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People steeped in the campus turmoil since Oct. 7 understand that there are at least two categories of Jewish students: The majority, who hold some attachment to Israel and were disturbed by the protests against it, and the minority who have participated in those protests.

But where would you place Bella, a pseudonymous Jewish student, at a California university with a reputation for antisemitism? She’s proud to be Jewish but never had much connection to Israel. That made her feel guilty after Oct. 7. But learning more about the conflict left her hopeless. “Before, when I knew nothing, ignorance was kind of nice,” she said.

Her roommate started sharing offensive posts about Jews and Israel on social media after the war began, so Bella quietly arranged for new housing the following semester. Yet she couldn’t say whether anti-Zionism, and the protests more generally, were antisemitic.

Or Shira, a student in Wisconsin who grew up in an observant Conservative and Zionist home but grew disillusioned with Israel during a gap year program in the country where she met with Palestinians. “I’m not a Zionist because it doesn’t capture enough,” she said, despite still believing “in Jewish autonomy, in some way.”

Shira tried to go to an IfNotNow protest against the war, but was turned off by the signs and slogans and found herself sitting on the sidelines. She still attends Shabbat dinner at the Chabad on campus but walks away from the rabbi when he mentions support for Israel.

***

Shira and Bella are two of the 36 Jewish students profiled anonymously in a new paper from Brandeis University that sought to break through the most common binaries — pro-Israel and anti-Israel.

“There’s a vast number of people on college campuses that wouldn’t be comfortable with either of those labels,” said Jonathan Krasner, who produced the study. “We wanted to understand where those people were coming from.”

Krasner and his research team found six distinct categories of Jewish students they describe this way:

• The Affirmed: Students whose pro-Israel activism and connection to Jewish identity deepened after Oct. 7

• The Aggrieved: Activist students who felt betrayed by Jewish institutions

• The Retrenched: Students who retreated into private Jewish spaces for safety and support

• The Conflicted: Students grappling with the moral and political complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

• The Disillusioned: Students let down by Jewish and Israeli institutions, fostering skepticism and distrust but not action

• The Disengaged: Students who distanced themselves from both Jewish and campus political discourse, often due to a desire to avoid conflict

Mapped onto a very rough political spectrum, these categories might look something like this.

We probably hear the most from “affirmed” students, with many — Shabbos Kestenbaum, Eyal Yakoby and Eden Yadegar — becoming national spokespeople for embattled Jews on campus, especially those who fall into the “retrenched” category.

The “aggrieved,” often represented by members of Jewish Voice for Peace, have also received a platform. But there’s a great missing middle in the discourse created by the absence, in the Brandeis study’s terms, of the “disillusioned,” “conflicted” and “disengaged.”

***

The category of Jewish students most concerned about antisemitism was, notably, not the “affirmed” — vocal pro-Israel students who are often the most direct targets for harassment by campus protesters — but rather the “retrenched,” who observed anti-Zionism with alarm but desperately sought to avoid conflict and turned toward Jewish spaces on campus.

Keren, who grew up in an affluent Jewish neighborhood on the East Coast, stopped wearing her Star of David necklace, hid other Jewish jewelry even from her roommate and avoided talking about the war in Gaza with other students.

“I don’t want to risk my relationships,” she explained.

But, at the same time, she said: “I’m pretty sure that most people I interact with hold antisemitic views.”

***

That missing middle of Jewish students that we tend to hear the least about — the “conflicted,” “disengaged” and “disillusioned” — could represent half of all Jews on campus, and they need support too.

You can see their voices reflected in documents like the Harvard task force report I wrote about in the last edition of this newsletter, and my bet is that they see little benefit from the most aggressive approaches to tamping down campus activism that may appeal to the “retrenched” and “affirmed.”

Instead, it may be the softer recommendations for improving the campus climate — like recruiting students interested in “open inquiry and mutual respect,” as the Harvard report suggested — that may help reduce polarization, and make the students who have stayed away from Jewish institutions at their schools and avoided conversations about Israel feel more comfortable participating.

📚 GO DEEPER

• Between Home and Homeland: Jewish College Students Confront the Israel-Gaza Conflict and Campus Divides (Journal of Jewish Education)

• A Venn diagram to help us talk about Israel and antisemitism (Forward)

USS Liberty reunion features prominent antisemite

The USS Liberty, left, one day after it was attacked by the Israeli military in 1967. (U.S. Navy)

🌐 WHAT HAPPENED

The USS Liberty Veterans Association’s annual conference, taking place in Norfolk, Virginia, in early June, is slated to host Stew Peters, the far-right antisemitic podcaster who called for a “final solution” involving the mass deportation of American Jews.

Flyers circulated online by anti-fascist activists say the conference is also hosting four other controversial figures, including Angelo Gage, classified as a neo-Nazi by the Southern Poverty Law Center; Jake Shields, a former mixed martial arts fighter who hosted David Duke on his podcast, and Matt Wakulik, a militia leader from Pennsylvania.

John Dixon, a spokesperson for the veterans group, said only Peters was speaking at the conference. “This DOES NOT mean we as the LVA share or condone all the views, beliefs, or behavior our supporters have,” he wrote in an email to The Virginian-Pilot.

🔎 WHY IT MATTERS

White supremacists have long seized on the USS Liberty incident, in which the Israeli military attacked an American spy ship during the 1967 War in what both countries say was an accident, in order to stir outrage at Jews and Israel.

But the latest embrace of the Liberty Veterans Association, which advocates for a thorough investigation of the attack, highlights a pronounced turn against Israel among prominent far-right voices. Peters, the only confirmed speaker, interviewed Kash Patel — who is now serving as Trump’s FBI director — eight times in recent years.

