“Is this for, like, anonymity?” a long-legged Stanford student dressed in a T-shirt and shorts wondered aloud as a fellow student handed him a black medical mask.
Without getting an answer, he donned the disposable mask over his nose and mouth, as did close to 200 other people, many of them undergraduate and graduate students with kaffiyehs draped over their shoulders. They gathered April 22 outside of Stanford’s Memorial Church in a “solidarity walkout” for Palestinians. Another masked woman with a kaffiyeh covering her pulled-back hair, wore dangling earrings with watermelons, which have become symbols of support for Palestinians. A dozen people waved large Palestinian flags over the crowd’s heads.
“Stanford, Stanford, you can’t hide,” a masked organizer of the walkout shouted into a megaphone, as the crowd chanted back in unison, “from supporting genocide.” There were other chants of “Resistance is justified when people are occupied!” and “Long live the intifada! Globalize the intifada!”
The primary thrust of the rally was to condemn the Israeli government for its military actions in Gaza and to encourage support for a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) ballot measure in the upcoming election for student government. (The symbolic ballot initiative, which demands that the university divest from Israel and accuses Israel of war crimes, passed in late April with roughly three-fourths of votes in favor. One-third of Stanford’s graduate and undergraduate students voted in the election.)
On April 25, pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protesters set up a tent encampment on White Plaza, adjacent to the student union. It mirrors the camps that have emerged at college campuses across the country in recent weeks — and is reminiscent of the 120-day encampment on White Plaza that lasted from late October into February despite a Stanford policy that forbids overnight camping on campus.
This time around, administrators warned of disciplinary action and possible arrests for those who continued to camp out, according to an online message sent across the campus on April 26 by University President Richard Saller and Provost Jennifer Martinez.
Throughout March and April J. interviewed Jewish undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, alumni and campus rabbis to understand how Stanford compares with other universities fraught with tension and activism around the Israel-Hamas war and how effectively the administration is handling the situation.
At Stanford, “there are principled protesters, there are ignorant protesters and there are malicious protesters — and that applies to all sides,” said Theo Baker, 19, a Jewish sophomore and a noted student journalist. “A lot of people are actually closer together than they think they are.”
Since the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in Israel and the subsequent war, Stanford has become a difficult campus for Jewish students to navigate both socially and academically, J. found. Many of them have decided to start keeping quiet in public about their Judaism and their views on Israel — fearful of harassment, bullying and social ostracization.
Online harassment
In January, wearing black face masks or kaffiyehs covering their faces, anti-Israel Stanford students protested outside a university forum about antisemitism and tried to disrupt the event before it started, though it did continue as planned. In a video circulated across social media, a masked female activist shouted, “Go back to Brooklyn!” and others chanted “Zionists, Zionists, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!”
Baker described the chaotic and “ugly” scene that evening in a lengthy, first-person article in late March for The Atlantic titled ”The War at Stanford.”
“At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, ‘We know your names and we know where you work.’ The ringleader added: ‘And we’ll soon find out where you live.’ The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying,” Baker wrote.
People have lost their goddamn minds and our standards of discourse have been poisoned.
Since the article was published, Baker has faced an onslaught of threatening, antisemitic messages on Fizz, a social media platform popular among Stanford students and described by the Stanford Daily as a “Twitter-Reddit hybrid” where everyone is anonymous. The site can only be accessed by students using their university email address.
“I’ve gotten tons of death threats. I’ve gotten lots of people telling me I should be cooked alive, that I should be waterboarded, but with gas and then set on fire,” Baker told J. One anonymous Fizz post likened Baker to “Hitler’s propaganda writer.”
When J. interviewed Baker on campus in early April, he had just returned from visiting his family on the East Coast, taking a few days away from campus to improve his mental health.
Baker said he doubts that the students writing these messages even bothered to read his article, which didn’t take a political or Zionist stance. Rather, Baker said, he focused the article on how the Israel-Hamas war has changed the way Stanford students treat one another.
“People have lost their goddamn minds and our standards of discourse have been poisoned,” Baker said. “People think, because there’s something terrible happening 7,500 miles away, it is OK to behave poorly here, and that strikes me as exactly the sort of anti-intellectualism that universities are supposed to combat, not embrace.”
He added, “Universities are supposed to be about learning how to talk about difficult things, about caring about multiple things at the same time, about engaging with issues with nuance. And we’ve just completely lost the plot.”
