Facing the Campus Protests: Three Personal Stories
by Maura Lerner Fisher
It may seem hard to believe that the recent outbreak of anti-Israel protests on college campuses could have a silver lining. And yet three young women from Bet Shalom who faced the turmoil up close, as students at different Midwestern universities, managed to find one.
We asked them to share what it was like this past year, when life on campus turned suddenly fraught. And in the midst of the chaos and sometimes frightening moments, one common theme emerged: how they all came through with even stronger ties to their Jewish heritage.
In some ways, it was an education they never expected. But the three college students who agreed to talk to us — Brenna Gross, Zoe Carter and Alex Stewart — clearly rose to the challenge.
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Brenna Gross, 19, a Bet Shalom newcomer who grew up in Maple Grove, just finished her freshman year at the University of Kansas. She admits that she was a little surprised when the protests hit her campus in Lawrence, Kansas this spring. “I was kind of naive to think it wouldn’t come to KU,” she said.
Shortly before final exams, dozens of protesters set up a pro-Palestinian tent encampment at the university. “In comparison to other campuses, it was smaller and wasn’t as bad,” she said. It didn’t turn violent, but the signs and chants to “globalize the intifada” were all the same. For Brenna, who had visited the site of the Nova Music Festival massacre in February during a Jewish Federation mission to Israel, the protests felt particularly painful. “It was heartbreaking to me to see how much hate there was for Israel,” she said.
Still, Brenna was heartened when Jewish students turned out in force to set up their own counter-protest across from the encampment. “People brought Israeli flags and hostage posters and Shabbat candles,” she said. It was a powerful contrast, she noted, with her side singing peace songs in Hebrew, “while the pro-Palestine side chanted hateful things.” For Brenna, it was also a moment of pride. The Jewish students were sending a message, she said, to “make sure the campus knew Jews were there to stay for good and not going to be quiet.”
This spring, she joined the board of a student group supporting Israel. And while some of her non-Jewish friends are very supportive, she said, she’s discovered an even tighter connection with her Jewish friends. “I’ve bonded with them so much more,” she said. “I can trust them, and I know that they get it.”
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Zoe Carter, 20, has belonged to Bet Shalom as long as she can remember, and just finished her sophomore year at Washington University in St. Louis. When the war began last October, she expected protests might erupt immediately on her politically-progressive campus, and was relieved when they didn’t. “Fall semester was pretty mellow,” she said. “And then, second semester, it just took off.”
By March, tension was building over a student-led campaign to pressure the university to divest from Boeing, which supplies weaponry to Israel. The university refused. Then the protests started escalating. There were dozens of arrests and some injuries as police clashed with pro-Palestinian protesters, Zoe said. But she never felt in danger herself until one day when the semester was nearing its end.
“The Saturday before finals started, I was studying in the library with one of my Jewish friends,” she recalled. “Suddenly we heard a bunch of chanting happening right outside the library. A couple of hundred people were gathered out (front), chanting ‘from the river to the sea,’ ‘intifada,’ waving Palestinian flags.”
When protesters started blocking the front doors, Zoe and her friend began looking for an escape route. “How do we basically get out of here and where do we go that is safe?” They were able to slip out through a back door and take refuge at the campus Hillel. “I was on edge for a few days after that,” Zoe said. “I didn’t go on campus the following day.”
When she returns this fall, she plans to work with a newly-formed Jewish advisory council on campus. “One of the reasons that this issue has so much weight is because there’s so much history with it, and college students who have been alive for give-or-take 20 years don’t understand that whole history,” she said. Now, she feels an obligation to try to educate her peers.
“I’ve always been a Zionist. I don’t know if I necessarily feel like it changed that, but I’ve definitely been more vocal about it,” Zoe said. “There’s power in numbers. The more people speaking out, the more powerful it is.”
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As president of Minnesota Hillel, Alex Stewart, 20, found herself “putting out little fires everywhere” this spring at the University of Minnesota, where she was finishing her junior year. Shortly after October 7, someone vandalized a Hillel poster board with photos of the Israeli kidnap victims. Before long, Jewish students were complaining about teachers openly venting their hostility toward Israel in class, even in courses that “had nothing to do with” the conflict. In a few cases, Alex said, students found themselves confronting “outwardly antisemitic” roommates, and “we had to help them find new housing.” The whole thing, she admits, “caught a lot of Jewish students off guard.”
In the spring, pro-Palestinian protesters set up a tent encampment and staged a “die in” in front of Coffman Memorial Union, the U’s main student hub, chanting and blocking the entrance. Walking to class, Alex saw “Glory to the resistance” chalked on sidewalks, next to drawings of terrorists with rifles. “It was the most insane thing you could ever imagine on a college campus,” she said.
For Alex, the clashes got even more personal when, as president of Hillel, she was mocked and heckled by protesters at a Board of Regents meeting, where students on both sides had been invited to speak. “We got completely verbally attacked by some protesters in front of the whole room,” she said. Yet she has no regrets about speaking out. “I would do this a million times over,” she said.
There were, she noted, some fledgling efforts to try to encourage a more civil dialogue about the war. But they were overwhelmed by the passions on campus. “In a perfect world, we’d have conversations with the other groups, the protesting groups,” she said.
Instead, she’s bracing for more conflict when school begins this fall. And she’s working to involve the U in a new international Hillel initiative to measure and combat antisemitism on campus. “I don’t think this is going to end anytime soon."