The campus protests have been non-violent. There is no evidence that Jewish students are unsafe.
As a Jew, even as a non-observant Jew, I have been subject to antisemitic slurs and comments my entire life.
It hasn’t made me uncomfortable.
It has only served to make the fight for social justice even more personal.
The Big Lie is that Jews are not safe on Columbia’s campus or on other university campuses across the country that are witnessing non-violent protests against U.S. support for Israel’s war on Palestine.
Nowhere do I feel more comfortable than when I march with my Palestinian sisters and brothers in the streets of Chicago calling for a ceasefire and and end to funding Israel.
Yesterday Speaker of the House and Christian nationalist Mike Johnson appeared before news reporters (to the boos of Columbia students) and called for the National Guard to be brought on campus.
If that were to happen, no student, Jew, Gentile or neither, can feel or will be safe.
For me and those of my generation, even the suggestion of bringing soldiers on to campus brings back the memories of Kent State and Jackson State where students who were protesting (and those who were not) were gunned down.
The National Guard at Kent State were ordered to shoot.
When the shooting stopped Allison Krause 19, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 20, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, died on the scene, while William Knox Schroeder, 19, was pronounced dead at Robinson Memorial Hospital shortly afterward.
Three of the dead students were Jews.