Baker first noticed this on Oct. 8, one day after Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel when terrorists massacred about 1,200 people and took an estimated 253 others as hostages.
He saw that a Stanford student had posted an image on social media from the Nova music festival, the site where Hamas killed more than 360 people and took more than 40 as hostages.
The post included the laughing crying emoji, which Baker understood as a celebration of the attack.
“I just curled up into a ball for a little bit because I have no conception of how that can be OK with you,” Baker said.
Noah Maltzman, a junior at Stanford who wears a kippah, came across a post on Fizz in which an anonymous student described Maltzman as a “Zionist bigot/racist” because he volunteered over the winter at the Blue and White Tent that was set up on White Plaza to advocate for the release of the hostages and to stand in solidarity with Israel and Jewish students. He said he’s known Jewish friends at Stanford who have also faced attacks on Fizz for openly supporting Zionism or being suspected of it.
This spring Maltzman, the Jewish identity chair for the Stanford chapter of the Jewish fraternity AEPi, ran for a seat in the student government and won. In his candidate statement posted online, Maltzman touted his involvement in several campus clubs and organizations, including writing for the Stanford Daily, the university’s student newspaper, and helping to plan and organize a celebration for the Hindu holiday of Holi. However, he omitted any mention of being Jewish or of having been “in basically every single Jewish club you can imagine,” he told J.
“The last thing that I’m going to do is ever write about the fact that I’m Jewish,” Maltzman said, in part because it’s evident by his name and by the kippah he wears. “I don’t think that writing anything about my Jewishness can help me,” he noted, adding that it would only hurt his candidacy.
Keeping quiet
When asked if he feels safe walking through campus wearing a kippah, Maltzman said he does his best to avoid protests and is reassured by the fact that Stanford students care too much about their career prospects to risk getting in trouble.
“Most Stanford students, I would argue, are too smart to physically threaten someone in broad daylight, unless they’re wearing something over their face,” Maltzman said.
Rabbi Dov Greenberg, who has run the Rohr Chabad Jewish Center at Stanford for the past 23 years, said other Jewish undergraduates tell him that they’re “afraid to identify as Jewish” by wearing a Star of David necklace, kippah or anything displaying the Israeli flag.
“They don’t want to be bullied or harassed by other students,” Greenberg said. “So ironically, the free speech argument has turned into the one group that’s afraid to speak are the ones being attacked, the Jews.”
Stanford’s Chabad and Hillel have both seen a lot more newcomers at Jewish campus events since Oct. 7. Many of the students have expressed feeling alienated from their peers, Greenberg and Hillel executive director Rabbi Jessica Kirschner told J.
Hillel has likewise welcomed “upperclassmen who found themselves politically homeless on campus after 10/7 and questioning some of their core relationships with peers,” Kirschner said in an email to J.
Stanford is also home to a sizable Israeli population of Israeli graduate students, post-docs and their families, according to Kirschner, who noted that “Hillel has been the home away from home they did not know they would need.”
Kevin Feigelis, 30, a doctoral student in physics, became one of the most vocal pro-Israel student organizers on campus last fall when he, along with a handful of other students, helped set up the Blue and White Tent that supports Israel and Jewish students.
He said Jewish students would pass by the tent, quietly noting their appreciation for Feigelis and the group’s efforts.
“It was just tremendous numbers of people just walking up to us and essentially saying, ‘Thank you for doing this…. I’ve been so scared. I’ve been so afraid. Keep up the good job,’” Feigelis said.
Often, their greatest fear isn’t physical harm, but social rejection, Feigelis said.
“The people that hate us, the anti-Israel people, the antisemitic people, have terrorized Jews into feeling like if they speak out, they’re going to maybe not be harmed, but they’re going to completely lose their social status,” Feigelis said. “Because social ostracization is one of the primary driving forces in this movement. To express any empathy for Israeli civilians is tantamount to saying that you’re a genocidal monster, essentially.”
Stanford came under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education in December, one of a number of colleges that the federal government is probing due to concerns over Title VI violations related to alleged antisemitism or Islamophobia on campus.
In late February, Feigelis traveled to Washington, D.C., to testify before a congressional roundtable hosted by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. He described the antisemitism he’s experienced on Stanford’s campus and urged members of Congress to find a solution.
“As my friends at Harvard and UPenn can tell you, it doesn’t end simply because the presidents are replaced,” he told the roundtable. “Systemic change is needed. The universities have proven they have no intention of fixing this themselves. It must be you. And it must be now.”
