On campuses, a vast chasm over war in Gaza
Students describe an atmosphere filled with tension, fear — and little dialogue
Ariela Rosenzweig and Brooke Verschleiser are both undergraduates at Brown University, and both are Jewish. But their sharply divergent experiences at school this year underscore how the Israel-Hamas war has triggered one of the most vitriolic periods on college campuses since the Vietnam War.
A senior, Rosenzweig spent eight days this semester on a hunger strike with 18 other pro-Palestinian activists, going so long without food that her toes went numb and her muscles ached.
Meanwhile, Verschleiser, a junior, took down the Israeli flag that flew outside her off-campus apartment after her building received an anonymous note: “Those who stand for death will die by their own hand.”
Although the protests and vigils that erupted after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing Israeli war in Gaza are smaller now, an atmosphere of tension — and for some Jewish students, isolation — reigns, visits to a handful of New England campuses in recent days found. For some students, the war in the Middle East, and the fear and anger it has provoked on campus, has marked their college years indelibly.
“There’s no world where I look back on my college experience and don’t think about all of this and everything that’s happened,” Verschleiser said as she sat at a table in the campus Hillel Center. “There’s no separating it now.”
In interviews with more than 60 students, a picture emerges of two groups living in immediate proximity to each other but separated by a chasm of difference over Israel. ProPalestinian activists, who have been staging sit-ins, hunger strikes, and rallies across campuses, said they feel silenced by school administrators. Jewish students who support Israel — and who in some cases are also critical of its military campaign — said they are clearly in the minority on their campuses, and felt uncomfortable voicing their feelings among peers. Many on both sides described retreating into familiar social circles, with few, if any, bridges between them.
Malia Cole, a University of Massachusetts Amherst junior who was arrested at a pro-Palestinian sit-in in October, said activism has become such a central focus of her life that she doesn’t “feel the desire to be friends” with people who seem immovable in their opposing viewpoints.
“It’s a foundational difference,” Cole said.
Though the climate varies from campus to campus, in general the activism is more muted than it was during the Vietnam era, with fewer sit-ins and arrests, more posting on social media, and an undercurrent of nervousness about broaching the subject in uncertain company.
For the vast majority of students with no connection to the conflict, the war has faded into the background, while the normal rhythm of campus life goes on.
“I just have my schedule,” said Alec Lucken, a first-year Northeastern student. “I go to class, go to the gym.”
At UMass Amherst one afternoon in early February, few of the students making their way across the hilly campus were aware of the court proceedings that morning in Eastern Hampshire District Court, 12 miles away in Belchertown, where Cole and around a dozen other students appeared for pretrial hearings on trespassing charges.
They were among 56 students arrested during the proPalestinian sit-in after they occupied the Whitmore Administrative Building past its closing. Since the arrests, pro-Palestinian groups continue to meet regularly, host teach-ins, and hang posters with messages such as “UMass is complicit in genocide” across campus.
Senior Ruya Hazeyen, who was among those arrested, said she feels herself “burning out,” juggling a full schedule of classes and leading action on campus. But Hazeyen, who is of Palestinian descent, doesn’t trust that the school’s mental health services could provide culturally sensitive counseling. (A UMass spokesman said the university’s mental health staff is diverse and professional.)
Instead, Hazeyen said, “We’ve kind of been each other’s therapists,” checking in on one another at planning meetings and in group chats.
Like many pro-Palestinian activists, she feels a responsibility to persist.
“I have no right to burn out when people are being massmurdered every day,” Hazeyen said. “How dare I be tired?”
Pro-Israel students have likewise turned to one another for support. UMass Amherst’s Hillel Center has seen an “unprecedented level” of visitors, as Jewish students seek out a safe community this semester, executive director Rabbi Aaron Fine wrote in an email.
At Brown, sophomore Ben Marcus said his group chat with other pro-Israel students includes daily messages about instances of antisemitic or anti-Israel harassment.
He has experienced it himself, he said: Two days after the Oct. 7 attack, Marcus, the vice president of Brown Students for Israel, was walking to an early morning service at Brown’s Hillel center when another student tapped him on the shoulder and asked about his views on Israel.
Marcus momentarily considered sliding his yarmulke off his head, but decided against it, and agreed to walk and talk. Marcus thought the conversation was going fine — until, he said, the student asserted that the Oct. 7 attack was “the beginning of the end,” and a Jewish genocide was imminent.
Diverging views on Israel have created painful divisions within Brown’s Jewish community. At Hillel, the dynamic has “changed dramatically,” said first-year student Ma’ayan Stutman-Shaw, with an exodus of Jewish students who stopped attending Hillel services because of the center’s support for Israel.
Hillel has offered StutmanShaw community, support, and comfort. But her preferred religious service hasn’t been as available since a newly formed group, Jews for Ceasefire Now, began holding its own religious services. That’s made it difficult to assemble enough students to form a minyan, the minimum 10-person quorum required for performing important liturgical rituals, at Hillel’s egalitarian services.
Rosenzweig, one of five Jewish students who participated in the hunger strike in early February, is among those who attend separate services in participants’ homes.
“I will not step foot in Hillel as long as Hillel is an explicitly Zionist space,” Rosenzweig said, adding that, as a Jew, she feels supported by her fellow pro-Palestinian activists.
Brown’s Hillel chapter has said in a community email that its “support for Israel and Zionist students is unassailable.” But Verschleiser, president of Brown Students for Israel, said many people she knows are both Zionist and also “highly critical” of the Israeli government.
Mariam Hassan, of Northeastern Law School’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, said that despite her hopes, it would be “a little bit naive” to assume the organization’s work is changing people’s minds.
The undergraduate chapter of SJP set up an informational table in Northeastern’s student center recently; at one point six members spoke to one visitor, while dozens of students ambled by without stopping.
“The reality is you see the same faces at the protests, you see the same faces at the different teach-ins,” Hassan said. The first-year law student said she has heard from others, outside SJP, that they feel the conflict is “a world away.”
And it’s hard to talk about it. At Brown, as pro-Palestinian students rallied on the steps of the Campus Center on Feb. 7, Matthew Fulop, a junior passing by, said he’s noticed trepidation among students who aren’t involved in activism about discussing Israel.
“That dialogue can sometimes lead to fear, when people are so passionate about a certain side they’re taking,” Fulop said.
Even some scholars are hesitant to speak on the issue “because they’re afraid of being labeled — either by the right or by the left,” said Omer Bartov, a Brown professor of Holocaust and genocide studies. “So they don’t.”
“The silence of people in the center actually causes polarization,” Bartov said, adding that people often treat Israeli studies and Palestinian studies as “two different planets,” but they need to be studied together, “in a critical and open way.”
For example, Bartov teaches a course called “Israel-Palestine: Lands and People.” Enrollment has doubled this semester, he said.
But not all students and professors feel so open. At Wellesley College, senior Maryam Ahmad, the editor-in-chief of the Wellesley News, whose editorial board has called for “the liberation of Palestine,” said she hears little discussion about the war in her classes, even though she’s majoring in political science — a “disorienting” contrast to her conversations and social media feeds.
“It doesn’t feel like there’s a single safe space,” Ahmad said. “Unless it is with people who you know are on the same spectrum of ideology.”