Tessa Veksler vividly remembers the wave of pain and panic she felt sweeping over her when she walked into a room at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in April 2024. She was about to face a recall vote as student government body president. Her ostensible infraction: mourning, on social media, the victims of the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre and defending Israel’s right to exist.
Veksler recalls noticing “how many people showed up because they were passionate about removing me from office.” The 23-year-old also remembers seeing some empty chairs on the side of the room where her supporters had gathered.
Over several hours, she listened to accusations, insults and verbal abuse. When she gave her statement, students shouted, laughed and smirked. She didn’t waver, but there was fear in the back of her mind, she says, recalling thinking, “What if this motion passes? What if I get removed from office? Is this going to be my legacy on campus?”
The recall vote failed narrowly, and Veksler finished her term as president, all the while setting her sights on the future.
“I didn’t want to just survive this. I wanted to thrive,” she says.
She now lives in New York and works for a PR firm while traveling the country as a sought-after public speaker on antisemitism and anti-Zionism. She’s also one of the main interviewees in “October 8,” a documentary about the explosion of antisemitism on college campuses, social media and the streets of America immediately following the Hamas atrocities in southern Israel, in which some 1,200 people were brutally slaughtered and 251 abducted and taken to the Gaza Strip.
Veksler’s journey exemplifies what many Jewish students in the United States have undergone after October 7 and shows how this experience has created a new generation of Jewish leaders, says Jonathan Falk, vice president of the Israel Action and Addressing Antisemitism Program at Hillel International, the largest Jewish student organization in the world.
Veksler’s story began receiving publicity a year ago when anti-Israel protests at US universities reached a boiling point.
Across the country, tens of thousands of students at more than 140 universities disrupted classes, vandalized property and intimidated Jewish students. Once the protests died down, several universities launched internal investigations; there were congressional hearings and resignations. Veksler’s former school, the University of California, Santa Barbara, faces several investigations over allegations of discrimination and civil rights violations against Jewish students and staff.
The fallout continues, with the Trump administration threatening to pull billions in federal funding from Ivy League universities such as Columbia, Brown, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania. In part, the administration accuses the schools of failing to uphold an environment of free learning and failing to protect the safety of all — including Jewish — students. The administration also cracked down on leaders of the student riots, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested several foreign students set to be deported.
Columbia, faced with $400 million in cuts, quickly acceded to the administration’s demands, which included restricting mask-wearing on campus, equipping campus police with more powers to arrest students, incorporating a definition of antisemitism into formal university policy, and appointing a senior provost to oversee programs in the departments for Middle East, South Asian and African studies.
Shortly before the Trump administration took office, Columbia hired Avi Shilon, a progressive Israeli historian from Tel Hai Academic College near Kiryat Shmona, as a guest lecturer — a preemptive move to broaden its curriculum. He, too, became a target of hate. In January, masked protesters stormed his class on the history of Israel.
“They shouted out ‘genocide’ and yelled at ‘the Zionist teaching about Zionism,’” he says.
Shilon invited the protesters to join the class, addressing them in Arabic — which they did not understand.
The protests were an unpleasant experience, Shilon says, “but not really frightening” given that he’s from a country where war, missile attacks and sirens have been part of everyday life.
“Yet for American Jews, it was very disturbing and disruptive,” he says.
Many, especially younger Jewish Americans, felt for the first time that they are a minority, Shilon says.
This time, it’s personal
Veksler started reflecting on her Jewish identity early in life. As a child, she went to weekly Hebrew school classes in Contra Costa County, near San Francisco, and later traveled to Israel. Her family had left their home in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1990 and immigrated to the US. Like most Jewish emigres who had fled the former Soviet Union, Veksler’s parents were deeply secular and skeptical of their daughter’s search for cultural and spiritual identity.
Veksler decided to study political science and communications at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she successfully ran for student body president.
“I really integrated myself into the general student population, not just my Jewish community,” she says. “I wanted to be a Jewish leader in a non-Jewish space.”
Veksler wasn’t naïve, and she had long observed the growing antisemitism in the US. Yet, she felt a series of shockwaves in the aftermath of October 7.
