Some Jewish students say they’ve been dropped by old roommates and sorority sisters and ostracized from campus clubs and teams because of their views — which are sometimes assumed.
Sophie Fisher, a sophomore at Barnard College in New York, said she was blocked by a friend and iced out by a sorority sister for supporting Israel. Credit…James Estrin/The New York TimesThis fall, a Barnard College sophomore named Sophie Fisher reached out to her freshman year roommate to catch up over coffee. Her old friend’s response was tepid, and Ms. Fisher wondered why. The two had been close enough that the roommate had come to the bar mitzvah of Ms. Fisher’s brother.
Several months later, the reason became clear.
Over Instagram, Ms. Fisher’s roommate wrote to her that they couldn’t be friends anymore because she had been posting in support of Israel since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. In other words, she was a Zionist. Ms. Fisher thought she had been careful to avoid inflammatory posts, but the roommate, Ms. Fisher said, accused her of racism.
Then she blocked Ms. Fisher.
Around the same time, Ms. Fisher noticed something else strange. Her “big” — a mentor in her sorority — had stopped talking to her. When they were in the same room, Ms. Fisher said, the big wouldn’t make eye contact with her. Ms. Fisher said that her big often posted about Students for Justice in Palestine, the campus group that Columbia had suspended in November for violating campus policies. Ms. Fisher remains in the sorority, but the two haven’t spoken in months.
“She was supposed to be my big sister,” she said.
This spring, college campuses became the main stage for the American protest movement against Israel’s seven-month-old war in Gaza. In April and May, dozens of pro-Palestinian encampments sprang up at universities around the country, as students called for institutional divestment from (and, at times, for the total dismantling of) Israel.
The protests have been characterized by heated rhetoric around the term “Zionist,” a word that typically refers to people who believe Jews have a right to a state in their ancestral homeland in present-day Israel (regardless of how they may feel about the war in Gaza). Many Palestinians and those who support them associate the word with mass displacement during the 1948 war triggered by the creation of Israel, as well as the killings over the past months of thousands of civilians and the decimation of Gaza.
Through chants, statements and sometimes physical obstruction, many protesters have made clear they don’t want to share space with people they consider Zionists — and indeed, that they find the ideology unacceptable. At the University of California, Los Angeles, pro-Palestinian students blocked peers who identified themselves as Zionists from parts of campus. Given that a large majority of American Jews say caring about Israel is an important part of their Jewish identity, these instances of exclusion have led to a debate over whether the encampments are de facto antisemitic. (Complicating matters, some of the most outspoken anti-Zionist protesters are Jewish.)
The Litmus Test
Some Jewish students on campus believe these dynamics amount to a kind of litmus test: If you support Palestine, you’re in. If you support the existence of or aren’t ready to denounce Israel, you’re out. And they say this is not limited to pro-Palestine protests. It is, instead, merely the most pointed form of a new social pressure that has started to drip down from the public square onto the fabric of everyday campus life, seeping into spaces that would seem to have little to do with Middle East politics: club sports, casual friendships, dance troupes.
Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, the incoming executive director of Harvard Hillel, said the more explicit litmus tests of the protests were “making visible and physical something that’s happening in a lot of places.”
This pressure, some students say, has forced them to choose between their belief in the right of the Jewish state to exist and full participation in campus social life. It is brought to bear not only on outwardly Zionist Jews, for whom the choice is in some sense already made, but to Jews on campus who may be ambivalent about Israel.
The mandate to take a stand on Israel-Gaza — and for it to be seen as the right one — is often implicit, these students say, and sometimes it is pressed on them by people who aren’t campus activists, but friends and mentors.
And ultimate Frisbee coaches. This month, a senior at Northwestern University walked into the office of the school’s Hillel executive director, Michael Simon, to tell him about a disturbing experience he’d just had.
Days before, the senior, a team captain who requested anonymity because he feared future professional consequences, had learned of a voluntary team meeting to discuss the war in Gaza. Beforehand, over a video call, the team’s coach, Penelope Wu, shared with the captains a presentation that she planned to share at the meeting.