“The far-right grassroots movements that propelled Trump to power are becoming increasingly anti-Israel, and, in doing so, moving the needle for the mainstream right,” Elad Nehorai wrote in a recent opinion column for the Forward.

📚 GO DEEPER

• A veterans’ reunion sits at the center of an online storm in Norfolk (Virginian-Pilot)

• OPINION | Anti-Israel rhetoric is fueling an alarmingly powerful new wave of antisemitism on the right (Forward)

A poll of Jewish voters released last week by GBAO Strategies, a respected firm associated with Democrats, made headlines for finding that 52% believe Trump is antisemitic. But it also included fascinating new information about who is most concerned about antisemitism, and what might drive that fear.

Emotional attachment to Israel is one of the traits most strongly correlated with concern over campus antisemitism, as seen in the chart above. That might also help explain why younger Jews, including those who are college age, are significantly less concerned about the issue than their parents and grandparents (demonstrated clearly in the chart below, but this has been a consistent finding over the past two years).

The analysis in brief: Your level of concern over campus antisemitism depends on your attachment to Israel, and young Jews are significantly less attached to Israel — and thus significantly less concerned about antisemitism — than their parents and grandparents.

Neo-Nazi prison murder: Brandon “Whitey” Simonson was convicted of murdering Matthew Philips, a Jewish inmate at a federal prison in Illinois. Simonson and Kristopher Martin, who pled guilty earlier this year, killed Philips — who had a Star of David tattoo — because he was Jewish in order to gain recognition with the Valhalla Bound Skinheads prison gang. Philips’ father says the prison should have done more to save his son. (Shaw Local, NBC News)

White House extremist ties: An NPR investigation found more Trump administration officials with connections to Nazi sympathizers. Paul Ingrassia, the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, praised antisemitic online influencer Andrew Tate on social media and attended a June 2024 rally featuring Nick Fuentes, the Holocaust denier and white nationalist. Rachel Cauley, a communications director at the Office of Budget and Management, previously worked for a right-wing advocacy group founded to defend Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who federal prosecutors have called a “Nazi sympathizer.” (NPR)

Voters think Trump is antisemitic: Half of American Jewish voters said they think “antisemitic” describes President Donald Trump somewhat or very well, a response no doubt influenced by partisan opposition to Trump but nonetheless concerning. (JTA)

Ye’s antisemitic song: The offensive antics from Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, pack less of a punch than they used to — but more prominent celebrities are starting to normalize them. Mega-podcaster Joe Rogan suggested that censoring Ye’s new “Heil Hitler” song “kind of supports” the rapper’s contention that Jews “run everything.” (Forward)

Campus Boeing protest: Pro-Palestinian demonstrators at the University of Washington ransacked a new engineering building partly funded by Boeing, claiming the Oct. 7 attack shattered the “illusion of Zionist-imperialist domination” and that the defense contractor was “complicit in Zionist genocide.” (NBC News)

Dyke March split: The New York Dyke March has splintered over its response to the Israel-Hamas war, which included an initial statement mourning the “senseless loss of Jewish life,” which was deleted 30 minutes later. (Forward)

Mayoral candidates spar: Antisemitism has taken center stage in the NYC mayoral race. Eric Adams, the embattled mayor, has created a new office to combat antisemitism while running for reelection on an “End Antisemitism” ballot line and accusing Brad Lander, a Jewish opponent, of subscribing to “anti-Jewish philosophies. “Jews are not pawns,” Lander shot back. (Forward)

Afrikaner refugee’s antisemitism: One of the Afrikaner South Africans who Trump rescued from a supposed “white genocide” called Jews “untrustworthy and dangerous” on social media before offering a minimal statement of regret. The Trump administration’s insistence that it is going to screen the social media accounts of potential immigrants for antisemitism makes the post harder to ignore. (Forward, Washington Post)

Musk’s AI questions Holocaust: The company behind Grok AI, the artificial intelligence service created by Elon Musk, blamed a “programming error” after the tool said it was “skeptical” that 6 million Jews had died in the Holocaust, days after it fixated on discussing “white genocide” in South Africa even when users asked it unrelated questions. (Rolling Stone)

Cleveland book burning: A man checked out dozens of books about Jews and other minority groups from a library in suburban Cleveland before filming himself burning them. (JTA)

Anti-Zionist garden: Sunset Community Garden in Queens is facing eviction after requiring its members to sign a statement opposing “nationalist and/or racist beliefs” including Zionism and antisemitism, a violation of Parks Department policies. Garden members say they removed political references from their bylaws but are still facing shutdown due, in part, to negative coverage in the New York Post. (Gothamist, JTA)

Wikipedia drama: A bipartisan group of federal lawmakers sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, demanding it address widespread anti-Israel and antisemitic bias identified by the Anti-Defamation League. But several of the scholars whose research is cited in the ADL’s report on Wikipedia say their work has been misrepresented. (Algemeiner, Forward)

Doxing ‘Zionists’: After years of being accused of racism by the pro-Israel Canary Mission, some pro-Palestinian activists are hitting back with “Reverse Canary Mission,” a website that uses similarly questionable standards to identify supposed Zionists. It could rise on the grid toward ‘dangerous’ if more people were reading the site, which  has fewer than 2,000 followers on social media. (Forward)

Semitic museum: Ruth Wisse, the conservative Jewish scholar, dredged up Harvard’s 2020 renaming of its Semitic Museum (now the Museum of the Ancient Near East) as evidence that the school is an “Islamist outpost” united by antisemitism. But the museum director says they dropped “semitic” because nobody knew what it meant. (Wall Street Journal)

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