In April, Stanford announced that it had appointed Jonathan Levin, Stanford’s business school dean, as its next university president — and its first Jewish president — effective Aug. 1.
Feigelis told J. the fact that Levin is Jewish means little in the big picture.
“So long as the board of trustees and their legal counsel are telling them not to do anything or take any action, then they’re not going to take any action,” he said of Stanford’s administration. “I don’t think that any new president at Stanford is going to behave any differently.”
Jewish students have felt singled out, not only socially, but also in the classroom.
On Oct. 10, Ameer Loggins, a Stanford lecturer, reportedly instructed first-year Jewish students to stand separately from their non-Jewish classmates as an academic exercise to represent how Palestinians are segregated from Israeli society. Loggins was removed from the classroom the following day and has not returned.
A Jewish doctoral student who asked not to be identified due to concerns for her safety is considering dropping out of Stanford if the climate around antisemitism doesn’t improve.
The student is working on her Ph.D. in education and Jewish studies with a focus on comparative studies in race and ethnicity. She has a Hebrew name, and, at the beginning of the school year prior to Oct. 7, had no qualms about disclosing to her cohort the fact that she’s Jewish.
Now she wishes she hadn’t.
In her ethnic studies classes, she said there have been several instances where her academic expertise relevant to discussions about Israeli society and politics has been questioned or challenged because she’s Jewish and presumed to be a Zionist despite not publicly identifying herself to them as such.
“If anything, I am so nuanced in this,” she said about her views on Israel, which are more critical than her classmates recognize. Because she’s Jewish, she said her classmates fail to appreciate that “I think so much like they do.”
The student said she doesn’t consider her peers to be antisemitic for holding anti-Zionist views. But she said there have been instances in her classes where anti-Zionism has shifted into antisemitism.
Last fall, she presented her proposed curriculum to teach Jewish high school students about Israel in a critical context that discusses terms such as settler colonialism, apartheid and indigeneity. She recalled a program administrator’s harsh critique. “Zionists are the in-group upon which white supremacy depends,” the administrator told her. “If you are complicit in the Zionist enterprise, you are enabling white supremacy.” Several teaching fellows “just nodded along” in agreement, she said.
Shortly after that interaction, the student asked many of her professors for permission to participate on Zoom, rather than come to class. Most of them allowed it, but not all. One of the main courses required for her minor in comparative studies on race and ethnicity wouldn’t allow her to attend remotely, so she dropped the class. She expects she’ll have to drop the minor altogether.
When she mustered the courage to attend a class in-person the first day of spring quarter, she sat in awkward silence as her classmates complimented a peer’s kaffiyeh and noted that they were waiting in anticipation for theirs to arrive in the mail.
“I feel alienated, extremely alienated. It’s been so hard to find connection and community,” she said.
She thinks about dropping out of Stanford almost daily.
“I really think a lot about my mental health and whether this kind of daily antisemitism is something that’s worth it,” she said. “But it’s Stanford. How do you walk away from a Ph.D. at Stanford because of antisemitism? How do you do that?”
Alumni action
In November, Stanford administrators announced the formation of a new Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias within the existing Jewish Advisory Committee, which the university president launched last May. Later in May, the subcommittee, composed of faculty, staff, students and alumni, will publish a report recommending immediate action as well as the development of longer-term recommendations to combat antisemitism on campus.
The Stanford Jewish Alumni Network (S-JAN), an 863-member group that formed in 2022, more than doubled in membership since the start of October, according to the network’s president, Shelley Hébert, who graduated from Stanford in 1976.
“We want to see Stanford lead,” Hébert said of her and S-JAN’s hopes for an improved campus climate.
The environment of the university for Jewish and Israeli students, faculty and staff “and how alumni perceive that environment is enormously important,” she added, especially in terms of where alumni give donations.
“We’ll have to wait and see not just what emerges from the subcommittee in terms of recommendations, but whether those recommendations are actually implemented,” Hébert said.
Feigelis will defend his Ph.D. in early June and expects that these are his final weeks as a Stanford student.
“Finishing up Stanford is a long time in the making. I’m excited to finally get my Ph.D., but the battle is far from over,” Feigelis said of his efforts to advocate for Jewish students.
“The fact that there are so few young Jewish voices who are willing to go out and say that what’s happening to us is not right, it’s completely unacceptable,” he said. Even as an alum, “if I have to be that person, then I’ll do it.”