took place without issue, and the activists left when it ended. 

“I wouldn’t want to say that it’s perfect,” said Acker, the Board of Regents member. “But it’s certainly much better than a year ago.” 

The school year isn’t over. Some students at Columbia are planning to erect another encampment this month, NBC News reported on Wednesday. 

But they’ll be doing so at an institution with new leadership, weeks after Columbia reached an agreement with the Trump administration, where the Ivy League university pledged to take stronger action against antisemitism to avoid a massive funding cut. The pressure on Columbia to crack down on any encampment will be massive.

Jewish faculty, alumni and students at Harvard — including some who have been outspoken against Harvard’s handling of antisemitism over the past year and a half — are watching with concern as the White House targets the Ivy League institution and the university prepares to battle with the Trump administration.

The Trump administration announced on Monday that it would be canceling $2.2 billion in federal funds to Harvard University after President Alan Garber said he would not cede to its demands. Many Jewish Harvard affiliates are wary of Trump’s aggressive intrusion into academia, while also calling for Harvard to take stronger action to address antisemitism. 

An April 11 letter from the Trump administration called for reforms to Harvard’s governance structure, its hiring of faculty, its admissions policies and its approach to antisemitism, with stringent federal reporting requirements, with all demands expected to be implemented by August. Attorneys for Harvard responded that Trump’s demands “go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.” 

“The second Trump letter had demands that could charitably be called ridiculous, and the Trump administration must have known that Garber would have no choice but to reject them,” Jesse Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who has spoken publicly about increasing antisemitism and anti-Zionism at Harvard after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, told Jewish Insider. “They say that Trump is the great divider, but I’ve never seen anybody unify the Harvard faculty as successfully as he has.”

Rabbi David Wolpe, who was a visiting faculty member at Harvard Divinity School from 2023-2024, said he has no problem “with the general goals that are laid out” in Trump’s letter. But, Wolpe added, “I think this is a letter that will have a lot of unintended consequences, and it seems to me an overreach.” 

“I think there are people in the Trump administration — one or two of whom I’ve spoken to — who I know that this is a genuine cause of the heart for them, I have no doubt about that,” Wolpe said. “But I think there are a lot of other agendas swirling around that are not directly concerned with antisemitism.” 

Jewish leaders on Harvard’s campus called on the university to implement some of the federal government’s suggestions to crackdown on antisemitism, even if the university rejects making a formal deal with Trump.  

“Considering that there is wide support in the Harvard community and beyond for many of these policies and changes, they should have been put into place long ago,” Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, who leads Harvard Chabad, told JI. “It’s our hope that in wanting to demonstrate its independence, Harvard will not delay implementing further necessary changes, because an authority is trying to impose it on them.” 

Former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who is still a professor at the university, praised Garber for “resisting extralegal and unreasonable demands from the federal government.” But just because Trump’s approach is the wrong one, Summers argued in a post on X, that doesn’t mean Harvard should ignore the issues raised in his letter.

“The wrongness of federal demands must not obscure the need for major reform to combat antisemitism, to promote genuine truth seeking, to venerate excellence and to ensure ideological diversity,” wrote Summers, who has been critical of Harvard’s handling of antisemitism after Oct. 7. 

One Harvard senior who has sharply criticized Harvard’s response to campus antisemitism, Jacob Miller, argued that Trump’s “crusade against Harvard” seeks to “hobble” the university, “the same way he has sought to incapacitate other perceived political enemies, including a number of law firms.”

Alex Bernat, a senior who is co-president of the Harvard Chabad Undergraduate Board, said that if Harvard is set on resisting the government’s demands, “then it is imperative Harvard release the steps they will take to further fix antisemitism here.”

Bernat praised some of the recent changes Harvard made in an attempt to combat antisemitism ahead of the government’s reforms, such as last month’s firing of two controversial heads of the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

“But [that is] not enough by any means and I’d like to see a concrete plan, whether developed internally at Harvard or agreed upon with the government,” he continued. “Additionally, I think Harvard ought to be careful about failing to take a given appropriate action merely because it was recommended from outside the university.” 

One nonprofit representing Harvard alumni calling for the school to make changes focused on promoting academic excellence, the 1636 Forum, has been highly critical of Harvard’s handling of campus protests after Oct. 7. 1636 Forum co-founder Allison Wu, a Harvard Business School alumna, said Garber should use this opportunity to clarify what reforms he will take.

“Harvard could benefit from publicly articulating a concrete roadmap for internal reforms and showing it can make swift, meaningful progress on that plan — even in the face of internal resistance or inertia,” Wu told JI. 

Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, declined to weigh in on the issue. 

The funding freeze is already affecting major research projects at Harvard. Jeff Fredberg, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, has been meeting weekly with Jewish public health students, researchers and faculty over the past year, and the feeling among them now “is one of fear and depression.” 

“They’ve dedicated their whole life to this, and now I’m hearing from them, ‘What am I going to do? There are not going to be positions, or my lab is going to get closed, or has been closed,’” said Fredberg, who started meeting with the group amid increasing antisemitism within the public health field. He worries the federal actions will backfire for budding Jewish scientists. “These Jewish students are afraid there’s going to be a backlash, because the sciences are going to take the body blows on this, and ‘It’s going to be because of the Jews.’”

Harvard’s attorneys made clear the university will fight Trump, although the school has not yet announced plans to file litigation against the federal government. The Trump administration’s antisemitism task force stated on Monday that it will not let up on its demands.

“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges — that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws,” the task force wrote in a press release announcing the funding pause. “It is time for elite universities to take the problem seriously and commit to meaningful change if they wish to continue receiving taxpayer support.” 

Trump added to Harvard’s worries on Tuesday by threatening to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status for “pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness.’” 

The arrest on Monday of a Palestinian student at Columbia University who helped organize campus anti-Israel demonstrations was the latest front in the Trump administration’s closely scrutinized crackdown on foreign activists who have expressed sympathy for Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups. 

Mohsen Mahdawi, a 34-year-old green card holder born and raised in the West Bank, was arrested and detained by federal immigration officers on Monday after he appeared at a U.S. citizenship interview in Vermont, where he resides.

Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said in an email to Jewish Insider on Tuesday that Mahdawi “was a ringleader in the Columbia protests,” sharing a New York Post article citing anonymous State Department sources claiming that he had used “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” against Jewish students.

“Due to privacy and other considerations, and visa confidentiality, we generally will not comment on Department actions with respect to specific cases,” a State Department spokesperson told JI on Tuesday.

Mahdawi’s lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition on Monday calling his detention unlawful. “This case concerns the government’s retaliatory and targeted detention and attempted removal of Mr. Mahdawi for his constitutionally protected speech,” the petition said.    

Representatives for Columbia declined to comment on Mahdawi’s arrest, citing federal student privacy law.

Like Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian green card holder and recent Columbia University graduate arrested by federal immigration agents last month, Mahdawi has not yet been charged with a crime. Instead, he appears to have been detained on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act cited by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to justify expelling foreigners who are seen as a threat to U.S. foreign policy and national security, which the petition also challenges.

Last week, a federal judge in Louisiana ordered that Khalil can be deported, determining such arguments are sufficient grounds for his removal, in a decision that is expected to face further challenges.

A federal judge in Vermont ruled on Monday that Mahdawi must be held in the state and cannot be removed from the country for now. 

Mahdawi’s legal team did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.    

Mahdawi had been a key organizer of anti-Israel protests at Columbia that roiled the campus after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. He helped to found Columbia University Apartheid Divest and was a member of the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which has expressed pro-Hamas rhetoric, among other student anti-Israel groups. 

For his part, Mahdawi, who moved to the U.S. from a refugee camp in the West Bank in 2014, called Hamas a “product of the Israeli occupation” shortly after the attacks and reportedly helped to write a statement released by Columbia student groups on Oct. 14, 2023, claiming that the “Palestinian struggle for freedom is rooted in international law, under which occupied peoples have the right to resist the occupation of their land.”

He also appeared at a rally a month after the attack alongside Nerdeen Kiswani of Within Our Lifetime, a radical group that advocates for armed resistance against Israel. 

In an interview on “60 Minutes” in December 2023, Mahdawi voiced sympathy for Hamas’ terror attacks.

“I did not say that I justify what Hamas has done. I said I can empathize,” he said. “To empathize is to understand the root cause and to not look at any event or situation in a vacuum. This is for me that path moving forward.”

On his Instagram page in August, meanwhile, Mahdawi posted photos commemorating what he called the “martyrdom” of his “cousin,” Maysara Masharqa, a field commander in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of Fatah, describing him as a “fierce resistance fighter,” according to The Washington Free Beacon. 

“Here is Mesra who offers his soul as a sacrifice for the homeland and for the blood of the martyrs as a gift for the victory of Gaza and in defense of the dignity of his homeland and his people against the vicious Israeli occupation in the West Bank,” Mahdawi wrote.

While the petition filed by his legal team notes that he stepped back from such activism in March 2024, Mahdawi’s public statements drew intense scrutiny from several antisemitism watchdog groups that are pushing the Trump administration to target campus protest leaders.

Mahdawi, who was an undergraduate at Columbia University, was planning to pursue a master’s degree in the fall, according to the petition.

His arrest drew criticism on Monday from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Peter Welch (D-VT) and Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT), who said in a statement that “he must be afforded due process under the law and immediately released from detention.” 

After Columbia interim President Katrina Armstrong’s abrupt resignation on Friday, several of the university’s congressional antagonists quickly jumped in to criticize Armstrong’s successor, former ABC News journalist Claire Shipman, the co-chair of Columbia’s board. 

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the former chair of the House Education Committee, said that Shipman’s tenure as interim president would be “short-lived.” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), freshly returned to Capitol Hill after President Donald Trump withdrew her nomination to be U.N. ambassador, called the choice of Shipman “untenable.” 

But a different reaction came from the White House: subtle praise. The Trump administration’s antisemitism task force called Columbia’s Friday night actions an “important step,” which an administration official confirmed to Jewish Insider was in reaction to Shipman’s appointment. News reports last week indicated that days before her resignation, Armstrong had promised the Trump administration she would enforce a mask ban on campus while telling faculty privately that she would not. 

On Columbia’s campus, the news of Shipman’s hiring was met with cautious optimism from pro-Israel student leaders.

“We’re in desperate need of strong leadership willing to make the deep-seated reforms necessary to save the university at this pivotal moment,” said Eden Yadegar, a senior studying Middle East studies and modern Jewish studies who last year testified before Congress about the antisemitism she has faced on Columbia’s campus. Yadegar declined to elaborate on whether she believes Shipman will bring about those reforms. 

Lishi Baker, a junior studying Middle East history and co-chair of the campus Israel advocacy group Aryeh, also said he would take a wait-and-see approach to Shipman. Baker expects university leadership to bring “deep structural and cultural changes at Columbia [that] are necessary to restore our campus to its primary mission of teaching, learning, and research,” he said. 

“Some of these changes can happen immediately and some will take longer,” Baker told JI. 

The university’s Hillel director, Brian Cohen, praised Shipman in a statement to JI, saying that she “is deeply committed to Columbia University and has consistently demonstrated concern for the well-being and needs of its Jewish community.”

“I look forward to working with her in this new role,” Cohen said.    

Major Jewish organizations have largely avoided weighing in on Shipman’s appointment. The Anti-Defamation League told JI that it was “too early.” 

Shipman, a veteran reporter and author with no academic leadership experience, has publicly stood by the university’s leadership as co-chair of Columbia’s board of trustees in response to the antisemitism that exploded on campus after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and ensuing war in Gaza. 

From the beginning of her tenure, Shipman will be contending with a complex campus landscape: Many liberal faculty and students are angry about the university’s decision to acquiesce to Trump’s demands as a way to regain access to $400 million in federal funding that his administration pulled in March, citing Columbia’s failure to properly address antisemitism. 

She will also face a tough negotiating partner in Washington, and pressure from Jewish students and alumni to take a stronger stance against a campus culture in which anti-Israel protests have thrived, with little consequences for rule-breaking activists until recently.

