If Jews do not feel safe on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City, in the United States of America, where can they feel safe?
NYC is home to some 1.3 million Jews, the most outside of Israel. Jewish men and women have thrived in The Big Apple for hundreds of years, enjoying religious freedom, prosperity, political power, and the affection and goodwill of millions of their gentile neighbors, colleagues, and loved ones.
Jewish culture is NYC culture. New Yorkers of all stripes schlep packages to the Post Office, kvetch when things go awry, and mock their friends when they act like putzes. Those of us who call NYC home need not be Jewish to speak and act this way. We live in New York. We pick it up.
However, things lately have been far from dancing the Horah.
Protests began after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre against Israel. The Iranian-sponsored terrorist group butchered some 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 240 hostages from Israel, America, and other nations. These demonstrations have devolved from opposition to Israel’s self-defense against these killers from the Gaza Strip, into support for Hamas, and now open hatred of Jews, per se.
At Columbia University, many pro-Hamas protesters are dressed in the black and white keffiyeh headdresses that are the Brownshirts of the Palestinazis. In recent days, they have waved Hamas flags, yelled Hamas slogans, and intimidated, threatened, and assaulted Jewish students, particularly those who wear yarmulkes and otherwise visually identify themselves as Jews.
Israeli and U.S. flags have been set ablaze.
“We are Hamas!” one protester yelled, just outside the campus gates, while banging a pot against a police barricade.
“You guys are all inbred,” one protester screamed at sophomore Jonathan Lederer and some 20 Jewish students singing songs of peace on campus Saturday, just before the pro-Hamas faction threw water in their faces and hurled projectiles at Lederer’s head and chest.
The anti-Semites also chanted: “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.” Also: “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.”
“Go back to Poland!” another pro-Hamas thug screamed at a Jewish student. “We all know how things turned out the last time the Jews were in Poland,” he said on Fox & Friends yesterday morning.
“The environment at Columbia University is absolutely dreadful,” graduate student Xavier Westergaard said Monday on America Reports. Campus police may not do anything “when presented with issues ranging from ‘I’ve just been spat on,’ ‘I’ve just been yelled at,’ ‘I’ve just been kicked.’ People are yelling, ‘Jewish students die,’ ‘Jews go back to Poland.’ This is insane. It feels like anarchy, and we are not being supported by our university.”
Even more ominous, the yarmulke-wearing Westergaard recalls walking across campus to his laboratory just days ago. “Students who were partaking in this protest called me out by name. I don’t know how the hell they know who I am. They shouted out my ID number. They told me that they knew I was a PhD. student in neuroscience and biology. It was very, very scary. I wasn’t carrying an Israeli flag. I wasn’t antagonizing them. I was just going about my business.”
“Earlier today, Columbia University refused to let me onto campus,” business school assistant professor Shai Davidai complained Monday via X. “Why? Because they cannot protect my safety as a Jewish professor. This is 1938.”
“This is happening at every U.S. university,” Davidai said Monday, just outside Columbia’s gates. The school deactivated his ID card, thus barring him from the premises. He added: “Jews are not safe anywhere on college campuses!”
Columbia has moved classes to Zoom University, as too many schools did during COVID-19. This time, university administrators say, the goal is “to de-escalate the rancor” and trigger “a reset.”
In a shocking turn, Columbia Rabbi Elie Buechler on Sunday urged Jews on campus to get out of Dodge. Via a WhatsApp message to some 300 mainly orthodox students, Buechler wrote that current events “have made it clear that Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety.” He continued: “It deeply pains me to say that I would strongly recommend you return home as soon as possible and remain home until the reality in and around campus has dramatically improved.”
All of this was too much for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. The multi-billionaire announced Monday that he is withdrawing his financial support for this Ivy League campus.
“It was through the full academic scholarship Columbia gave me that I was able to attend college and get my start in life, and for that I have been tremendously grateful,” Kraft said. “However, the school I love so much — the one that welcomed me and provided me with so much opportunity — is no longer an institution I recognize.”
In happier times, since 2000, Kraft donated at least $18 million to Columbia. According to the New York Post, this included funds to launch the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life. Kraft joins wealthy alumnus Leon Cooperman, whose checkbook now is closed to Columbia.
Things are grim at Yale, too, as sophomore Sahar Tartak recently detailed. “Pierson’s head of college told me in October that Yale’s 14 heads of college were all instructed not to advertise a Shabbat dinner mourning the lives of those lost on October 7,” she wrote in the Free Press.
Far worse, on Saturday, Hamas sympathizers locked their arms together, walled off, and followed around campus Tartak and one of her openly Jewish friends.
“They pointed their middle fingers at me and yelled, ‘Free Palestine,’ and the taunting continued until a six-foot-something male protester holding a Palestinian flag waved the flag in my face and then stabbed me with it in my left eye,” Tartak wrote.
“When I tried to go after him, the human blockade of protest organizers continued to stand in front of me, to keep me from catching my assailant,” Tartak told America’s Newsroom. “I was checked out by an ambulance EMT, who recommended I go to the hospital,” which she did. Tartak appears to be on the mend, although she suffered headaches on Sunday.
Tartak recognized several classmates in telecasts about the pro-Palestinian anti-Semites. She said: “It’s really painful to realize that your peers have joined the Nazi Party.”
Meanwhile, discouraging news also emerged from London at the weekend. Gideon Falter, a yarmulke-wearing, Torah-carrying Jew and CEO of the U.K.’s Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAAS) walked through the British capital on Saturday after synagogue. When he happened upon an outdoor, pro-Palestine demonstration, a police officer stopped him and told him not to cross the street, lest the cop arrest him.
“You are quite openly Jewish,” the Bobby told him. “This is a pro-Palestinian march. I am not accusing you of anything, but I am worried about the reaction to your presence.” As Red State reported, the Scotland Yard officer accused Falter of “a breach of peace with all these other people.” The “other people” were five individuals who accompanied Falter, some of whom also wore yarmulkes. All of this was captured on video.
So, his majesty’s police evidently will stop people on the street for being “openly Jewish.”
One wonders, would a London police officer threaten to arrest a British Muslim in a burqa or a kaffiyeh for crossing the street toward a pro-Israel rally filled with Jews? Would officials worry about the reaction to the Muslims’ presence?
These questions answer themselves.
CAAS is organizing a Walk Together through Central London on Saturday, April 27, to demonstrate that Jews and their friends should be free to stroll in peace wherever they wish in the British metropolis. CAAS will announce the walk’s starting point on Friday. For details, please consult CAAS’ website.
The Free Press’s Bari Weiss perfectly captured the double standards that undergird these shondas.
“For a second, imagine that black students at Columbia were taunted: Go back to Africa,” she wrote Sunday. “Or imagine that a gay student was [sic] surrounded by homophobic protesters and hit with a stick at Yale University. Or imagine if a campus imam told Muslim students that they ought to head home for Ramadan because campus public safety could not guarantee their security.”
Weiss accurately added: “There would be relentless fury from our media and condemnation from our politicians.”
But since the targets of this growing mayhem are mere Jews, the responses are crickets, handwringing, and “context.”
These are terrifying times for Jews and the gentiles who love them. Anti-Semitism rears its hideous head much as Ernest Hemingway described the onset of bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises: “Gradually, and then suddenly.”
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor.
