(RNS) — Campus protests over the war in Gaza last school year featured scenes of chaos around tent encampments with police crackdowns and student arrests.
Jewish establishment organizations then rushed in with headline-grabbing reports detailing an unprecedented spike in antisemitism and violence against Jewish students.
But as the new school year begins this month, and students settle in for a new school year, a new report from a Tufts University political scientist mostly sidesteps the politically charged questions of antisemitism, its definition and whether it’s being used to stifle free speech. Instead, it examined the social costs that the protests had on Jewish students.
The study, consisting of surveys of Jewish and non-Jewish students undertaken by College Pulse, an online survey research and analytics company, in 2022, as well as 2023 and 2024, offers a peek into the experiences of Jewish students before and after the start of the war in October last year.
It found that Jewish students on campus overwhelmingly supported a Jewish state in Israel. (Only 15% of Jewish students disagreed and an additional 15% to 25% said they weren’t sure.) But that support came at a price.
“On average, students feel physically very safe on campus, and that’s not what they’re worried about,” said Eitan Hersh, the report’s chief researcher and a professor of political science at Tufts. “The problem is really social, which is that most of the Jewish students have a view that is deemed a negative view by most people on campus.”
Students surveyed were asked if they have lost friends because of conflicting viewpoints over the Israel-Hamas conflict. Chart courtesy of Hersh & Lyss report
In 2024, more than half of Jewish students said they paid a social penalty for supporting Israel’s existence, up from 34% in 2022. Israel, to put it bluntly, was unpopular among most college students.
More specifically, in 2024, 24% of Jewish students said they hid their Jewish identity to fit in, up from 15% in 2022, and 33% said “people will judge me negatively if I participate in Jewish activities,” up from 19% in 2022.
In 2024, that social penalty also meant lost friendships: 39% of Jewish students who supported Israel said they had lost friends. (The same was true of Jewish opponents of the existence of Israel — 41% said they had lost friends over their beliefs.)
One Jewish student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not a part of the report, spoke to this dynamic.
“I’ve had a couple of friends that participated in the protests,” said the UNC junior. “Initially, I was fine with it. But then when I saw them in the quad chanting things like ‘globalize the intifada,’ I thought that that was sort of too far, and I think that those relationships sort of have broken down a little bit as a result of that.” (The phrase “globalize the intifada” is a pro-Palestinian slogan meaning “resist Israel’s oppression and occupation.”)
The Gaza war, which has dragged on for nearly 11 months, followed the Hamas attack on Israel that killed nearly 1,200 people and took some 250 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israel’s foreign ministry. Israel’s retaliation has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and has reduced the coastal strip to rubble, leaving 2 million people homeless, hungry and sick, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
The report found that non-Jewish students blamed Israel for the war and overwhelmingly sympathized with Palestinians. Both Jewish and non-Jewish students agreed their campus was more sympathetic to Palestinians.
Data from responses by Jewish students regarding whether or not they hide their Jewish identity. Chart courtesy of Hersch & Lyss report
Pro-Palestinian students were passionate about the issue. The report found that 21% of non-Jewish students said they didn’t want to be friends with Israel supporters. A small but growing number — 8% — said they avoided socializing with Jewish students altogether, up from 4% in 2023.
Len Saxe, a social psychologist at Brandeis University who has directed studies of students at university campuses, found something very similar in a study he did on hostility toward Jews on campus.
“What we concluded is that the hostility that Jewish students feel is not from the majority of the non-Jewish students, it’s from a much smaller group,” Saxe said. “The basic finding was that two thirds of (non-Jewish students) didn’t express any prejudice, but there’s a third that do.”
Jewish students, especially those who grew up within Jewish denominations, tended to blame Hamas for the war, rather than Israel. But their views on the war were nuanced.
“The students with the most robust Jewish background were both most supportive of the existence of Israel and also most critical of the government,” said Hersh. “It wasn’t hard for them to hold those two things in their head at the same time.”
But Hersh added, “If prior to Oct. 7 a student might have thought their position, which is I’m a Zionist but I don’t like the Israeli government, was socially acceptable, they realized that no, that’s not a socially acceptable position on campus.”
On Tuesday (Sept. 3), classes resumed at Columbia University, one of the campuses with the loudest disruptions last semester.
Some 50 pro-Palestinian demonstrators picketed outside the school’s main gates, urging students to boycott classes and handing out flyers accusing Columbia of being complicit in genocide, the New York Times reported.
Many campuses have new rules in place to tamp down on protests, and so far there are few signs that the activists are rebuilding momentum.
But the reality for Jewish students remains the same, Hersh said: “Jewish students have what is really a minority viewpoint on campus. This past year that minority viewpoint was highly salient.”