“In an existential crisis, they need to collaborate and to be candid in the exchanges with the Trump administration and what they’ll do, and they need to stick with that,” Mark Yudof, former president of the University of California, offered as advice for Shipman. “You need good faith implementation of what you agree with with the administration, that you’re not looking for loopholes.”

In a message sent to the Columbia community on Monday, Shipman expressed a desire to meet with people across Columbia’s campus as she navigates this “precarious moment” for the university. She did not reference the circumstances of her appointment, nor did she discuss antisemitism on campus, although she hinted at the seriousness of the task before her. 

“My request, right now, is that we all — students, faculty, staff and everyone in this remarkable place — come together and work to protect and support this invaluable repository of knowledge, this home to the next generation of intellectual explorers, and this place of great and continuing promise,” Shipman wrote. 

Last April, Shipman testified at a congressional hearing about antisemitism at Columbia alongside then-Columbia President Minouche Shafik, who resigned from her role in August, and board Co-Chair David Greenwald. Shipman told members of the House Committee on Education and Workforce that she knows Columbia has “significant and important work to do to address antisemitism and to ensure that our Jewish community is safe and welcome.” 

The hearing generally avoided the splashy headlines that followed testimony from the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania in December 2023. (Shipman reportedly described that hearing as “capital [sic] hill nonsense,” according to a congressional report published in October.) 

But her Capitol Hill appearance with Shafik and Greenwald was followed by the erecting of Columbia’s anti-Israel encampment — the first such protest in the country, which touched off dozens of others. Columbia’s response to the encampment earned criticism from bipartisan lawmakers, even as Shipman and her fellow board members stood by Shafik’s handling of the protests, which turned violent when students occupied a campus building. 

Choosing a university president from outside of academia is an unusual choice, even for an interim position. Shipman, who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, graduated from Columbia College in 1986 and returned to earn a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in 1994. She reported from Moscow for CNN, covered the Clinton administration at NBC News and spent 15 years covering politics and international affairs at ABC News. 

Shipman, notably, also spent time earlier in her career covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on assignment in the Middle East. 

Ramping up its pressure campaign against Ivy League schools, the Trump administration notified Harvard University on Monday in a letter that it is reviewing the school’s billions of dollars in federal funding. 

The newly formed Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism will review $255.6 million in contracts and $8.7 billion in multiyear grant commitments between the government and Harvard, first reported by The Free Press and later announced by the Department of Education.

“Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from anti-semitic discrimination — all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry — has put its reputation in serious jeopardy,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus.”

Harvard President Alan Garber argued in a statement on Monday that the university has “devoted considerable effort to addressing antisemitism” for the past 15 months. 

Those efforts, Garber said, have included “strengthen[ing] our rules and our approach to disciplining those who violate them, training and education on antisemitism across our campus and [the introduction of] measures to support our Jewish community and ensure student safety and security.”

Garber said that the university will “engage with members of the federal government’s task force to combat antisemitism to ensure that they have a full account of the work we have done and the actions we will take going forward to combat antisemitism.” 

The crackdown comes days after Columbia University agreed to enter into ongoing negotiations with the Trump administration, which cut $400 million from the university on March 7, citing the academic institution’s “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students.” The set of demands that Columbia agreed to include putting the school’s Middle Eastern studies department under a “receivership,” which would involve closer oversight from an external body.

As an apparent preemptive measure to avoid a fate similar to Columbia’s, two heads of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies were let go from their roles last Wednesday. 

Task force member Sean Keveney, acting general counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement that the task force is “pleased that Harvard is willing to engage with us.” 

Harvard University did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Jewish Insider about the investigation. 

On March 10, the Department of Education sent letters to 60 universities, including Harvard, warning them of “potential enforcement actions” if they do not fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students. 

The Instagram page of the anti-Israel coalition Columbia University Apartheid Divest was disabled on Monday for the second time since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, a spokesperson for Meta confirmed to Jewish Insider. 

The account belonging to CUAD, a coalition of at least 80 Columbia student groups that was formed in 2016 and has gained renewed support since Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, was initially suspended in December 2024. 

Columbia’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a member of the coalition, was banned from Meta in August 2024. At the time, a spokesperson for Meta, the company that owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, told JI that the account was disabled for repeated violations of Meta’s dangerous organizations and individuals policies. 

According to Meta’s policies, the company does “not allow organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence to have a presence on our platforms.”

The coalition has ramped up its anti-Israel demonstrations, as the university entered into ongoing negotiations with the Trump administration over its handling of antisemitism on campus. The White House cut $400 million from Columbia’s federal funding earlier this month over its failure to address campus antisemitism. 

Meta declined to comment on its latest decision to remove CUAD from the platform on Monday. CUAD remains active on several other social media platforms, including X and Telegram. 

“This comes after a long and concerted effort from corporations and imperial powers to erase the Palestinian people,” CUAD wrote on X, claiming that this time around Meta is giving “no option for appeal.” 

The Justice Department’s newly formed Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism filed a statement of interest in court on Monday night supporting Jewish students and a professor in their case alleging that the University of California Los Angeles permitted antisemitism on campus. 

According to the suit, in the spring of 2024 UCLA violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by knowingly allowed members of an anti-Israel protest encampment to physically prevent students and faculty from accessing portions of the campus if they were wearing items that identified them as Jewish if they refused to denounce Israel. The filing comes as the task force is separately investigating the University of California system for Title VI violations. 

The brief filed on Monday marks the first time the federal government has filed a statement of interest in court to argue that a university should be held accountable for the campus antisemitism that has skyrocketed across the country since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel.  

Leo Terrell, head of the antisemitism task force, said in a statement that “the President, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the Task Force know that every student must be free to attend school without being discriminated against on the basis of their race, religion or national origin.” 

The Trump administration’s new multi-agency task force to combat antisemitism announced earlier this month that it would visit 10 university campuses that have experienced an increase of antisemitic incidents. 

