On Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of the devastating Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war, Shira Hagag and Zack Mink headed out to Cal Poly Humboldt’s University Center Quad and put up a sign they’d made reading, “Ask me about October 7.”
As Jewish students at the school, Hagag and Mink were hoping to spur dialogue with anyone interested in the perspective of their Jewish American and Israeli classmates.
Their plans were quickly dashed. Protesters began to show up, and they had no interest in a discussion. One approached the Jewish pair and leaned menacingly into Hagag, who is from Netanya, Israel.
“He barked at my face, so close to my face,” she recalled.
Hagag, a 6-foot basketball small forward who played on the women’s team last year, said she wasn’t fazed.
“I didn’t move,” she told J. “I’m like, I’m sorry, but you’re not gonna scare me. You cover your face for a reason, because you know you’re doing something wrong.”
To Mink, the protesters appeared to be arriving for their own event, but they quickly turned to targeting the Jewish students at the table.
In one of several videos posted on Instagram of incidents that took place that day, a protester is seen throwing red paint on a nearby building and on a videographer recording the event with a tripod-mounted camera. Moments later, another masked protester is seen walking up to the videographer and growling into the camera.
Mink and Hagag told J. protesters drew a circle in chalk around their table and labeled it with the words “Zio Corner.”
The events of that day are now part of a federal complaint filed in March with the U.S. Department of Education, which responded in May by launching an investigation into the university’s conduct.
Cal Poly Humboldt, a picturesque campus that last fall had a student population of just over 6,000, is located on the rural North Coast. It covers some 200 acres, nestled between Highway 101 and the edge of Arcata Community Forest.
In stark contrast to the peaceful forests and coastline that surround the school, Humboldt saw some of the most intense and disruptive anti-Israel campus protests in the country after October 2023. In the most dramatic instance, over a two-week period in April and May 2024, the university went into full lockdown, moving all classes online and relocating events as protesters took over Siemens Hall.
Inside the building, which houses the information technology and services department, protesters scrawled graffiti on the walls, disabled toilets and barricaded the entrances with furniture, according to campus announcements to the community at the time.
Protesters clashed with police in a showdown captured on video that went viral online. Police arrested 39 people, both students and non-students, during the campus takeover, according to a university spokesperson.
For many of the estimated 200 or so Jewish students, it remains the most vivid example of how the pro-Palestinian protest movement transformed the campus into a social minefield, leading some to feel isolated and at times fearful.
In March, the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a Jewish civil rights law firm based in Washington, D.C., filed its complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, alleging that the Cal Poly Humboldt administration had failed to address concerns that Jewish students had expressed repeatedly. The complaint detailed some of the more extreme incidents, including everything that happened on Oct. 7, 2024: the growling, the red paint, the “Zio Corner” circle.
“The University administration was present when this happened and did not respond to intervene to stop the targeted harassment of Jewish students,” the complaint read.
Also mentioned was an incident on Nov. 2, 2024, when vandals shattered the doors of the school’s Forbes Gymnasium and spray-painted slogans on the walls, including “KKK = IDF.”
Those were the only two incidents reported to campus police among the six total cited in the complaint. The university is still investigating both incidents, according to a July 3 email from spokesperson Aileen Yoo.
The Brandeis Center announced on May 27 that the DOE had launched an investigation into the complaint. Yoo confirmed that the university had been sent notice of the investigation by the Office for Civil Rights, but had received no further communication from the DOE as of early July.
Extremism on campus
The Brandeis complaint provided a window into the kind of hostile behavior Jewish students have faced on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus.
Those who speak up expose themselves to harassment, intimidation and exclusion. Mink, Hagag and Yuval Bochner Loewenberg, also a member of the Jewish student group, told J. they struggle to find common ground with the most vocal protesters on campus, only some of whom are thought to be students.
Loewenberg, who will begin his sophomore year in the fall, said he has prepared talking points that he can use when confronted by protesters, and is hopeful that such an approach will open avenues for productive discourse.
“My five first cousins are currently in the IDF, and I pray for their safety. And yet, I also pray for the safety of the Palestinian people, because they are not the ones who should be hurting from this, just as the Israelis aren’t the ones who should be hurting from this,” he said.
In February 2024, Kira Trinity, then a graduate psychology student, worked with an art student to paint over anti-Israel graffiti in the art building’s bathroom.
Over slogans reading “Free Palestine,” “Land back” and “Our solidarity is their greatest fear,” the two painted a pro-peace mural, depicting two girls holding hands: one wearing a shirt with the Israeli flag, and the other wearing a shirt with the Palestinian flag.
Days later, the mural had been defaced. The words “IS-NOT-REAL” and “LAND BACK!!!” were scrawled on the Israeli flag, according to Trinity.
“It’s really, really devastating,” said Trinity, who is Jewish and has lived in Arcata for 20 years. “I live here because it’s supposed to be a ‘love and peace’ community.”
Some activists on campus take extreme anti-Israel positions, including voicing support for Hamas.
Weeks after the tabling confrontation, in late October 2024, Mink discovered a troubling booklet among a pile of zines displayed outside of the university’s Latin American cultural center, known as “El Centro.”
“The best thing we can do to be in solidarity with Palestinians,” the booklet read, “is to utterly and absolutely attack (from the inside) at the war machine that is killing them, which is ‘America’ –– which is ‘The West’ –– which is ‘Israel.’”
“We should understand Hamas as a Palestinian organization created from the alleys of the refugee camps of Gaza that took on the mantle of armed struggle,” it continued.