First, there was the shock over the attack by Hamas — the killings, the chaos, the hostages.
Then came the shock over how quickly the narrative shifted and the roles of victims and perpetrators were reversed in the public eye. Jewish people around the world “didn’t even get 24 hours of compassion before there were people gathering in the streets, protesting Israel, the country that was just attacked,” Veksler says.
Then came a barrage of personal threats, harassment and hate on social media, flyers, signs and graffiti. Fellow students called her a Zionist, a racist and a supporter of genocide. “You can run but you can’t hide, Tessa Veksler,” one flyer read. “Zionists not allowed,” someone wrote on a piece of paper and — probably unaware of the inherent irony — pinned it outside the university’s “Multicultural Center,” where the student government office was located.
But it wasn’t just anonymous enemies. People she had known for years abruptly turned on her. For a while, she was hoping the university administration would support her, but she soon realized that wasn’t going to happen.
Finally, there was the recall attempt.
Veksler felt crushed by “the feeling that thousands of people had such a deep hatred for me, a hatred I couldn’t fix.” She couldn’t eat, slept poorly, and isolated herself even from friends and family. There were moments when she considered resigning from her position — and quickly dismissed the idea.
“I wasn’t going to give up my identity,” she says.
The personal nature of antisemitic attacks that spiked after October 7 was an experience shared by many Jewish students, says Hillel International’s Falk.
“It’s one thing to see a swastika painted on a sidewalk, which is horrible,” he says. “But it’s another thing to see a swastika scribbled on your own dorm room door, or a mezuzah being ripped off.“
Veksler credits her faith with helping her push through the tough times. She identifies with the Modern Orthodox community, even though she says she doesn’t like boxes. She keeps kosher and observes Shabbat. During the campus protests, she says she found a sense of belonging and safety in her Jewish community.
Hashtag resilience
Veksler made another pivotal decision. After the first wave of verbal attacks, she sought a wider public and started posting on social media photos and videos of the hate she received, using the hashtag #werenotgoinganywhere.
“I wanted to turn this experience into something that is now a large part of my life and my career,” she says.
With all the fallout from the antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment after October 7 for Jewish American students and Jewish Americans in general, historian Shilon says there’s also a positive aspect: “I think that the cliché of Am Yisrael Chai hasn’t been alive for a very long time the way it is today,” he says.
By living through the attacks, “a lot of Jewish students have found their voice,” agrees Falk.
Student engagement in Hillel’s activities saw a big surge in the fall of 2024 — an increase of 28 percent around the US, according to an internal survey.
“The number of students who have stepped forward and entered leadership positions in Jewish organizations is significant,” Falk says.
Veksler’s activism put her on the radar of Hiltzik Strategies, a high-profile PR and strategic communications firm in New York, where she was offered a job after graduating last summer. She also speaks around the country, helping promote “October 8,” which became the number one documentary in US movie theaters after its release in March.
Veksler hopes the film will continue to grow its impact “beyond the Jewish echo chamber, because it needs to be seen urgently by everybody in the country and around the world.”
She’s also made prominent friends, including Jewish American actress Debra Messing and comedian Michael Rapaport. And she’s running for the World Zionist Congress, which will convene in Jerusalem in October.
Veksler says she supports the Trump administration’s decision to cut funding for universities that were unable or unwilling to protect the safety of Jewish students. She also thinks the crackdown on students who engaged in antisemitic and anti-Zionist protests is justified. With the privilege of attending an American university comes a code of conduct, she says, and if someone violates that code — whether it’s for cheating or inciting violence — that privilege can be revoked.
She disagrees with those who are critical of the measures and have voiced concern over violations of free speech, which is protected by the US Constitution, and due process.
“This is not an issue of free speech,” she says. “This is an issue of conduct. It’s about supporting terrorist organizations.”
Sometimes, dark memories of her last year in Santa Barbara come back to haunt her — the hate, the harassment and the humiliation — but she also remembers her fight and victory.
“My life is very different now from what I had imagined,” Veksler says with a thin smile. “But it opened up a lot of opportunities for me to advocate for the issues I care about — on a much larger scale.”
The Times of Israel Community.