The task force already announced it will cut $400 million from Columbia University’s federal funding due to antisemitic demonstrations unless the university agrees to a number of conditions by Thursday. At the time, Terrell said that was “only the beginning” of university funding cuts.

A new report from a Stanford committee focused on addressing antisemitism and anti-Israel bias determined that antisemitism is “widespread and pernicious” at the elite Palo Alto, Calif., university, capturing the atmosphere on campus in its eye-catching title: “It’s in the air.” The 148-page document is the first official account to be released publicly by the committee, which was created by Stanford President Richard Saller in November weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel set off a wave of antisemitism on American campuses. 

Comprising Stanford faculty, staff, students and alumni, the 12 members of the committee detailed the hostile conditions faced by Jewish and Israeli students on campus since October. They described an environment of intimidation and fear, with students and Jewish faculty facing a complex mixture of exclusion and harassment. The report’s authors outlined instances of antisemitism across campus — in the classroom, on social media, in residential life and at campus protests. 

“Some of this bias is expressed in overt and occasionally shocking ways,” the committee found, “but often it is wrapped in layers of subtlety and implication, one or two steps away from blatant hate speech.”

Occasionally, the level of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment “reached a level of social injury that deeply affected people’s lives,” the report’s authors found. Students moved out of dorm rooms because of antisemitic incidents, such as mezuzot being torn down from their doors; some students were “ostracized, canceled or intimidated” for identifying openly as Jewish “or for simply being Israeli”; other Jewish students feared displaying Jewish symbols “for fear of losing friendships or group acceptance.”

One incident of particular concern, which was reported widely in the fall, happened days after Oct. 7, when the instructor of an undergraduate seminar asked Jewish students to raise their hands, saying “he was simulating what Jews were doing to Palestinians” by taking a Jewish student’s personal belongings while the student was “turned around and looking out the window,” according to the report. The instructor also minimized the deaths of Jews in the Holocaust. The instructor was suspended, and his contract expired at the end of last year. But more than 1,700 students signed a petition supporting him; Stanford has an undergraduate population of roughly 7,800. 

The report’s authors singled out the incident because it reflects the “current predicament” Stanford faces in addressing “incidents in which Jewish students feel singled out, intimidated, and harmed solely because of their identities as Jews, [and] are trivialized or dismissed by their peers and community in ways that never would be tolerated if done to students with other identities that have historically been subject to bigotry.”

The outright, direct targeting of Jewish students that happened in this freshman seminar was not a common occurrence, the report found. 

“The most common manifestation of antisemitism in student life,” according to the report, was “the imposition of a unique social burden on Jewish students to openly denounce Israel and renounce any ties to it.” 

Although antisemitism manifested itself in classrooms, campus protests and among friend groups, “no venue has provided a wider and more uninhibited berth for the expression of hostility toward Jews and Israelis than social media,” the committee found. On Fizz, a social media platform for Stanford students where all posts are anonymous, antisemitism is rampant. Posts call out “Zios,” using a derogatory slur for Zionists. Others mock Jewish students who expressed concerns about antisemitism or their safety on campus. 

The committee issued detailed recommendations for the university, such as applying disciplinary standards equally and meaningfully, enforcing content moderation on Fizz, improving training on antisemitism for resident assistants and including Jews and Israelis in the categories recognized in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs on campus. 

Most important, the committee argued, is for the university to prioritize civil discourse and aim to restore important norms that the report’s authors allege have declined precipitously since the fall.

“The core problem, we concluded, is not simply the failure to punish rule violations in a concrete way. It is the broader deterioration of norms that once stigmatized antisemitism,” the report said. “The best way for Stanford to respond to antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias is for it to recommit to core university principles that should be promoted and defended equally for all groups, irrespective of race, religion, nationality or other forms of identity.”

The antisemitism-focused committee pledged to work closely with a similar committee examining Islamophobia and anti-Arab discrimination on campus. The leaders of both groups met as they prepared reports, which were released on the same day. “Our concern and recommendations to counter bias on campus were written with concern for the broader Stanford community and not simply Jewish students, faculty and staff,” the antisemitism committee wrote. 

The university also released a report on Thursday from the committee formed to support the school’s Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities. Muslim and Jewish students shared concern on some issues, including a fear shared by religiously identifiable students, like Muslim women who wear a hijab or Jewish men who wear a kippah.

Still, the reports diverged — for instance, in the “Rupture and Repair” report, a statement from the Muslim, Arab and Palestinian committee took issue with “calls for ‘civil discourse,’” alleging that the term “reflect[s] a suspicion of student activism, a distrust of speech outside the boundaries of institutional orthodoxy and opposition to [DEI].” The report called for broader protection of free speech and condemned disciplinary action taken against some anti-Israel protesters who interrupted a family weekend event, the university’s handling of which drew praise in the antisemitism report. 

The Muslim, Arab and Palestinian committee’s report also took a stance in support of anti-Zionist Jewish students who felt at times more aligned with the Muslim community than the Jewish community in recent months, the report’s authors found.

“​​We support these community members’ conceptual separation between antisemitism and anti-Zionism,” the report said. “We also think that the identification of ‘good Jews’ is an antisemitic trope, and we believe our recommendations on speech, safety and academic programming will serve Jewish members of the Stanford community as much as they serve anyone else.”

Saller said in a statement that the reports indicate “additional areas for attention” beyond what work the university is already doing to address hate. 

“The reports will contribute to the essential ongoing work of building a campus community in which everyone can truly thrive, and in which acts of bias and discrimination have no place,” Saller said. 

Months of intense anti-Israel protests at Stanford University escalated on Wednesday morning — the last day of classes for the spring quarter — when 13 students and alumni broke into and barricaded themselves inside President Richard Saller’s office, insisting that the university meet their demands to cut ties with Israel. Within hours of the 5:30 a.m. break-in, law enforcement arrested all of the rioters and the university shut down an anti-Israel illegal encampment that has engulfed campus since April. 

The demonstrators filmed themselves covering Saller’s desk in red paint, destroyed property and renamed the building to “Dr. Adnan Office,” in honor of Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, “the Palestinian General Surgeon who was murdered in April by the Israeli genocidal campaign,” the group told The Stanford Daily. Al-Bursh died while in Israeli prison, where he was being held due to national security reasons, the Israel Defense Forces said. 

