Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

As students return to college campuses this fall, many Jewish community leaders and students are asking whether the tone and tenor of campus activism on Israel and Gaza will be any different this year, despite assurances from university leadership that it will.

“Last year was so exhausting,” said Aaron Schimmel, a Stanford Ph.D. student. “We just want normalcy.”

On Aug. 19, the president of the University of California, Michael Drake, announced updates to UC’s policies surrounding free speech and protests. During the upcoming school year, Drake said, the 10-school university system would be “reinforcing” policies that prohibit camping and the wearing of identity-concealing masks during protests. The updates, he said, follow a summer spent “reflecting with students, faculty, staff, Regents, and others on the events of the past year.”

Whether the announcement will help reduce the temperature of the debate surrounding Israel and Gaza, or head off tent encampment protests that proliferated in public university spaces at dozens of California campuses, remains an open question.

Last school year, Cal, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Davis and others had rules in place that prohibited overnight camping. Even so, student encampments were allowed to stay because university leadership wished to avoid ugly police confrontations. It was only after violent incidents that schools like UCLA called in police to dismantle the protest camps. (The UCLA chancellor later told Congress he wished he had done so sooner).

In mid-August, Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, resigned in the wake of national scrutiny over her handling of campus protests. Her departure followed the January resignations of the Penn and Harvard presidents after a heated congressional hearing about campus antisemitism, and the retirement in May of the Cornell president after months of turmoil over the war.

In a series of conversations with J. as the fall term approached, Jewish and pro-Israel students and leaders voiced uncertainty about what to expect next, expressing a mix of emotions: reserved optimism, anxiety, and despair over what many viewed as the inevitable return of coarse debate and a hostile atmosphere on campus. The turmoil began soon after the Oct. 7 rampage by Hamas, in which some 1,200 people in southern Israel were murdered and 250 were taken hostage, starting the war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza as Hamas militants embed in densely packed urban areas.

Rabbi Gil Leeds, who directs the Chabad Jewish center at UC Berkeley, told J. he has fielded calls from Jewish parents concerned about sending their children to the university.

“They’re like, should we really be sending our daughter there?” he said.

Some students requested housing close to the Chabad center, Leeds said, so they wouldn’t have to walk long distances at night, especially on Jewish holidays when they will be wearing kippot or dressing up for services, making them more easily identifiable as Jews.

Leeds said he expected protests against Israel to return with gusto this semester, which starts on Aug. 28, in part because of the way UC Berkeley handled the activism last year. 

“It wasn’t really resolved in a way that we would have liked it to be resolved, which would be the enforcement of time, place and manner” rules, he said, referring to Cal’s policies surrounding student protests, which say protesters may not “camp or lodge on University property.”

“You know, a law-and-order-type of enforcement,” Leeds said. “It was more like an appeasement and concession. That kind of emboldens them, and I think they’re going to, unfortunately, snap right back, unless something more is done.”

Pro-Palestinian activists have signaled that they intend to continue on-campus protests. The Young Democratic Socialists of America, with more than 100 university chapters, is planning a “national student strike,” according to the news outlet the Free Press. The Escalate Network, an influential online group that encourages radical protests against Israel on college campuses and elsewhere, published an updated 2024 “do-it-yourself occupation guide” for taking over property, with step-by-step advice on how to enter locked buildings, barricade doors and avoid getting caught. 

“The new school year is coming. The genocide continues,” the group tweeted on Aug. 13. “We must move from permanent war to permanent revolution. Students: LAY PLANS!”

The new school year is coming.
The genocide continues.
We must move from permanent war to permanent revolution.
Students: LAY PLANS!

— Escalate Network (@readytoescalate) August 13, 2024

Meanwhile, state lawmakers are trying to impact the campus climate from their perch in Sacramento. Members of the Legislature are leaning on UC leadership to take a more hands-on approach. Over the summer, lawmakers said they would condition $25 million in state funding to the UC system on whether it develops a “systemwide framework” for campus protests, free speech and enforcement policies. State Sen. Steve Glazer, a member of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, authored a new bill that aims to force university leadership to prohibit “violent, harassing, intimidating, or discriminatory conduct” that creates “a hostile environment on campus.” The measure is getting intense pushback from pro-Palestinian organizations and free-speech groups like the ACLU.

Scott Wiener, a progressive state senator representing San Francisco and a backer of Glazer’s bill, told J. that he strongly supports students’ right to protest. 

“That’s a fundamental constitutional right,” he said. “But the campuses need to be able to function, and we want to make sure that students are not being subjected to bullying, harassment and intimidation.”

Things can “spiral out of control so quickly,” Wiener added. “That’s why it’s important for campus administrators to get out ahead and to anticipate some of these challenges.”

The protests on college campuses in California were intensely polarizing, impacting not only the 10 universities in the UC system but also the vast Cal State system, as well as private universities like Stanford and USF. Many within the protest movement saw themselves as an essential voice against a brutal war conducted with American backing, while opponents pointed to the hostile rhetoric used by the protesters, which included support for Palestinian militancy, vitriolic pronouncements against “Zionists” or people who support Israel, and scant regard for the civilian hostages held in Gaza or for the innocents killed by Hamas on Oct. 7.

Rabbi Jessica Kirschner, director of Hillel at Stanford, where classes start on Aug. 26, recalled the challenges associated with the encampment last school year — its duration and location and the sometimes troubling sentiments expressed by protesters.

“There was really, to some extent, no way to avoid them,” Kirschner said. “Even if you rerouted yourself so you just never went through White Plaza, which is a very central location on campus, they remain sort of physically present,” she said. 