It raised and dismissed several potential objections to the idea of a club Frisbee team holding a meeting about Mideast politics. Assertions like “Lake Effect is just a sports team” and “I’m not involved in this” were countered by the statements “Sports are political” and “Neutrality is inherently supportive of the oppressor.”
It also included an agenda item called “Judaism vs. Zionism,” featuring material from Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist Jewish activist group.
The student said he had voiced an objection to the material because he thought it presented a one-sided view of the war and Zionism. (The J.V.P. material was later replaced with several paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry for “Zionism.”)
After the meeting, he said, the coach spoke to him.
According to the student — who identifies as a liberal Zionist — Ms. Wu told him that she respected him as a Frisbee player, but that his pro-Israel attitude was wrong, and that it could be an obstacle in the future as he sought to make friends and get a job. (The fear of long-term professional consequences has also been a theme among pro-Palestine protesters since the beginning of the war. Shortly after Oct. 7, a conservative watchdog group called Accuracy in Media hired billboard trucks to publicly shame college students they accused of anti-Israel sentiment, mobilizations that were widely seen as an attempt to harm these students’ career prospects.)
In an email to The New York Times, Ms. Wu wrote that the student had “mischaracterized or misremembered certain things I said.”
The captain didn’t attend the meeting, instead writing a letter to his teammates describing his impression of the presentation.
“It will be a call for activism against Israel at all costs, and at least implicitly it will be a call for a dismantling, and/or annihilation, of the one Jewish state,” he wrote in the letter. (The student said a few of his teammates wrote him back, but most did not.)
Around the country, Jewish students found their identities questioned in a variety of previously welcoming communities.
At Rice University, a freshman named Michael Busch said he felt unwelcome at a campus L.G.B.T.Q. group, after he was heckled in an associated group chat for saying that he was in favor of a two-state solution and that he believed Israel accepted queer people more than other Middle Eastern countries.
“If that makes me a Zionist, I’m a Zionist,” he said. “That was the initial litmus test. From there, I found myself shut out of a lot of communities.”
Mr. Busch said that afterward, he was ostracized by the members of other campus affinity groups to which he belonged, including one for Middle Eastern students and one for Hispanic students.
At Barnard College, a senior named Batya Tropper said she was upset after her hip-hop dance team announced its intention to join a coalition of student groups pressuring Columbia University to divest from Israel. According to Ms. Tropper, who is Israeli American, team leaders rejected her attempt to discuss the decision.
Ms. Tropper, who had danced for the troupe for four years, said she was quietly removed from the team’s WhatsApp channel a few weeks after it officially signed on to the divestment group.
At Yale College, a Jewish junior said she was discouraged from joining a secret society she had been admitted to when members began to suspect she was a Zionist after she mentioned attending an event at the Slifka Center, Yale’s main hub for Jewish life. The student, who asked to remain anonymous because she feared social ramifications on campus, said she was not a Zionist, and thought that members of the society, Ceres Athena, had come to the conclusion that she was by misconstruing old social media posts related to Israel — though none reached out to ask her directly. (Members of Ceres Athena did not respond to emails from The Times.)
And at Columbia University, a senior named Dessa Gerger — who says she is often “put off” by peers who are quick to label anti-Zionism as antisemitism and feels that “the story about Jewish students feeling unsafe on campus is overplayed” — decided not to continue her participation in college radio after a member of the station’s board expressed ambivalence about the idea of a program that featured Israeli music.
“I didn’t do the radio show this semester because I don’t feel any kind of desire to be in a political organization,” Ms. Gerger said. “I want to be in a radio station.”
Of course, for pro-Palestinian activists who support a cultural and academic boycott of Israel, there can be no such thing as Israeli music without politics. According to its website, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement operates according to the principle of “anti-normalization,” which forbids joint events or projects between Arabs and Jewish Israelis who do not, among other things, recognize Palestinians’ right of return to the land they were forced from in 1948.
“For Palestinians and those in solidarity, the problem is Zionism and what it’s meant to Palestinians,” said Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Palestine-Israel program at the Arab Center in Washington. “That’s going to put people in the Jewish community who are dealing with these tensions in an uncomfortable situation. They’re going to be asked to pick between a commitment to justice and a commitment to Zionism.”