Meanwhile, chaos ensued outside of the building as well; a public safety officer was injured after being shoved by the demonstrators, who were interfering with a transport vehicle. The Main Quad, the historic center of the university, was scrawled with graffiti such as “De@th 2 Isr@hell,” “Pigs taste best dead” and “F*** Amerikkka.” 

“There has been extensive damage to the interior of Building 10, [where Saller’s office is located], and exterior of the buildings in the quad,” Dee Mostofi, a Stanford University spokesperson told Jewish Insider.  

Dozens of students and alumni have continued rioting — including throwing medal barricades at police officers — outside of the building throughout Wednesday morning. 

“We are appalled that our students chose to take this action and we will work with law enforcement to ensure that they face the full consequences allowed by law,” Mostofi said. “All arrested students will be immediately suspended and in case any of them are seniors, they will not be allowed to graduate.” 

Mostofi continued, “We have consistently emphasized the need for constructive engagement and peaceful protest when there is a disagreement in views. This was not peaceful protest and actions such as what occurred this morning have no place at Stanford.” 

The student and alumni demonstrators issued three demands to Stanford: add the divestment bill submitted by Stanford Against Apartheid in Palestine to the next Board of Trustees meeting, with a recommendation by Saller supporting the bill; disclose finances from the fiscal year 2022 including endowment investments; and drop all disciplinary and criminal charges against pro-Palestinian students at Stanford.

The swift disciplinary action from Stanford administration on Wednesday stands in sharp contrast to how the school has approached prior anti-Israel demonstrations, which have skyrocketed on campus since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel. 

“The administration treated these people with kid gloves the entire time and have refused to discipline them from the get-go, back in October,” Kevin Feigelis, a doctoral student in the physics department, told JI. “When you refuse to discipline people that misbehave, you give an inch, they take a mile. They have gotten more radicalized.” 

In January, after students hurled antisemitic slogans outside of an on-campus forum meant to combat antisemitism organized by Feigelis, the administration took no punitive action. 

The chants shouted at Feigelis and other Jewish students included, “We’re going to find out where you live,” “Zionist, Zionist, you can’t hide” and “Go back to Brooklyn.”

The Stanford administration allowed an anti-Israel encampment to remain on campus since April. On Wednesday, Saller said in a statement that because of the morning’s occupation, the encampment was removed “in the interest of public safety.”  

The removal came after more than 300 people set up tents in White Plaza for more than a month, despite the administration announcing in a university-wide statement in May that the encampment “violates our policy on overnight camping, which is in place for the safety of our community members. Even during the daytime, the encampment also violates our policies on the use of White Plaza.” Around the country, dozens of universities shut down similar illegal demonstrations within weeks. 

Feigelis continued, “it’s sad that the only time they sent in police was when it was the president’s office himself, as opposed to every time Jewish students have been terrorized on campus.” 

In the aftermath of a surge in antisemitism that erupted following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel, top universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and Northwestern announced the creation of new bodies tasked with studying antisemitism on campus and identifying how to address it. Their impending work is framed with urgency, and the bodies are generally discussed using language about the importance of inclusivity on campus. 

But nearly five months after the environment for Jewish students on these campuses began to rapidly deteriorate, questions remain over the efficacy and mandate of such groups. They will also face the thorny issue of campus free speech as they delve into questions about what, exactly, constitutes antisemitism on campus. 

The question over the credibility of these antisemitism task forces was underscored this week at Harvard, following the resignation of business school professor Raffaella Sadun, the co-chair of the presidential task force, reportedly because she felt university leaders weren’t willing to act on the committee’s recommendations. 

“They’ve utterly failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students. It’s shameful,” a Jewish faculty member at Harvard told Jewish Insider. They requested anonymity to speak candidly about interactions with students and administrators in recent months. The professor has seen numerous Israeli students kicked out of WhatsApp groups unrelated to politics because they are Israeli. The professor also described widespread opposition, among many students, to topics having to do with Israel — and a corresponding reluctance to act from administrators, who fear pushback from far-left students. 

“If you’re an administrator, and you care about your own personal well-being, and you want to keep Harvard out of the news or off social media, you basically try not to engage with these people in a way that will provoke them,” the professor said. “In the end this backfired on Harvard, because their failure to take care of Jewish students contributed to the accusations of institutional antisemitism, the lawsuit, the congressional investigation.”

Harvard announced the creation of an antisemitism task force in January, which immediately faced criticism due to comments made by its other co-chair, historian Derek Penslar, suggesting that antisemitism is not a major problem at Harvard. The body’s full membership has now been announced, but the scope and timeline of its work remains unclear. 

Interim Harvard President Alan Garber said in a Monday email that he expects the work of Harvard’s antisemitism task force to “take several months to complete,” but he asked the co-chairs “to send recommendations to the deans and me on a rolling basis.” It is not clear if the university will provide updates along the way; or if Harvard’s leadership will accept the task force’s recommendations.

At universities that already had antisemitism task forces prior to Oct. 7, those that achieved the most success generally have a budget to pursue actual work, a clear timeline for their work and strong buy-in from administrators, who must be willing to actually implement the groups’ recommendations, according to Miriam Elman, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which works to fight anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism at U.S. universities. 

It’s not yet clear if the newly created task forces — especially those at private universities, which don’t have the same obligation for transparency as public universities — will achieve the needed support from leaders.

“I think if the mandate is not clear, if there’s not enough resources, if the council doesn’t have committees and jobs, it’s just going to be window dressing,” said Elman. “It’s not going to be able to do the work that needs to be done.”

At Columbia University, Shai Davidai, an assistant professor in the business school, said he doesn’t have confidence that a newly created antisemitism task force can succeed unless the faculty on the committee changes to include more Zionist and Israeli voices. 

“At universities, if you want to make sure something doesn’t happen, you set up a task force,” Davidai continued. “The task force at Columbia has done absolutely nothing. They just talk.” 

