Margaux Jubin, a Jewish student at Emerson College, said the warm and welcoming environment she experienced on campus evaporated after Hamas’ October attack on Israel.
She said the student newspaper censored her from using the word “massacre” or describing Hamas as a terrorist organization in an op-ed. Shunned by onetime friends, she said protesters even blocked her from entering her dorm on Passover.
“I had people blowing cigarette smoke into my hair,” Jubin said. “When I was there with cameras, people would throw their keffiyeh over my camera. People backed me into a corner.”
Israeli colleges and private Jewish universities in the United States are marketing themselves as safe havens for students and faculty alike amid rising safety concerns on college campuses. Public colleges in Texas and Florida are easing transfer pathways and extending deadlines to draw in disaffected students.
Brandeis University in Waltham recently bought a full-page ad in The New York Times to promote itself as a refuge for Jewish students and extended its transfer deadline to May 31.
“This is the hate of the flavor of the moment,” said Brandeis President Ron Liebowitz in an interview days after this year’s commencement.
In an open letter, Liebowitz promised a campus free of “Jew hatred.”
“It’s pervasive and it ranges from chants that can get under some people’s skin to actual physical violence we’ve seen on several campuses,” Liebowitz said.
A Brandeis spokesperson said 90 students had applied to transfer in the extra weeks to apply past its typical deadline — and a third identified as Jewish, according to the admissions office. Overall, it saw a nearly 20% bump over “typical” transfer applications.
MIT undergrad Quinn Perian, a member of the campus organization Jews for Ceasefire, expressed concern about the offer of a safe haven.
“It’s really dangerous to everyone, including and especially Jewish students, to be phrasing student activism as ‘antisemitic’ or something that one needs to be away from to be safe from,” Perian said.
For his organizing, he said he’s been called a “fake Jew” — which he dismissed.
“We’re striving to create a campus where we can actually focus on instances of antisemitism that are happening — that are actual antisemitism — and not just students protesting,” Perian said in an interview in his dorm room, just days after the encampment at MIT was removed by police last month.
Defining antisemitism is a core problem. Some Jewish students and faculty view the ongoing protests and criticism of the state of Israel — including attacks on its right to exist — as antisemitic.
Across MIT’s campus, Maya Makarovski packed up her dorm for the year, but predicted that antisemitism will persist on campus in the fall.
“It’s hard for non-Jews to look at it and say, ‘This is antisemitism,’ but it really is just this covert new form where they’re not going to call you a kike, but they’ll call you a Zionist as if it’s some dirty word or something,” she said.
Makarovski said she appreciates the offer of a refuge but worries about leaving the small Jewish community at MIT.
“If this is how they act when we’re here, God forbid we see how they act when we’re not here,” she said.
Computer scientist Mauricio Karchmer, who is Jewish, left his dream job at MIT earlier this year, citing antisemitism.
“It’s not easy to leave,” said Karchmer, who now teaches at Yeshiva University in New York.
He said he didn’t approve of how Jewish students were being treated by pro-Palestinian protesters in Cambridge.
“After October 7, when they needed the most comfort, not only were they not offered a shoulder — they were vilified,” he said.
Karchmer said he isn’t sure the situation will improve, because many other faculty don’t think there’s anything to fix.
Miriam Blue, executive director of the Hillel Council of New England that connects Jewish students through clubs at several Boston-area campuses, said some students are also choosing to return to Florida because “things are seemingly a lot easier for Jewish students in Florida state schools.”
“But it’s an individual decision,” she said. “I can’t tell someone that they can absolutely feel 100% safe anywhere, or that the grass is greener somewhere else and they’re going to have a much better experience.”
She said, if students want to stay in Boston and New England, her organization will work to help them feel safe.
But Jubin, the Emerson student, has already moved on. In March, while visiting her family in Israel, she decided to transfer to a college in the Tel Aviv area.
In September, she’ll begin her studies at Reichman University, Israel’s first private university.
