Opinion | Four Columbia University students on what campus life is like now -

The protests and unrest taking place on campuses around the country have spurred an extraordinary response from Post readers. This is the first of three days of letters about them. To continue the conversation, email letters@washpost.com or go to https://wapo.st/letter. — Alyssa Rosenberg, letters and community editor

There are no more universities in Gaza. As I write the last words of my dissertation, I’ve never been more aware of silence, never been more aware that no bombs drop outside my dorm room window, that no air raid sirens sound.

For several days, Columbia students and staff made a real university by the sundial I’d pass so often on my way to class. They taught each other. They prayed together. They collected books, shared food, read poetry, made speeches, laughed, marched, shouted, wept. They linked arms as President Minouche Shafik called the New York Police Department on them.

How can I attend graduation, knowing that so many of these brave students have been suspended or expelled? How can I attend graduation, when Palestinians in Gaza cannot attend university at all and when professors like Refaat Alareer are murdered? How can I attend graduation, not even knowing how much of Columbia’s endowment is invested in this brutal apartheid system?

Ms. Shafik said university officials “do not want to deprive thousands of students and their families and friends of a graduation celebration.” But she, not the protesters, is the one depriving us of this experience. And just as she cannot keep us from grieving, neither can she keep us from finding joy outside the rituals of commencement. As I grieve for Gaza, I take heart from the children there who “fly kites instead of warplanes.” As I grieve for the encampment, I take joy in all those whom it has inspired across the world.

I remember reading Walter Benjamin’s description of “the angel of history”: his face turned toward a past “piling wreckage” at his feet. Who was this angel, I wondered, who “would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed”?

The students who occupied Hamilton Hall renamed it Hind’s Hall, after Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old girl from the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City who was killed by the Israeli military after fleeing a tank attack on her family that claimed the lives of her relatives.

I know the angel now. Her name is Hind. I know the wreckage: It is Tel al-Hawa and Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah and Rafah. And I hear the voices around the world who, in Hind’s name, grieve and celebrate and wake the dead.

Ethan Zachary Chua, New York

The writer is a master’s candidate in the Columbia University and London School of Economics dual degree program in international and world history.

As an international journalist who has spent years reporting from Germany, where public denial of the Holocaust is a criminal offense, I am acutely aware of the dangers of antisemitism. I empathize with why some of Jewish students at Columbia University, traumatized by the brutal Oct. 7 attack, perceived the pro-Palestinian encampment erected on campus in recent weeks as a threat.

But as a native of Moscow, I am also aware of how the images of uniformed police entering the Ivy League campus on April 18 and April 30 were exploited and weaponized by the authoritarian regimes in Russia and Iran. Not only did Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, publicly condemn the developments, but Iranian state media have been reporting every nuance ever since. With the U.S. presidential election coming up in November, the pressure on the Biden administration is mounting. As much as the protests are about the Israeli-Gaza war, they are also about the run-up to those elections and the country’s willingness to move beyond fruitless partisanship and internal divisions.

These raids have weakened our resilience and deepened a crisis of communication that existed before the protests and left many pro-Palestinian students feeling unheard and abandoned in their grief over the civilian deaths and displacement in Gaza. That crisis is no longer invisible. Sitting with my back against the sundial on Columbia’s College Walk, the site of a significant 1968 Vietnam War protest, I can see the faded squares of grass left behind after the university removed the multicolored sea of tents that made up the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” A few yards away, the doors of Hamilton Hall stand gaping, holes in the glass, the doorknob twisted and distorted, fine shards of glass still visible on the floor.

Nearby, the lawn is covered in a bright carpet of evergreen artificial turf that will serve as the seating area for the proud relatives and friends of Columbia’s graduates. New green grass will grow and cover the bleached scars on the lawn where tents once stood and signs once offered “Welcome to the People’s University for Palestine.” Healing the rifts on our campus and in our society will take more time, more work and more care.

Ekaterina Venkina, New York

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The writer is a masters candidate at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

A movement needs to mature

The protest movement on college campuses needs to mature before it graduates. As commencements begin and students return home or enter life after school, their gatherings will shrink and disperse, at least temporarily. It’s time for hard thinking about how to make sure this cause will survive past the spring term and move national policy.

I do not believe the movement encouraging American institutions to divest from and boycott Israeli institutions is antisemitic in its core. Neither am I convinced that Zionism is inevitably racist. But I do think that to be successful, the movement at Columbia University, where I am in graduate school, and elsewhere needs to think more strategically and focus on pressuring Israel to end its military campaign in Gaza.

Personally, I did not see enough efforts to get rid of extremist voices. It’s not enough to point to Jewish students who participated in protests or to a Seder held in the camp on the first night of Passover while letting students who post videos of themselves saying things like “Zionists don’t deserve to live” speak at news conferences for the protest. Any movement has outliers. And any successful movement will draw attention from outsiders who try to make use of those outliers to shape perception of the movement. It falls to the collective to not allow its extremists to define it and especially not to let those extremists stand in the way of real policy change.

Born as a university protest, the movement has so far targeted universities with its demands. After Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s ill-considered decision to invite the New York Police Department onto campus the first time, it has been propelled into a national protest. It is time to acknowledge this new responsibility. After Tuesday night’s arrest of the protesters and the shutdown of campus, the movement is sure to transform again. It’s time to focus on the Biden administration at home and the Netanyahu government in Israel. This is who I believe many students like me — who do not feel like they can fully participate in the protest in its current form — want to protest as well. These leaders are the people who can put a stop to the immediate suffering in Gaza. Ending this misery and stopping the Netanyahu government are the prerequisites for peace. It is time to mature and clarify the message.

It is time to graduate and face the country.

Julian Heiss, New York

The writer is a graduate student in international affairs at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs.

When I applied to Columbia nearly five years ago, I believed our school’s famous core curriculum would provide the framework in which all students could have sober debates about our political disagreements, even those such as the Israeli-Gaza conflict. I was wrong.

For months, I have been horrified by the rise in antisemitism on our campus. “Globalize the intifada!” “Zionist pigs off our campus now.” “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” “We don’t want two states, we want all of it.” “Go back to Poland!” These are only samples of the rhetoric used by campus demonstrators over the past two weeks. Physically identifiable Jewish students, including those of us who wear kippahs or Star of David necklaces, have been physically and verbally harassed on campus. Friends of mine have been told to kill themselves and have been called racial slurs. It is no wonder that many Jewish students, including myself, do not feel physically or emotionally safe on campus and have left over the past two weeks.

I have tried to engage in good-faith dialogues with my peers. But when my classmates broke into and occupied a principal academic building after months of refusing to engage in any conversation, I concluded that Columbia has failed Jewish students such as myself.

President Minouche Shafik must follow through on the commitments she made to enforce existing rules surrounding time, place and manner of demonstrations; reform new student orientation; and adapt diversity, equity and inclusion programming to include Jewish history and antisemitism.

While I will graduate soon, a new class of freshmen enters, concerned Jewish students among them. It will take meaningful actions from Columbia’s leadership to make the undergraduate experience I dreamed of possible for them.

Jacob Schmeltz, New York

The writer is a senior at Columbia University and vice president of the Jewish on Campus Student Union.

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