I can still remember the thrill I felt at having the opportunity even to apply to Columbia University’s graduate school of education, Teachers College.
Me? Who moved around so much as a kid; who, as a result of that rootlessness, at times struggled in school; for whom English was the language spoken at home but not in school, nor socially.
Upon receiving my acceptance letter of admission, I was ecstatic.
For decades, the Teachers College library remained a home away from home of sorts for me.
For just about a decade I’ve lived pretty close to the Columbia campus. During the pandemic, before we were vaccinated and indoor socializing was verboten, I shared more than a few Shabbat meals with friends on the Columbia University campus.
Watching Columbia’s chaotic descent into madness has been simply appalling. As a proud alumna who values Teachers College, it has even felt on some level, personal.
Not long after Oct. 7, Prof. Shai Davidai bravely went public about the disturbing “protests” transpiring at Columbia that possibly placed Jewish students’s safety in jeopardy, and certainly placed their lives as students on campus in severe discomfort.
The response from Columbia was crickets.
The anti-Semitism toward Jewish students only kept mounting.
By this past February I myself witnessed how the situation was spinning out of control when I passed a long truck painted scarlet red with mirror images of Joe Biden and Adolf Hitler side by side, replete with provocative content written in black text. Red and black. The colors of Nazism and swastikas. It was somewhere in the neighborhood on Broadway St. In broad daylight. Maybe around 110th Street. It was on the way to Columbia, up at 116th.
The passivity from the Columbia administration toward this growing mob continued. Maybe a lurching response here or there.
This only enabled these terrorist- and Hamas-sympathizing “protesters” at Columbia to become more emboldened, more entrenched.
Now, with Columbia as one of the preeminent universities serving as a model of moral decrepitude tolerating this mob rule, it, like a virus or malignancy, spread across America to tens of university campuses, including UCLA, Northwestern and unfortunately many others, including Auraria in Denver.
At Columbia, these “protesters” have crossed over to seizing a university building.
Trespassing. Vandalizing. Violence.
It’s nothing short of the inception of a brand of domestic terrorism, now rampant and possibly thriving not only at Columbia but at tens of universities across America.
Sad to say, sometimes even with faculty members promoting it.
In many ways, the progressive media narrative about the Israel-Hamas war seems to be generating and fostering a particular embrace of this terrorism narrative.
Of course, freedom of speech and freedom to assemble are cornerstones of our American democracy.
The building that was seized at Columbia University is a building that carries a history of protest, rooted in anti-Vietnam protests.
Peaceful protests are legitimate and must be respected.
Many from the anti-Vietnam generation who were conscientious objectors lived with the consequences of their principled protest. They showed up unmasked. They stood behind what they believed in. Some served time in jail.
In contrast, today’s “protesters” — pro-Hamas disruptors and agitators — come across more as coddled elites who can’t even stand behind their own supposed principles, unmasked, and have crossed over to violence. In this they are similar in cowardly fashion to the Hamas terrorists whom they defend. Hamas terrorists come in mobs and packs of masked faces.
This mob rule and campus anti-Semitism must be purged.
Because if this lawlessness, this anarchy, this grotesque anti-Semitism — let’s be honest, there was no eruption of protests at Columbia or any other campus across America when Russia invaded Ukraine, or when China abused its Uighur population — if these universities continue to cave in to the pressures of these mobs, this may metastasize to all of America.
What starts on the university campuses won’t necessarily end there.
We are seeing with our very own eyes what America can potentially look like down the road, since today’s Gen Z college campus students are tomorrow’s leaders.
Sure, part of university life and youth is discovering who we are and what we truly believe in. The sense of invincibility and justice burns within like fire at that age. Personally, I remember causes I was burning for at that age. One example was my participation in an organization called Lights In Action. At age 20, I thought I was saving the world one night when, under the cover of dark at 2 a.m., I was part of an assembly line on the great steps of the James A. Farley New York Post Office on 8th Avenue, as we each caught one of the thousands of boxes we had helped assemble, filled with inspirational Jewish content being mailed by us to other Jewish university students across America.
Granted, there wasn’t a war raging. There hadn’t been a barbaric attack on Jews in Israel. Innocents across the region weren’t dying as a consequence of that brutal attack, as they are today. Yet, that time in our lives, that moment of fiery youth when you want to be part of making sure all is right and fair in the world, was very real to me.
As it was to the Vietnam War generation.
As it is to many today, Jews and non-Jews.
But a university should never be a breeding ground for promoting or appeasing hate, violence or anti-Semitism.
A university campus should be a place of intellectual growth, of broadening horizons, but, at an absolute minimum, it ought to be safe for all, safe for Jewish students.
What we are seeing is on a micro, university level. If this is not stopped, it is potentially the exact picture of what we will see on the macro, national level. Which is, giving Hamas what it wants. Appeasing terrorists.
Warning flags are there. If Jewish students don’t feel safe on American university campuses, what more evidence are we waiting for before doing something about it?
Studying at Columbia was a proud and primary place in my life.
I hope it will reverse course and once again be a place where Jewish students can feel safe and proud to have been a part of.
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