In DC, Jewish students tell House committee: ‘It’s open season on Jews on our campus’
Months after the Education and Workforce Committee hearing that contributed to the resignation of top school presidents, Jewish students say the hatred continues unchecked
Reporter at The Times of Israel
NEW YORK — The House of Representatives’ Education and the Workforce Committee held a bipartisan roundtable Thursday with Jewish students from nine American universities to hear testimony about their experiences with antisemitism on campus.
Testimony given before the Education and Workforce Committee’s last hearing in December led to the resignations of Harvard University president Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill.
“These students are dealing with antisemitism at their respective universities on a daily basis. Their courage to speak out and share their stories will give the American people a new look at what is truly happening on college campuses around the country,” Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said before the roundtable in a statement. “This roundtable will help inform the committee’s next steps in the antisemitism investigation as it continues to hold postsecondary education accountable for rampant antisemitism.”
The students, some wearing “Bring Them Home” dog tags in honor of the 134 hostages held by the Hamas terror group since October 7, testified to the members of Congress about their experiences as Jewish students at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tulane University, Rutgers University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Cooper Union, Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Each student painted a picture of a campus rife with harassment, prejudicial treatment and acts of violence against Jews, and each one said their respective schools did not consistently enforce school codes of conduct or local laws against perpetrators of antisemitism.
Speaking of the climate at Harvard University, Harvard Divinity graduate student Shabbos Kestenbaum testified that Harvard’s actions toward Jews showed unimaginable “disdain for and contempt of a minority group.”
Noah Rubin, an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, said that despite Magill’s resignation 86 days prior, antisemitism has continued and in fact been “emboldened” at the Philadelphia campus, and his efforts to speak to administrators to counter threats against the Jewish community have been met with “nothing more than meaningless words and empty promises.”
Describing incidents of doxxing of Jewish students (in which their personal contact information is made public), marches through campus with participants yelling “We won’t stop at a ceasefire,” and antisemitic cartoons drawn by a University of Pennsylvania professor, Rubin said, “It’s open season on Jews on our campus.”
Other student speakers described campus protests with genocidal language, anti-Israel demonstrators’ takeovers of campus buildings with the implicit and sometimes explicit approval of administration, threatening words and campus climates where complaints to authorities designated to address such concerns fell on deaf ears.
Some students — first- and second-generation Americans who had fled from persecution — remarked on the irony of their current situation.
“I didn’t come to college to study in a living laboratory of antisemitism, which is what it has become,” Joe Gindi, a Jewish student at Rutgers University whose family was from Aleppo, Syria, said. “Jews at Rutgers are afraid.”
Kevin Feigelis, a postgraduate at Stanford University, called his school “a university that has openly changed its policies to placate a mob,” noting that vociferous and hateful demonstrators were allowed free rein against Jews on his campus.
“Please step in and help us — please hold our universities accountable,” Feigelis said, noting, in a nod to Claudine Gay and Liz Magill, that antisemitism “doesn’t end simply because the presidents are replaced. Systemic change is needed.”
Members of the committee applauded the bravery of the students in coming forward to testify. Many asked students for more specific granular details of their experiences at school, ranging from whether they had changed their behavior as Jews to stay on campus to what had happened when they sought support and redress from school administrative bodies.
Many students said that they found appeals to their campuses’ diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices — offices designed to redress any manifestations of hate on campus — had fallen on particularly deaf ears.
At Tulane University, undergraduate Yasmeen Ohebsion said, DEI asked students confronting antisemitism to write up detailed reports of their experiences. Ohebsion said they then did not respond to her for six weeks.
“To call DEI useless would be an understatement,” Kestenbaum said.
Congresswoman Kathy Manning of North Carolina told the students, “Not one of you went to college to be a warrior for the Jewish people and yet, here you are today, putting yourselves at risk by speaking out, condemning antisemitism and telling the world what is going on at campuses across this country. We are taking this issue very seriously.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik called antisemitism “a rot that goes deep” in American higher education, and said the antisemitic incidents recounted by the students were “atrocious.”
Stefanik turned to the cameras to speak directly to university administrators to say, “This Congress will not stop until we hold you accountable. That’s a promise.”
Members of Congress in their questions to the students concurred, expressing their hope that the hearing would shed more light on antisemitism being experienced by students on American college campuses and lead to ways to address it and end it.
In interviews with The Times of Israel, some of the students characterized themselves as cautiously hopeful about the potential impact of their testimony.
“I definitely feel more optimistic,” Kestenbaum said after the hearing, noting the “genuine concern” of the members of Congress as they heard the students’ testimony.
“Stefanik and [Democratic Congressman Ritchie] Torres could not be further apart ideologically, but I saw the way they reacted to our testimony, and the questions they asked were practical: ‘What can we do to help?’ I’m absolutely comforted that it’s a bipartisan group committed to stamping out institutionalized antisemitism.”
“But it’s such a damning indictment — not just of Harvard University, but the state of American higher education, that to receive protection we have to fly to DC and testify,” Kestenbaum added. “This should be the university’s job — and on paper, it is the university’s job.”
Eden Yadegar, a Columbia undergraduate whose testimony included referencing the tenured Columbia professor Joseph Massad who called the October 7 Hamas-led massacre that killed 1,200 people in southern Israel “awesome” and “astounding,” said she felt hopeful in the wake of the students’ testimony.
“I feel hopeful that Congress will listen to our pleas and understand what it feels like to be a Jewish American college student in 2024,” Yadegar said. “And I’m hopeful that the American people will really listen and leave their preconceived notions about us and our identity at the door, and listen to what our lived experiences have been.”
