Two weeks ago, the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine publicized an email leaked by an anonymous student at the university’s social work school. In the email, a professor, who was also not named in the screenshot, raised the issue of a Palestinian flag emoji that the student had placed next to her name during Zoom meetings.

“On an unrelated matter,” the professor wrote, “it has recently been brought to my attention that geopolitical emojis” — the Palestinian flag — “used at the end of name info has caused trauma reactions, making it difficult for some to remain present and not dissociate during class session.”

LEAKED EMAIL EXCHANGE:
Columbia University Professor asks CSSW student to remove Palestine Flag from their zoom name online because it has “caused trauma reactions”.
“Geopolitical emojis” is referring to the Palestinian flag. pic.twitter.com/SQVyB6E4rU

The professor asked for the student’s “continued partnership in ensuring our class space remains a safe one for all.” In an excruciatingly polite response, the student asked for permission to discuss the issue collectively, with the class.

It’s the stuff of far-right parody: an absurd example of “woke” culture. An Ivy League professor, invoking the language of “trauma response” and safety, in an email that refers to class members as “folx,” suggesting the removal of an emoji.

Yet the professor’s email speaks to a broader problem of student safety being flattened into a question of whether students feel safe. And these aren’t the reactionary tropes of left-wing “snowflakes”: “Safety” is being invoked by pro-Israel students, many conservative and center-right, who believe that protests targeting the nation state constitute inherent attacks on them as Jews.

The same dynamic played out in the fall at the same university. Last November, Columbia banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, as The Intercept reported, because an “unauthorized event” put on by the groups “included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” When challenged to name the threat, Columbia Senior Executive Vice President Gerald Rosberg said only, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the student groups, that “accusations that Israel was ‘a racist state committing genocide’ and ‘is an apartheid state’ could upset some people and ‘seem … like an incitement of violence.’”

New York City’s Upper West Side isn’t the only setting for such thin complaints. A staggeringly imbalanced feature in The Atlantic this week, written by Stanford sophomore Theo Baker, offered up a supposedly neutral narrative that treats the “conflict” on his college campus as a battle between imperiled Jewish students and unreasoned pro-Palestine zealots.

Right-wing GOP culture warriors and conservative Zionist groups are using similar claims about campus incidents nationwide. “Safety” is the latest weapon in the culture war, being deployed now to deal a blow to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, known as DEI, and to silence criticism of Israel.

The result has brought us to our intolerable status quo, with students and faculty risking grave consequences for protesting a war in which Israeli forces have slaughtered over 31,000 people. Israel’s U.S.-backed assault has razed to rubble every single university in Gaza, but the concern as relates to intellectual life in this country focuses instead on the inoculation of Israel’s young supporters from bad feeling.

“People are taking their feelings of being uncomfortable with information as the same as physically being unsafe,” said Layla, a Palestinian American graduate student at Columbia’s School of Social Work, who asked to withhold her last name for fear of harassment. “As a Palestinian student, I’ve lost family in Gaza. Frankly, I get uncomfortable when Zionist students are chanting ‘no ceasefire’ on campus. That makes me feel uncomfortable. That makes me feel unsafe. But I know that it is not a physical threat to my safety. That is free speech.”

Feeling Safe vs. Being Safe

The need to distinguish between feeling safe and being safe is both urgent and undeniably fraught.........

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