Meirav Solomon was torn about whether to join Gaza War protests on her campus at Tufts University a year ago. She says never shied from activism but she found herself “with a foot in both camps.”
Both her parents are rabbis and she has personal connections to Israelis and Palestinians. She heard antisemitic chants from protesters including friends and felt they “maybe didn’t understand what they were saying.”
“I was on campus in an incredibly nuanced and gray situation in which I didn’t really feel like I was a part of anyone’s community,” said Solomon.
Few may have seen nuance in that fraught time, but Solomon now has this certainty: she doesn’t support the Trump administration’s moves against universities and their faculty, staff and students in what it calls a fight against antisemitism. She says Jewish students like her are being used as cover for undemocratic acts and to wrest control of universities.
“The Trump administration’s policies right now are doing nothing to make me feel safer, make my friends feel safer, Jewish, non-Jewish, Muslim, Arab,” said Solomon, a student leader with the progressive group J Street U. “This is a time when we need to be building coalitions and not excluding people.”
Solomon is part of a rising chorus of voices around the country from student and faculty groups to Jewish organizations that say antisemitism can’t be tackled by defunding colleges, penalizing free speech and revoking student visas.
They are speaking out a year after opponents of the war in Gaza set up clusters of tents with Palestinian flags, and anti-Israel, anti-Zionist slogans at Boston-area schools like Tufts, Emerson College, Northeastern University and MIT. Some schools called in police to clear out the encampments and more than 150 students were arrested.
In early February, the Trump administration created a “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” with a priority to “root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.”
The Trump administration is freezing funds to achieve their goals. They’ve put dozens of schools on notice that they’re under investigation and froze more than $2 billion in grants to Harvard for not complying with the administration’s demands.
Critics say this will set back research and discovery but not antisemitism, which some surveys show is increasing on many campuses.
"The Trump administration’s policies right now are doing nothing to make me feel safer, make my friends feel safer, Jewish, non-Jewish, Muslim, Arab"Tufts student Meirav Solomon
Jonathan Feingold, a professor at the Boston University School of Law, said funding cuts will weaken schools’ ability not only to fight antisemitism but any forms of racism. He said universities are the places for “messy” dialogue and where students can learn how to listen despite disagreement.
He said many of those advocating for Palestinian human rights are Jewish students and faculty, something he thinks has been missed by the media.
“Pretty early on we were hearing a pretty dominant narrative that the pro-Palestine protest and advocacy was somehow anti-Jewish, which I think just misrepresented the broad diversity of Jewish community members and sort of where they were positioned within the story,” Feingold said.
Feingold is a co-founder of Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff - Boston Area, a group that does not believe criticism of the state of Israel and its policies is antisemitic. He hopes his organization will “uplift this diversity of Jewish perspectives on campus.”
“Some of them feel like their identity is calling them to advocate for Palestinian human rights, and others view that advocacy as somehow anti-Jewish,'' Feingold said. ”There’s clearly division within the Jewish community on that point.”
Many students of varied perspectives have found common ground in support for Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts graduate student from Turkey who in late March was swept off the street by plainclothes federal agents and is now in a detention facility.
Öztürk’s lawyers say the Trump administration is using an op-ed she co-wrote for a school paper calling on Tufts to divest from Israel as justification for canceling her student visa and moving to deport her. The student groups Tufts Republicans and Tufts Democrats recently issued a “bipartisan statement” expressing their concern.
One student from Northeastern University, who identifies as Orthodox Jewish, said he didn’t want his name used out of fear for the personal safety of a close friend on a student visa. He said Öztürk’s writings in no way merited her arrest and “is not making anyone safer.”
“I’m happy that some of the Jewish groups on campus have recognized this fact and have come out against it,’’ he said.
He called that “a very important example of solidarity that we need in the current moment.” And he thinks listening to students would be a better start to combating antisemitism on campus.
“If they’re willing to actually engage with Jewish students and ask them what risks they felt, I think the answer would be probably not the student who co-authored an op-ed,” he said.
Meirav Solomon points to the irony of deporting people in the name of Jewish safety, when throughout history Jews have had to flee persecution.
She feels strongly that deporting people without due process in the name of “Jewish safety” is not good for the Jewish community.
“Jews will be, I’m not just saying could be, I’m saying will be, targeted unfairly because of our association, unfortunately, with these disastrous policies,” she said. “It should make every Jew scared.”
Arthur Mansavage, a student at Emerson College, said that while he largely disagreed with what Öztürk wrote, he thinks the government crossed “a huge line … all in the name of trying to fight antisemitism.”
Mansavage, who is on the board of Emerson’s chapter of the Jewish student organization Hillel, worries the action could provoke extremists to be more aggressive.
“If anything, it’ll only make it worse and make way for other groups,’’ he said, “like far-right extremist groups.”
When Mansavage reflects on last year’s protests at Emerson, he said he wished he’d handled them differently. He said he heard plenty of antisemitic rhetoric from protesters, but ultimately moved to a hotel because he lived near the protests and couldn’t sleep.
He said he decided to show his support for Israel and walked out of his dorm with an Israeli flag to stand across from the encampment. He was surrounded by shouting protesters, he said, and someone tried to take the flag from him. Looking back he wishes his actions had been more productive and less provocative.
“I understand that holding the Israel flag at some points … could be seen as like a thing to just piss people off,” Mansavage said. “I wish I would have tried to talk to more people before even doing something like that.”
He said people are often misinformed or know little about what they’re protesting.
“They see something on social media and then they’re like, ‘Let’s hit the streets.’” Mansavage said, “I think it should be a lot more conversation focused and community building focused and educating people about Jewish people.”
Margaux Jubin also was at Emerson last year. Jubin, who is Jewish, said she was blocked from her dorm by pro-Palestinian protesters and received “daily hate messages” from peers for her support of Israel. The experience spurred her to transfer schools, and she said it “solidified” her commitment to advocating for Israel.
Jubin believes that the threats of funding cuts by the Trump administration have forced schools to act more swiftly against antisemitism.
“I think it’s finally sounded the alarm and people are scared, which unfortunately that’s what needed to happen in order for action to take place,” said Jubin.
She also maintains that criticizing Israel’s right to exist is anti-Jewish, but she agrees with those who say criticizing the nation’s policies is not.
“I’m the first person, and my Jewish peers alike, are the first people to join a conversation about the Israeli government, offer our own critiques, offer ways that we are disappointed,” Jubin said.
Laura Shaw Frank, national director of the American Jewish Committee’s Center for Education Advocacy, said professors need to be trained not to impose political beliefs on students and instead focus on viewpoint diversity and critical thinking.
The organization released a survey earlier this year which found nearly a third of American Jewish college students think faculty have “fueled” a learning environment hostile to Jews.
“So, we think that that is a major thing that needs to happen. We also think that Jews are a very misunderstood and under-understood population in American society,” said Shaw Frank.
The Northeastern student, who requested anonymity, says the current moment has created a “heightened climate of political risk” for those who speak in support of the Palestinian cause — and lowered the opportunity for thoughtful discussion.
“The fact that I’m speaking to you anonymously right now, I think, kind of shows that the thing I fear most is certainly not what my fellow students are saying at a protest,” he said. ”It is the administration’s actions. And I hope that speaks loudest of all.”
