Milène Klein was preparing to celebrate Pessah, Jewish Passover, with her family, Monday April 22. But that did not stop her from continuing her mobilization. A Palestinian flag drawn on her left cheek, the word “Jewish” written on her right cheek, this 21-year-old philosophy and comparative literature student is one of the many Jewish students at Columbia University who support the movement against the war in Gaza . The New York campus, which has a strong community of Jewish students (5,000 out of 36,000), has been torn apart for months over the war between Israel and Hamas.
Tensions became such that the place was transformed into an entrenched camp, with filtering of students by the police and a catastrophic suspension of classes on Monday morning, before arrests of pro-Palestinian students in the evening.
“It’s like there’s been a military coup on campus. We no longer see our leaders, they send us emails to tell us that what is happening is terrible. There are cops all over campus. But a lot of students say to themselves that now it’s our campus”confides Milène Klein, who believes she wants to seize the chance to be heard. “It is our responsibility as Jews to stand up and say that what is happening (in Gaza) is a genocide”she believes, accusing “Zionists to use this moment to push their agenda and threaten Palestinian and Arab students on campus”.
But, at the heart of these tensions, Jewish students also feel in danger, verbally attacked, sometimes physically threatened, hearing anti-Israeli, even anti-Semitic slogans from their dormitories located next to the central square of the campus. The affair took a political turn, with a campus and faculty committed to the left, a generally uneasy Jewish community and Republicans happy to do battle with progressive universities and muzzle any criticism of Israel.
Between the grotesque and McCarthyism
The American president himself intervened on Monday on the subject, condemning the “anti-Semitic demonstrations” on campus, just like “those who don’t understand what’s happening with the Palestinians”. At Yale, around sixty students defending the Palestinian cause were arrested. Across the country, other campuses are mobilizing.
The crisis at Columbia crystallized on Wednesday April 17. That day, the president of the university, Nemat Shafik, 61, an economist of Egyptian origin in office since the summer of 2023, was interviewed by a congressional commission, the same one which led, in December 2023, with the fall of the presidents of Harvard and Pennsylvania. Asked by Trumpist elected official Elise Stefanik to know if the call for the genocide of the Jews violated the internal regulations of their university, they replied that it “depended on the context”. Nemat Shafik is determined not to make the mistake of her colleagues. “Yes, it violates him”she answers the question.
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