Jewish students in the Ivy League, I’m here to offer an invitation: Come to the South, where you’ll be safe.
It’s manifestly not safe to be an Ivy League Jew. A prominent Columbia rabbi “strongly” advised Jewish students to go home and not come back: It’s become clear “Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme antisemitism and anarchy,” Rabbi Elie Buechler told students this week over WhatsApp.
And no wonder. An anti-Israel protester near the Columbia campus yelled at counterprotesters holding Israeli flags, “Go back to Poland!” and “Go back to Belarus!” The marcher waved the Palestinian flag in their faces and said, “Get the hell out of here!”
“Columbia is basically now Hamas with a bad football program,” one wag tweeted.
If demonstrators were yelling at black students, “Go back to Africa,” President Biden would have given a national address, at least if his underlings were able to get his medications right. But as I write this, he hasn’t even tweeted.
And it’s not just Columbia. At Yale, a Jewish student was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag wielded by an anti-Israel protester after fellow marchers blocked building entrances.
She and a friend were singled out because they were wearing Hasidic Jewish attire and surrounded by members of the pro-Palestinian mob. As The Post reported, the student “said she tried to report the assault to campus police but they told her there was nothing they could do.”
Harvard has been just as bad. Facing a congressional probe over widespread antisemitism and failure to protect Jewish students, it’s been doing its best to stonewall.
Jews who put out menorahs for Hanukkah had to take them away each night for safekeeping to avoid vandalism, but when pro-Palestinian students put up a display Harvard provided 24/7 security.
Penn, even as it tries to fire professor Amy Wax for criticizing affirmative-action policies, has hired an antisemitic cartoonist, Dwayne Booth, to teach this fall.
“One cartoon depicts Zionists sipping Gazan blood from wine glasses, a version of the ancient blood libel employed in anti-Semitic propaganda,” the Free Beacon reports.
Acts and threats of violence are all over, and it’s not just the Ivy League: At Berkeley, a female freshman was choked during a pro-Palestinian protest, and pro-Palestinian protesters mobbed a dinner at the law dean’s house.
They also published flyers showing the dean, who is Jewish, sipping blood from a wine glass.
Back in 1938, Nazis blocked the entrance to the University of Vienna to keep out Jews. Something eerily similar is happening at our nation’s allegedly elite universities.
(As Jim Treacher says, “A keffiyeh on an American college campus is just a hipster swastika.”)
My advice to Jewish students at these institutions: Come on down. At schools like mine, the University of Tennessee, in red states, such intimidation, harassment and lawlessness aren’t tolerated.
In my city of Knoxville, after Hamas’ Oct. 7 rape/torture/murder/kidnapping spree, we had a pro-Israel rally attended by all our major civic leaders. The allegedly elite schools had marches in support of Hamas.
In the red states, support for Israel isn’t controversial. In our allegedly elite northeastern and California universities it can get you mobbed.
So why stay?
Sure, you’ll miss the good parts of New York or Cambridge (or . . . Philadelphia?). But red-state college towns are full of excellent bars, restaurants, music venues, theaters and other amenities of civilized living. (And at much more reasonable prices.)
People are friendly, and many of these schools have a lively Jewish presence and would welcome more. Maybe the degrees aren’t from Columbia, but the way things are going, is that so bad?
And amenities aside, most important, you won’t be surrounded by people who hate Jews, people who are enabled, if not encouraged, by university administrations dependent on the full-tuition revenues of hate-filled foreign students and their governments. (If foreign money is corrupting our universities to this extent, maybe we should shut it off.)
So why stay where you’re abused and threatened? Come on down. We’d love to have you.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