At Stanford University, an antisemitism task force created in the wake of Oct. 7 has, like Harvard’s, been mired in conversations and controversy over its membership. Faculty co-chair Ari Kelman, an associate professor in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and Religious Studies, had a record of downplaying the threat of campus antisemitism along with recent alliances with anti-Israel groups. He resigned, citing the controversy, and was replaced with Larry Diamond, a pro-Israel professor in Stanford’s political science department. Under its new leadership, the committee also expanded its name and scope in January to include anti-Israel bias. 

Despite the updates, Kevin Feigelis, a doctoral student in the Stanford physics department, who on Thursday testified at a House Education Committee roundtable with Jewish students, said that “the task force has still accomplished nothing and it’s not clear that they have the power to accomplish anything.” 

In January, Feigelis worked with the campus antisemitism task force to plan an on-campus forum meant to combat antisemitism. The symposium was disrupted by a pro-Palestinian protest that included threats to Jewish attendees.

The task force “was instituted just to appease people,” Feigelis said. “Stanford is aware of exactly what is going on, and if they cared they would have done something over the last five months. The university places people on these committees in one of two ways: either it places people who they think are going to be most sympathetic to the university or they go straight to Hillel and ask them. These are both troubling.” 

Feigelis expressed belief that the task force could accomplish more if it consisted of lawyers and more Israeli faculty. 

“If [the administration cared] the committee would not be made of political scientists and a biologist… lawyers should be the ones staffing a committee that determines what constitutes antisemitism. Instead they picked people who have no idea what constitutes free speech or what the code of conduct actually is.” 

He continued, “The task force is currently holding listening sessions, but it’s just not clear what will come of that.” 

After Northwestern University announced in November that it would create an antisemitism task force, 163 faculty and staff members at the university wrote a letter to President Michael Schill saying they were “seriously dismayed and concerned” by the announcement, raising concerns that the task force’s work would challenge “rigorous, open debate.” Three of the signatories of that letter — including Jessica Winegar, a Middle Eastern studies professor and vocal proponent of boycotts of Israel — were then named to the task force, which will also focus on addressing Islamophobia. 

“If you really want to fix the problem, why conflate it with other issues that are going to prolong trying to find a solution to it?” Mike Teplitsky, a Northwestern alum and the president of the Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern, said of the task force’s attempt to also focus on Islamophobia and other forms of hate. “I would call it a bureaucratic distraction from trying to fix the problem.” 

Mark Rotenberg, Hillel International’s vice president for university initiatives and the group’s general counsel, argued that antisemitism has proven to be so severe as to warrant its own mechanisms. The inclusion of Islamophobia “and other hateful behavior” in the group’s mandate would be like if a campus Title IX office, focused on gender-based inequality, was also required to focus on racism.

“Antiracism may be a very important thing, but merging it with the problem of violence in frat houses is not going to signal the women on that campus that they are really taking that problem seriously,” said Rotenberg, who works with administrators at campuses across the U.S. on antisemitism-related issues. “That’s our point about antisemitism.”

Lily Cohen, a Northwestern senior who is a member of the task force, came face to face with antisemitism on campus a year before the Oct. 7 attacks. After writing an op-ed in the campus newspaper decrying antisemitism and speaking out about her support for Zionism, she was called a terrorist and faced an onslaught of hate — including a large banner that was printed with her article, covered by “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in red paint. 

“I think it comes from the top,” said Cohen, who noted that, after the op-ed incident, “no strong actions were taken to stand up for Jewish students or protect Jewish students, or even just express that that wasn’t OK. It fostered an environment where antisemitism is tolerated at Northwestern as long as it stays just subtle enough that you’re not saying Jews.”

Afterward, she met with university administrators to talk about what happened to her. “At the end of the day, listening is not enough,” she said. “I don’t think in any of the meetings I had with any administrators, that they actually referred to what happened to me as antisemitism. I think that that’s a huge problem here, is how easy it is to say, ‘We are not antisemitic, we’re just anti-Zionist,’ or ‘We don’t hate Jews, we just hate Zionists. We just hate Israel.’”

The group started meeting in January, and it was asked by the president to finish its work by June, which Cohen worries is not enough time, especially given its broad scope. Administrators at the school have not instilled much confidence in her in the past, but she is choosing to be hopeful.

“Being on the committee, I have to be optimistic that we’re going to do something and that the president will take our recommendations seriously, and will put them into action,” she said. “Because if not, what was it all for?”

Gabby Deutch is Jewish Insider’s senior national correspondent; Haley Cohen is eJewishPhilanthropy’s news reporter.

For two hours on Wednesday, lawmakers heard from a parade of Jewish students, each delivering the same message: They do not feel safe on their college campuses.

Speaking to a roundtable organized by the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, Jewish students from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, Rutgers, Stanford, Tulane, Cooper Union and University of California, Berkeley spoke about about the harassment, threats and violence they’ve faced on their campuses since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

The students’ accounts were all remarkably similar, despite coming from a range of locations and school types, including openly antisemitic taunts and harassment, angry mobs rampaging through campus and overtaking campus buildings, vandalism and in some cases threats of or actual incidents of violence, all going largely or completely unaddressed by university administrators and campus police, despite repeated and sustained pleas from the students for help and support. 

In some cases, the students said professors and administrators were complicit or actively involved in the antisemitic activity. Students said that they feared for their safety and even their lives.

The students, saying they felt abandoned by their universities and had no faith in them to act to protect them, pleaded for action from Congress. They said that they hoped their testimony could serve as a wakeup call to both Congress and the American public.

“As my friends from Harvard and UPenn can tell you, it doesn’t end simply because presidents are replaced. Systemic change is needed,” Kevin Feigelis, a Stanford student, said. “Universities have proven they have no intention of fixing themselves. It must be you, and it must be now.”

Shabbos Kestenbaum — a Harvard student who said he’d contacted the school’s antisemitism task force more than 40 times without a response and had been threatened in a video with a machete by a still-employed Harvard staff member — called Congress and the courts the students’ “last hope.”