“I’m sure that’s part of the intention of the protesters,” she added. “But it really did impact the atmosphere for students, faculty and staff.”

The tent encampment at Stanford, one of scores like it at universities across the country, was one of the most long-lasting, launching relatively early in the war, just weeks after the Oct. 7 attack. Administrators negotiated with campers in the ensuing months, and the encampment was dismantled in February. Then in April a new encampment popped up and lasted until the end of the semester. The university removed the second one after some of the protesters were arrested for breaking into the university president’s office and vandalizing it.

One photo circulated widely on social media and in news reports showed a protester wearing a Hamas headband. Stanford officials called the photo “deeply disturbing” and submitted it to the FBI.

Passover seder at UC Berkeley’s Gaza solidarity encampment pic.twitter.com/S2rvuC51Uk

— Dena Takruri (@Dena) April 25, 2024

At the same time, a number of Jewish anti-Zionist activists have been visibly involved in the encampment protests and supported them wholeheartedly. At Cal, Jewish demonstrators helped lead a Passover seder in April, setting out matzah, grape juice and other foods on a blue tarp on Sproul Plaza. A photo of the seder published by an Al Jazeera journalist shows an attendee wearing a kippah decorated as a watermelon, a symbol of Palestinian nationalism, next to another wearing a kaffiyeh.

Jewish Berkeley student Jonah Gottlieb, who attended the seder, wrote on social media that attendees “prayed, sang, and ate,” calling the gathering a “sacred space” within the encampment.

I’m gathered right now with 50+
Jewish Berkeleyans for our Seder at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Sproul Plaza. As we prayed, sang, and ate, a woman shoved a camera in our faces. She refused to leave when asked and continued yelling and disrupting our holy religious ceremony.

— Jonah Gottlieb 🇵🇸✡️🌹 (@JonahGottlieb) April 23, 2024

Multiple people who spoke with J. in recent weeks for this story said that in their view, protesters who were openly antisemitic or supported violence against civilians represented a minority in the tent encampments at Stanford, Berkeley and elsewhere. Most simply wanted Israel to cease the war in Gaza.

Yet the minority was a vocal one, imbuing campus protests with a tone that was often intimidating, or morally repugnant, to Jewish students and others who support Israel.

“Starting as early as maybe Oct. 7, but certainly by Oct. 8, there was language on campus that seemed supportive of Hamas and what it had done that seemed to justify those attacks,” Kirschner said. “And this was before there was any [military] response from Israel at all.”

UC Berkeley’s encampment sprang up in April and was dismantled in May after a few concessions by leadership, including a pledge to examine the university’s investment policy. Much of the activity at the encampment was peaceful; when a J. reporter visited in its early days, students were sitting in their tents, chatting, sipping coffee and doing homework.

But over time, an unsparing and hostile attitude toward Israel and Zionists became evident, including the use of violent language. The protesters hung a banner above the tents on Sproul Plaza describing their action as a “student intifada.” Another sign was emblazoned with inverted red triangles, a symbol Hamas has used in propaganda videos to indicate Israeli military targets. “Glory to the martyrs! Victory to the resistance!” the sign said.

A number of Jewish Berkeley students said they avoided walking by the encampment, which wasn’t always easy because of its central location on campus. For several weeks, protesters blocked a portion of the arch of Sather Gate with anti-Israel banners and played a recording with sounds of bombs and screaming.    

“It’s not a peaceful encampment. It’s not like they’re handing out roses,” Rabbi Leeds said. Of the rhetoric there, “people are taking your identity and using it, you know, to call you the pariah and the root of all evil,” he said. “It makes it a tough pill to swallow every morning when you walk by campus.”

The new chancellor of UC Berkeley, Rich Lyons, released a 2½-minute video statement on Aug. 19 that made reference to the enforcement of campus policies surrounding protests, and that affirmed the university would take direction from the UC system. But the statement did not say whether students who erected encampments would be subject to censure or punishment.

“Adherence to our ‘time, place and manner’ rules will continue to ensure that expressive activities do not interfere with the rights of others, or with the operations of our university,” Lyons said. “We can and will continue to address violations of these rules in a carefully considered way.”

For its part, the UC Office of the President told J. that the system stands firmly against antisemitism and “acts of anti-Jewish bigotry,” calling them “alarming and antithetical to core UC values.”

Jewish, pro-Israel students may be buoyed by a recent ruling in federal court in Southern California, where a judge ordered leadership of UCLA to change course in its handling of campus protests in order to protect Jewish students. The ruling came after evidence was presented showing that pro-Palestinian demonstrators blocked Israel-supporting students from traversing parts of campus, a violation of their rights, the judge wrote.

“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” the judge wrote in a blistering decision blaming UCLA for contributing to the problem. “This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” 

Lawyers for UCLA have said they plan to appeal the decision.

Schimmel, the Ph.D. student at Stanford who is studying Jewish history, said the question of whether pro-Israel Jews will feel safe this year is frequently discussed at Jewish community minyans, or prayer sessions, in group chats and on social media. 

One of the major problems with the protests, Schimmel said, has been the masks that demonstrators have worn to conceal their identity. That has contributed to an atmosphere of distrust among students, he said.

“We didn’t know if our classmates, or neighbors, or the person sitting next to us was out there threatening violence against us, and our people,” Schimmel said. “The fact that they were in the middle of campus, and the fact that you didn’t know who was participating in this, were the two biggest things that bothered me,” he said.

“Myself and my Jewish friends, we just want to be students, and focus on our work and getting our degrees,” he said. “We just want things to be quiet on campus.”