Colleges cracked down on encampments. But antisemitism on campus hasn’t gone anywhere. |
We were used to a pretty steady stream of calls, texts, and emails reporting things like a swastika on a bathroom floor, a Jewish student being punched or a threat that the kosher dining hall would be shot up. As the person leading Hillel International’s Israel Action and Addressing Antisemitism program, my team and I had developed an unfortunate fluency in these incidents: what they meant, how to respond, and what came next.
Then, in the middle of April 2024, something shifted. Students and others staged an anti-Israel encampment in the middle of Columbia’s campus, and within days, my inbox looked like a fire alarm had gone off simultaneously across the country as more than 100 campuses followed. The tents multiplied. And what happened around them was not only standard protest: students chanting for the elimination of Israel, antisemitic tropes displayed openly on posters, Zionist students physically blocked from parts of their own campuses. For many Jewish students, the encampments felt like a message directed specifically at them: You don’t belong here. This moment confirmed just how isolated, vulnerable, and misunderstood they had become on way too many campuses.
Now that we have some distance from spring 2024, it is worth asking what we have learned since and whether we are prepared to be honest about the answers.
Some things have improved. Some campuses are less visibly chaotic. Some interventions have worked. But the encampments were never the whole story. They were one highly visible expression of a deeper problem — a problem that did not leave when the tents did.
Since the encampments, the most important thing we have learned is that antisemitism is adaptive. When one form becomes less acceptable or more constrained, another emerges. And what has emerged over the past two years is more diffuse, more........