Multiple students and lawmakers said that the current events on campus carry echoes of 1930s Germany or the pogroms in Russia.

Some suggested potential courses of action that Congress and other federal branches could take, including leveraging U.S. taxpayer funding or the schools’ tax-exempt statuses, placing third-party monitors on campus and enforcing diversity requirements in Middle East studies departments requiring them to include pro-Israel views.

Students from Harvard, Penn and MIT all said that little has changed on their campuses since last year’s blockbuster congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, which prompted the ouster of Harvard and Penn’s presidents.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the committee’s chair, vowed that she and her colleagues would not stop their efforts to tackle antisemitism on campus.

“I was very emotional,” Foxx told Jewish Insider, “I’m a mother and a grandmother. I have one grandchild who went to college and I’m not sure what I would have done if he had come home to say he felt threatened on his campus like these students feel threatened. No student on a college campus, in this country, in the year 2024, should feel threatened.”

Foxx said that the committee’s antisemitism investigation is proceeding deliberately, but that the schools will be held to account. The committee has already requested documents from Harvard, Penn and Columbia and has now subpoenaed Harvard. Foxx suggested that other schools whose students had appeared Thursday could be next.

“We’re going to find out where you live.”

“Zionist, Zionist, you can’t hide.”

“Go back to Brooklyn.”

“Our next generation will ensure Israel falls, and America too, the other terrorists.” 

Those were some of the antisemitic slogans hurled at Ari Arias and other Jewish students at Stanford University last Wednesday night outside an on-campus forum — meant to combat antisemitism. 

“We were trying to leave the event and the entrance and exit were both packed with them yelling that we can’t hide,” Arias, a premed student in his junior year, told Jewish Insider. “As we finally exited the venue, they continued following us… They started yelling super-threatening things at us, like, ‘We know your names, we know where you work and soon we’re going to find out where you live.’”    

The forum was organized by Kevin Feigelis, a doctoral student in the physics department. Speakers included the Stanford President Richard Saller, Provost Jenny Martinez and Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism. 

Dee Mostofi, a university spokesperson, told JI that the school is “aware of the protest that took place on Wednesday outside an event to discuss antisemitism attended by Stanford leadership.” It is not clear whether the protesters were university students.

“While we respect the right to peaceful protest, hateful language such as ‘Go back to Brooklyn,’ which is a personal attack based on identity and stereotypes, is beneath all of us, and it harms the ability to have the reasoned exchange of ideas and debate that is central to the university. Stanford remains focused on supporting civil discourse and the well-being of all members of our community,” Mostofi said. 

Asked whether the threatening statements violate Stanford’s speech policies and if punitive actions were taken, Mostofi did not respond. 

Feigelis said that the anti-Israel “mob” on campus Wednesday night is part of a larger pattern seen on Stanford’s campus since Oct. 7, where on any given day it’s common to see protesters “chanting for Israel’s intifada.” The group has also organized a sit-in, where students have camped out since October demanding that the university endorse a cease-fire in Gaza and commit to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, among other orders. Saller and Martinez met with students involved in the sit-in in December but have not commented on whether they plan to address the demands.  

The pro-Palestinian rallies are so common that David Schuller, an applied physics doctoral student, has set out to observe and document as many of them as possible — with an Israeli flag in tow. Most of the time he’s standing alone.   

“I actually interacted with the same group twice on Wednesday,” he told JI, explaining that while Wednesday night’s turnout outside of the antisemitism forum was notably large, the group also swarmed the outside of the engineering building that afternoon.   

Later that day, Schuller, wearing a kippah, can be seen surrounded by pro-Palestinians chanting “resistance is justified when people are occupied,” in a video that has since gone viral. “Rape is not resistance,” Schuller repeatedly responded in the video. 

“My intentions of going are to show them that we aren’t going anywhere… even though I’m a single person and they are at least 25 or 30 people,” he said, estimating that he’s been to 10 pro-Palestinian rallies since Oct. 7. None have turned physically violent, but sometimes threats are made if he doesn’t immediately leave, Schuller said.  

“I often offer to sit down and have a conversation, but they respond that they won’t talk to me. There’s no room for nuance when they are shouting genocidal slogans. I know that there is a silent majority that does think these protests are ridiculous, even though I go alone and am portrayed as an extremist… in reality I care more about the Palestinian people than a lot of these protesters do,” he continued. 

Arias, who describes himself as an active Jewish leader, said that he was afraid to walk around campus on Thursday. But he expressed the belief that “the president and provost have done a good job handling antisemitism relative to other schools.” 

He pointed to the school’s Dec. 8 statement that said “Stanford unequivocally condemns calls for the genocide of Jews or any peoples.” The statement came several days after the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT testified on Capitol Hill and refused to say that calls for genocide against Jews would violate university policy. “I don’t think what happened on Wednesday has to do with the administration,” Arias continued. 

Feigelis, meanwhile, called Stanford leadership’s words “empty.” 

“There’s been such a lack of clear communication between the administration and students since [Oct. 7],”  he said.

Amid rising tensions on college campuses since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war, it may come as no surprise that Stanford University’s newly formed Antisemitism Committee is already touching off a debate — before it has even held its first meeting. 

The controversy centers on the faculty co-chair of the committee, Ari Kelman, an associate professor in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and Religious Studies, and his record of downplaying the threat of campus antisemitism along with his recent alliances with anti-Israel groups. 

Kelman authored a 2017 paper on antisemitism he co-wrote with several other Stanford faculty members. The 36-page report, called “Safe on the Sidelines,” concluded that antisemitism isn’t a problem on college campuses because “different representations of campus culture come from the difficulties in defining what counts as political speech and what counts as antisemitism.” 

That conclusion, along with Kelman’s appointment and whether the committee will consider anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, “concerns a number of us,” a Jewish MBA student at Stanford who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter told JI.

Kelman also served on the academic board of Open Hillel, which has worked to overturn Hillel International’s guidelines that prevent partnering with anti-Zionist groups or individuals. The Open Hillel group has pushed for anti-Israel groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that advocates for the boycott of Israel and eradication of Zionism, to be included, even as these groups have been responsible for the growing hostility on campus against Jewish, pro-Israel students. 

