Jewish college students subjected to dangerous levels of nuance

NEW YORK, NY—According to recent data released by the Anti-Defamation League, the climate on American college campuses for Jewish students is becoming unbearable since the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks, as these students are exposed to toxic amounts of nuanced, detailed information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Whereas prior to October 7, 15.6% of Jewish college students reported having a thorough understanding of Israel, surveys show that the proportion of Jewish students fathoming complex analyses of the land’s history has skyrocketed to 15.8%.

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt is troubled by the presence of multiple people’s narratives on college campuses, explaining, “In order for Jewish students to remain safe on campus, it is imperative that campus policies protect their worldview from scrutiny. Lately, too many Jewish students are hearing anti-Semitic slurs like, ‘Green Line’ and ‘internally displaced persons.’ They should be kept safe from anti-Israel groups trying to harass them with information like the death toll of the current war in Gaza.”

Jewish student leaders have been experiencing this firsthand. According to Harvard Hillel President Amy Tov, “It’s been really exhausting lately. Before, all we’d have to say is, ‘Israel has a right to defend itself,’ but now we have to go out of our way to explain why indiscriminate bombing in the Gaza Strip, dehumanizing security checkpoints in the West Bank, and a little genocide waged here and there against Palestinians are actually good things. All this nuance is making me sound like an asshole, and I hate it.”

In a disturbing phenomenon that researchers are calling, “internalized reality,” some Jewish students have been so deeply affected by this wave of informational incidents that they’ve been adopting some of the poisonous nuance themselves. NYU student Hadasah Binah told the Jewish Logarithm, “It’s been hard, but lately I just can’t stop thinking about how some Palestinians have committed terrorist acts and taken hostages that are still in Gaza but also all of them are people and maybe Israel has been maintaining control over Palestinian lands and lives with discriminatory laws and land alienation—” We can’t remember what else she said because we got vertigo.



Hillel International has long enforced policies on permissible speech about Israel at campus Hillel events, which state that partners and speakers cannot, for example, “deny the right of Israel to pretend hummus isn’t an Arab dish” or “promote hostile attitudes toward Taylor Swift’s music.” However, since people who are not Jewish lately are talking about Israel—which, you know, what gives those fuckers the right?—the Standards of Partnership have not proven to be enough. Hillel International President and CEO Adam Lehman explained what Hillel is doing now to help protect Jewish students from having to develop any more neurons in the parts of their brains that store information about Israel. “We’ve been working with universities to establish policies and guidelines to promote civil yet uncritical dialogue about Israel. Our main bit of advice is that sentences about Israel should center on adjectives, not verbs. A great example would be, ‘Israel good; Hamas bad’—or, better yet, ‘Us good; them bad.’ We know there is an urgent threat because we’re even hearing Jews utter sentences like, ‘Eighty-six destroyed Palestinian villages are now the sites of forests planted by the Jewish National Fund.’ Sentences with three verbs like that one are not acceptable.”

Greenblatt of the ADL stresses that Jewish students should feel empowered to greet nuance with a firm, “Shut up.” He cites, for example, “So the other day some self-hating Jew asked me, ‘Hey, Jonathan, is it possible that some of the antisemitic incidents you’re compiling are actual antisemitic incidents, while another huge chunk are just plain old criticisms of Israel?’, and I told that bitch to sheket b’vakasha.”