For Layla Saliba, a Palestinian American student at the Columbia School of Social Work, not wanting to be friends with Zionists on campus comes down to the way she said she had been treated by some on campus: with offensive chants like “terrorist go home,” and jeering when she has spoken out about family she has lost in Gaza.
“We’re not treated as human,” said Ms. Saliba, 24, who works for the Columbia divestiture coalition. “I don’t want to be friends with people who don’t view me as human, as somebody who is worthy of respect.”
Ms. Saliba added that the social cost of being vocally pro-Palestinian was also significant: Her activism is detailed in an entry on Canary Mission, a site that documents and denounces anti-Zionists on campuses around the country.
“If Zionists are complaining about losing a friend, that’s completely trivial compared to what the Palestinians are facing,” said Mike Miccioli, 25, a physics Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine there. He said he hoped that Zionism would become socially toxic on campus.
“I think anyone who subscribes to the Zionist ideology should be viewed as you would view one who proclaims to be a white supremacist,” he said.
Feeling the Squeeze From All Sides
At times, the pressure to choose is reinforced from above. At Northwestern, some instructors had asked students to attend campus protests, according to a recent email from Liz Trubey, the associate dean for undergraduate affairs at the school’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She admonished these instructors, saying, “this is an inappropriate use of authority.”
“The anti-normalization of Zionism that’s happening all over campus is an affront to the Jewish community,” said Brian Cohen, the executive director of Columbia Hillel. “It makes people in parts of campus not accept Jews. And it divides the Jewish community. Those who promote it know that’s what it does.”
But the pressure to choose a side isn’t only coming from pro-Palestinian activists.
For college-age Jews who strongly identify with Zionism, the loss of friends and extracurricular activities may be upsetting, but they have a natural community to turn to in campus organizations like Hillel and Chabad. For Jews with conflicted feelings about Israel, though, establishment Jewish groups may mirror the social pressure coming from anti-Zionists.
This month, a widely circulated letter signed by hundreds of Jews at Columbia pushed back against anti-Zionist Jews on campus, calling them tokens and questioning their Jewishness.
“Contrary to what many have tried to sell you — no, Judaism cannot be separated from Israel,” the letter read. “Zionism is, simply put, the manifestation of that belief.”
Aliza Abusch-Magder, a Columbia senior who participated in Jews for Ceasefire, said she was “uncomfortable” protesting alongside members of the encampment because of the chant “All Zionists off campus now.”
At the same time, she said she had found that “the Jewish community on campus, which I took pride in calling my own, is not interested or is struggling to accept Jews who are anything but very Zionist.”
Recently, Ms. Abusch-Magder confessed to a rabbi at Hillel that she felt the group was not a welcoming space for Jews who aren’t ardently pro-Israel. She said the rabbi, Yonah Hain, told her that Hillel wasn’t supposed to be a resource for Jewish students who don’t support Israel.
He called her and other ambivalent Jews “korban,” a Hebrew word that refers to a sacrifice to God among the ancient Hebrews.
(Hillel International’s “Israel Guidelines” reject partnerships with “organizations, groups or speakers” who “deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state”; support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions; or “delegitimize, demonize or apply a double standard to Israel.”)
Ms. Abusch-Magder said she believed Mr. Hain was implying that “we’re the people who don’t have a place on earth,” though she conceded that she might be misinterpreting his use of the word.
(In a text message, Mr. Hain declined to comment.)
After Mr. Hain and Ms. Abusch-Magder’s interaction, Hillel sponsored an event to encourage dialogue between Jews with different perspectives on Israel, which Ms. Abusch-Magder felt was little more than a fig leaf.
These black-or-white pressures — to remove anti-Zionists from some Jewish communities, and to remove Zionists from parts of campus life — seem likely to shrink a middle ground where people with fiercely differing beliefs can learn from one another. And that, according to some Jews caught in the middle, is a real loss.
“It’s harder and it takes more mental effort,” said Ms. Gerger, the Columbia senior. “But there aren’t deeper conversations going on.”
