Something I never thought I would say is that October 7th pushed me to see some of the worst parts of the Jewish community.
This wasn’t my immediate reaction to the events unfolding in Israel and subsequently on campus. Immediately, I sank to the ground and cried. Immediately, I texted my friends and family in Israel to make sure they were okay. Immediately, I hyperventilated.
Though it felt like October 7th had somehow caused the earth to stop spinning, the opposite was true: The world, and especially college campus activism, erupted.
Columbia was no exception. Although dormant literally until October 6th, Students for Justice in Palestine jumped on the opportunity for an impending counter-offensive from the IDF following Hamas’s October 7th attack, and keffiyehs began popping up all around campus. It didn’t take long for campus to devolve into the hotbed of antisemitism that my community had always warned me about but that I had never really seen come to fruition.
On October 12th, just five days after the attack, my friends and I stood silently with Israeli flags on our backs while hundreds of Free Palestine protesters chanted “from the river to the sea” in the middle of Columbia’s campus. While graves were still warm and corpses were still being identified in Israel, college students in New York City demanded liberation from the very nation that was still recovering from the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
My experience on campus only worsened as the year progressed. My column for the Columbia Daily Spectator was canceled after just one article because lies were spread about me on social media. I was bullied relentlessly online, and absolute strangers gave me dirty looks on campus because they recognized my face.
Yet, at a moment when humanity revealed the worst parts of itself, the Jewish community was no exception. Despite touting our status as an or l’goyim (a model for the world), the Jewish community behaved just like everyone else around us. We jumped to conclusions about what the “other side” was thinking, we spoke about the strangers in our midst with a negative tone of voice, and we closed ourselves off from thinking critically about anything that might threaten our sense of unity. Friends of mine openly made fun of people wearing keffiyehs, yelled profanities at people who gave us dirty looks, and questioned the status of Jews who found themselves more on the left.
It became increasingly difficult for me to have honest conversations about the state of the war within the religious Jewish community. Suddenly, words like “ceasefire” became absolutely taboo, and an entirely mocking tone characterized conversations about more left-wing Jews in the community. The notion of segulat yisrael (that we are the chosen nation)—which I had always understood to mean that the Jewish people had a unique responsibility to uphold God’s word—had morphed into a toxic sense of superiority that excused us from responsibility for our actions.
October 7th only further reinforced my belief in the need for a Jewish state. It strengthened my desire to make aliyah and further embedded my sense of self as part of the Jewish collective. But our response to October 7th also revealed the darker aspect of my proud Jewish nationalism: that in acting just like other nations, we don’t always live up to our end of the covenant.
The fate of the Jewish people rests on our ability to defend ourselves physically and to defend ourselves spiritually. Each and every one of us is a soldier of God; some of us make the biggest sacrifice of all and fight physically, and the rest of us make small decisions every day to represent God appropriately in this world. As such, it’s incumbent upon us to constantly ask: Am I acting in a way that brings about an or l’goyim? Am I acting in a way that truly takes on the responsibility of being chosen by Hashem?
Our communal responsibility is also expressed in the maxim kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh (all Israel are responsible for each other). Areivut is a legal doctrine that urges us to value collective responsibility. Jewish communities across the globe have taken that value and implemented it in their own ways. For example, in my own college Jewish community, we went out of our way to make sure there was a minyan every single day for three times a day so that my friend could say kaddish for his brother who had passed away. The idea of communal responsibility behind the concept of areivut means that there exists a certain standard by which Jews ought to conduct themselves.
I’ve always known that I was part of something larger than myself by being born a Jew, but I never understood the extent of this until this year when I learned that my words and my actions on campus had consequences for every other Jew in school with me. When one Jew said something racist, it was interpreted by the broader student body that all Jews were racist. When one Jew refused to think critically about the war, it was interpreted that all Jews were close-minded. We didn’t choose it, but to the outside world, each Jew represents every Jew. Thus, when one pro-Israel Jewish student on campus acts out of turn, she doesn’t just hurt her own neshama, but she violates the responsibility of kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh by staining the reputation of all Jews on campus.
Columbia Jewish students have come to understand areivut not just as a halakhic concept, but as an integral component of the Jewish experience on campus. When our Hillel executive director and campus rabbi were bullied by Columbia administrators by text messages, we experienced the attack as if we ourselves had been targeted. When one of our student leaders was cyberbullied by an anonymous antisemitic Instagram account, we each experienced her pain as if it were our own. Being Jewish, as we’ve had to understand it quite intimately, is an intertwined, communal experience.
If you ask most Jews on campus how they’re feeling about this upcoming academic year, I’m sure they would agree: Things aren’t looking so bright. The protesters who erected the encampments and broke into Hamilton Hall were cleared of any real consequences both by the university and by the Manhattan DA’s office, and those in the Columbia administration have essentially demonstrated that rules need not be enforced—or, at least, rules need not be enforced when it comes to harassing Jews.
But we haven’t let that keep us down, and despite everything we’ve endured, the Columbia Jewish community has demonstrated our resilience time and again. From our open letter that garnered over 700 signatures of Jewish students on campus who stood proudly by their Zionism to the simple fact that we continued to attend our university despite all that happened this past academic year, we hope it’s obvious that the Jewish community at Columbia isn’t backing down.
In the heat of the moment, it’s easy to forget who we are. It’s easy to sink to the level of those around us and forget that, at our core, we are the People of the Book and the children of God. What matters to me most is that even while fighting antisemitism, we fight to maintain the religious integrity of our community as well. When we protect ourselves as Jews, we shouldn’t forget that spiritual health is just as important as the physical.