The center promptly removed the zines from the display per requests from university administrators after they received emails from Mink showing the content, Yoo said in a June 10 email statement.
“Neither the University nor El Centro knows who produced and distributed the zines,” she said.
Jewish pro-Israel students hit a wall
After a turbulent fall semester, tensions between Jewish pro-Israel students and campus activists resurfaced in the spring when the university held a weeklong series in April to “honor student activism.”
The organizers, made up of students and faculty members, sought to offer a “healing space” for activists who were arrested during the pro-Palestinian protests in spring 2024. Called Global Awareness and Student Activism (GASA), it promised “teach-ins,” rallies, art galleries and “solidarity actions & performances.”
One of GASA’s main organizers was Rouhollah Aghasaleh, an assistant professor in the School of Education. Aghasaleh, who uses they/them pronouns, was present during the May 2024 takeover of Siemens Hall, where they said they had intended to guide student protesters on how to de-escalate with campus police. While at Siemens Hall, Aghasaleh was arrested and placed on a two-month suspension from teaching at the university.
From Aghasaleh’s perspective, the main goal of GASA was to convey a message to students: “Activism is not a crime, activism is encouraged, activism is intellectual, and also there are rules and guidelines to do activism on campus,” they told J. about one of the sessions that focused on the school’s time, place, and manner policy. “It was not a platform for activism; it was a time for training, networking, recruitment and also some healing.”
The GASA webpage featured a gallery of photos from the spring 2024 campus protests and building takeover captured by the protesters. Some images featured graffiti scrawled on campus buildings, from the hopeful (“Jews for peace and freedom in Palestine”) to the glorification of terror: “Intifada forever,” “Avenge the martyrs forever,” “I ❤️Hamas” and “Glory 2 armed resistance.”
Seeking to offer a balance in perspective by hosting their own GASA event, Mink and Loewenberg approached organizers about scheduling a screening of “October 8,” a documentary about the rise in anti-Israel animosity and antisemitism in the United States. A long retired Cal Poly Humboldt professor who was connected with GASA organizers and saw the request lashed out at the Jewish student group for taking part in the Brandeis Center complaint.
“It must feel good to have such a sense of entitlement and the political and financial capital to be able to do this,” the professor wrote in an April 11 email reviewed by J. “I wonder if you met with the current President to see how to resolve these incidents together with others different from you … before filing a formal complaint.”
“The former employee does not represent the University,” Yoo wrote in a July 3 email statement to J. “We do not have anything additional to add.”
Outside of the tense email exchange, Loewenberg and Mink were able to coordinate with Aghasaleh and schedule the “October 8” screening. Mink saw it as an opportunity to showcase Jewish activism and advocacy, in line with the main themes of GASA.
But a few days before the event, Aghasaleh notified the Jewish students that the screening would no longer be included in the GASA program.
The documentary “does not align with the goals and missions of GASA to celebrate and encourage activism. Please do NOT advertise it as such in any materials or announcements,” read an email from Aghasaleh dated April 21.
“I think that just really goes to show this double standard that people have for anti-Zionist vs. Zionist Jews,” Mink told J. in an April 28 interview, shortly before he graduated. “I’m still waiting for the faculty organizers and administrators to acknowledge, at the very least, the fact that we were excluded from the event week after being accepted into it.”
The Jewish students decided to proceed with the screening as a standalone event, drawing around 50 people.
Searching for common ground
The tension continued the next day, when a panel on multifaith approaches to activism was scheduled at the main university library on April 24.
Local Humboldt Chabad Rabbi Eliyahu Cowen had been invited to serve as a panelist by organizer Stephanie Corigliano, a lecturer in the School of Religious Studies. He arrived at campus and was locking up his bike when he checked his phone and saw an email from Corigliano. It informed him that the event had been canceled, 20 minutes before it was to begin.
Coriglianio did not respond to J.’s multiple requests for comment.
Since he was already on campus, Cowen decided to go to the library to meet any panelists and students who had shown up before the cancellation was announced.
Once he arrived, he encountered protesters who began pointing fingers and calling him out, he said. One played a recording from a November 2023 Arcata City Council meeting where Cowen had publicly condemned Hamas.
The same day as the canceled panel, a pro-Palestinian group posted the event flyer on social media and added “call to action: protest Zionist panelist.” Another group’s social media post that day included a video of Cowen at the city council meeting.
“He is known in this community for his harmful and anti-Palestinian racism and hatred, Zionist rhetoric he spews every chance he gets,” the post said.
At the time, the city was considering a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war — which the council ended up adopting in March 2024. Being a community leader for both Jewish students and residents of Arcata and nearby towns, Cowen decided to speak out at the meeting, he told J.
“Israel must do everything they can to help rid this evil from their midst, while doing their best to minimize casualties to righteous and innocent people living there. War is hell, definitely a last resort,” Cowen told the council over a jeering crowd, as the mayor called for order.
Cowen said that experience showed him a completely different side of Arcata, one he had never encountered in the 12 years he and his family have lived there. He’d always experienced local residents as “very warm, receptive and open.”
Cowen told J. he had initially been hesitant to participate in the GASA panel, but was convinced by the Jewish students who felt excluded from the conversation and encouraged him to represent their voices.
“I wanted to introduce a paradigm shift of what activism means, that it’s not a matter of marching down the street with banners, but actions are the main thing,” Cowen said. “Activism means activating in acts of goodness and kindness: the way you treat your neighbor, your roommate, the way you speak and act in a moral and honest way.”