The Morningside Heights Tent City
Pivot to remote: Happy Passover to those who observe. And to Columbia University students who happen to be Jewish: Enjoy your remote learning.
For those who've just tuned in, the pro-Palestine tent city encampment at Columbia—and several other universities across the country—keeps getting razed and then resurrected. But new video keeps emerging showing the treatment Jews on campus are facing, and it…does not make the protesters look good.
"Repeat after me: We have Zionists who've entered the camp," says one protester, referring to Jewish students. "We are going to create a human chain…so that they do not pass this point and infringe upon our privacy and try to disrupt our community," chanted the students, in unison, as if they were Jonestown cultists. At least one student, a visibly Jewish sophomore named Jonathan Lederer, says he was pushed and shoved by the mob, which also threw objects at him "from close range."
What is happening at Columbia? The "Gaza Solidarity Encampment" is essentially a tent city set up by students protesting not just Israel's military campaign inside Gaza but also Columbia University's "continued financial investment in corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine," set up by Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace. The students have all kinds of odd and only tangentially related demands, including expecting the university to sever all ties with the New York Police Department (NYPD).
Last week, the universities—both Columbia and Barnard, which partners with Columbia and basically functions as an undergraduate college of the university—sent administrators into the throngs of protesting students to let them know it was time to break it up and disassemble the tent city, which was in violation of Columbia policy. When this failed, NYPD cops were sent in and arrested 108 students on Thursday evening. (Several sitting senators have called for the National Guard to be sent in to break up protests, which is surely overkill.)
The daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.), Isra Hisi, was among those arrested. "She had no idea she would end up suspended, homeless, and left without food within a matter of days," according to The Daily Beast, which seemed to think the sob-story lens was the way to go.
Following these arrests, the tent city simply sprang back up. Student demonstrators told Jews to "go back to Poland."
"Say it loud and say it clear, we don't want no Zionists here," added others, chanting.
Sit at home: "All faculty whose classrooms are located on the main Morningside campus and equipped with hybrid capabilities should enable them to provide virtual learning options," said the university yesterday, which has scheduled final exams for May 3–10. "Faculty in other classrooms or teaching spaces that do not have capabilities for offering hybrid options should hold classes remotely if there are student requests for virtual participation."
This feels like it has marks of the pandemic era all over it: In the absence of capable leadership, relegate students to remote learning—an unserious, worse form of teaching that could surely be gotten for cheaper than Columbia tuition. In the absence of an actually good strategy to ensure divestiture—which would be harder to pull off—just live-action role play as revolutionaries and tell Jews to go back to where they came from, as if that's coherent and aligned with anything else these mostly-leftist students espouse. It feels like, in the years following George Floyd, protests have descended to their lowest form. "You guys are all inbred," protesters reportedly told counter-protesting Jewish students.
In the not-so-distant past, Columbia has struggled to find principles to stand by when challenged by student protesters. In 2019, the university allowed Chinese Communist Party sympathizer student protesters to shut down a panel that would have detailed the regime's human rights violations and digital surveillance techniques, moderated by a Tiananmen Square survivor. Comedian Nimesh Patel had his mic cut by Columbia students after telling a joke about gay black men. Back in the mid-aughts, too, Columbia had another scandal, almost the current situation inverted: Professors perceived as too biased against Israel were targeted with mass scrutiny and calls for firing.
It's not clear what type of speech environment Columbia hopes to cultivate. But allowing tent cities to thrive on campus while telling Jews to simply log onto Zoom sure doesn't seem like what most students had in mind when they forked over their $70,000 tuition checks.
Scenes from New York: Haven't you had enough New York today? Haven't you gotten your fix?
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