Immediately after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, Jewish Voice for Peace released a statement declaring: “The Root of Violence Is Oppression,” laying the blame for the massacre on Israel.

Kelman said that he hasn’t been on the board of Open Hillel for over a decade. “I don’t recall doing anything as a board member, either,” he told JI. “I don’t think I ever attended a board meeting, even. Mostly my service was in the form of advice I gave to individual students,” he continued, noting that he also served on the board of Stanford Hillel from 2012-2015. “[On the Stanford Hillel board] I did attend meetings and participated in a strategic planning effort,” Kelman said. 

Asked whether he currently supports allowing JVP to be included in the Hillel umbrella, Kelman said, “I’m not in a position to say what Hillel ought to do.” 

The Jewish MBA student pointed to that lack of clarity as a reason for concern. “What we need is an advocate who is really aggressive in pursuing the kinds of actions and speech we see on campus, and many of us feel that very harsh anti-Zionist activities on campus are really just code for antisemitism and a chair that distinguishes between the two, we fear may not be the most aggressive watchdog over this,” the student said. He expressed further concern that the committee established “does not cover anti-Israel hate, only anti-Jewish hate,” a charge that Kelman denies. 

“That’s a double standard,” the student said. “Because at the same time Stanford created a committee to combat Muslim, Palestinian and Arab hate, it lumped in ethnicity, religion and state-based hate. In our case it’s only antisemitism. If someone says something targeted at Israelis, they are not protected.”

Another Jewish student, a senior studying computer science, also expressed concerns about the committee. “They’ve chosen people to lead this committee who believe anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism,” she said. “They don’t have to make this a democratic process, but I don’t feel the committee represents the Jewish community.” 

“They’re making this committee only to prevent from liability,” she continued. “If they actually wanted to help they would actually listen to the concerns of Jewish students. There is so much polarization on campus right now.” 

The student pointed to a rally she witnessed on campus attended by 300 people, where “someone called to take up arms to undo Zionism,” adding that some members of Stanford’s administration were at the rally, and that afterwards a “video was shared with the university many times and they never did anything about it.”

“It feels like every day, something new happens and the university does nothing, so it feels like a lost cause and it feels empty to allow a student to call to take up arms on campus and then make a task force,” she said. 

The MBA student argued that Kelman’s research deliberately excluded pro-Israel or Hillel-affiliated students, while focusing on those in favor of the BDS movement.

Kelman’s paper stated, “It is likely that those who are highly connected to Israel become a target of antisemitic or anti-Israel sentiment because they make their support for Israel known. It is also likely that those who are more connected to Israel are more sensitive to criticism of Israel, or more likely to perceive such criticism as antisemitic. Both dynamics are, perhaps, in play,” the paper continued. 

Kelman denied the claim that pro-Israel students were ignored, calling it “preposterous.” 

“Based on a paper published by the [Cohen Center at] Brandeis around the same time as ours, they found that students who were involved in AIPAC on campus were actually much more likely to report antisemitic acts on campus,” he said. 

“So we were trying to mitigate against that bias that had been established in previous research. We also didn’t interview first-year students because we wanted to exclude the noise of adjustment to college life. We also excluded late seniors because they’re checked out. We didn’t exclude students who go to Hillel, but we chose people who are not in Hillel leadership. We didn’t choose people who are on any kind of far extreme, we didn’t include student leaders of any kind.”

Regarding the newly formed Antisemitism Committee, Kelman said that “while there’s some flexibility in our range, our main focus [of the committee] is on antisemitism, in all of its forms, on our campus and in the larger Stanford community.”

“The student is quite wrong to presume that ‘something targeted at Israelis won’t be considered as antisemitism,’” Kelman continued. “The student’s presumption on this matter is simply and plainly incorrect.”

Kelman said that he realizes that the situation on campus regarding antisemitism has changed since 2017. “America has experienced a significant increase in antisemitism since then,” he told JI. “The goal of that paper was to understand from the position of Jewish undergraduates on college campuses in California how they were experiencing antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campuses. What we found was that they were not concerned for the most part.” 

But when it comes to determining what constitutes antisemitism, Kelman has argued in an amicus brief through the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism is “flawed and overly expansive” and “silences Palestinian voices.” The brief was filed in support of San Francisco State University in a case brought by Lawfare, in which SFSU later admitted to antisemitism. Kelman said he stands by criticism of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. 

“I still believe that it does [silence Palestinians],” he said. “I don’t think the IHRA definition is operationally appropriate in the context of the university.” 

Kelman said the current climate for Jewish students at Stanford is “tense.”

“There’s no monolithic climate,” he continued, noting that Stanford’s move to create two committees, one to combat antisemitism and one to combat Islamophobia, was “absolutely the right strategy.” 

“For our campus, I don’t think for a variety of reasons that the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office is equipped to deal with the level of concern and complexity of issues that have swamped our campus and other campuses in the last six weeks,” he continued. 

Jonathan Levav, a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, called the campus climate “difficult.”

“Students are feeling a range from very fearful to uncomfortable,” he told JI. “I’ve heard from many students, ‘I don’t feel comfortable identifying as Jewish or pro-Israel.’” 

Levav called the administration’s response “flaccid and reluctant.” “Basically what they’ve done is like if they said after George Floyd’s death ‘all lives matter.’” 

“Nothing has been proactive,” Levav continued. “Anything they have done has been the result of prodding.” According to Levav, a pro-Palestinian protest has been allowed to continue on campus even without getting a required permit “because of the optics,” he said. “They care more about optics than enforcing their own rules, and in the meantime they are sacrificing the well-being of Jewish students.” 

“It’s odd we have a situation where Israel is at the center and we have so many Israelis on the faculty but no Israeli faculty members on the committee. The decisions are curious,” he continued, comparing it to “having a committee on race without any Black people. Who would do that?” 

“[Stanford’s administration] is going to marginalize the issue of Israel and act as if anything anti-Israel is not antisemitism, which is false,” Levav continued.