When I read Tom Gjelten’s piece “No Room for Dissent in the Newsroom?” published in Moment’s November/December 2024 issue, it brought back memories of working on my college paper. I was not surprised to read that other students have encountered antisemitic attitudes, which had been brewing well before October 7, 2023.
In the 2021 spring semester, I was a sophomore pursuing a degree in journalism. I joined my university’s student-run newspaper as an assistant news editor. I felt as if I had finally found the place where I fit in. But toward the end of my first semester at the paper, I almost dropped out.
In 2021, for the third consecutive year, a swastika was drawn on a residential building on campus. One of the news editors wrote an article about the incident, but I wanted to write a larger piece reporting on antisemitism on campus. I had been hearing anecdotally about an increasing number of incidents and wanted to see if that was true. When I pitched the article, the editor-in-chief of the paper said I should write it as an opinion piece. I was confused. It wasn’t just my opinion. It was the very real lived experience of students on campus. This was left unresolved, but she let me work on the piece on the condition that she would see it before it went into the newspaper’s design layout.
In my reporting, I quoted a student who was assigned an exam on Rosh Hashanah. She had asked the professor if they could change the date of the exam or allow her to take it after the holiday. The professor said if she didn’t take the exam either before or on the day, she would receive an incomplete. The student argued she shouldn’t be penalized for observing a religious holiday. The professor told her that she needed to provide proof that she was Jewish.
My school had a “No Hate” series of lectures put on by the Cultural Center addressing racism and other forms of hate. A statement from the university administration read: “The University, through the Cultural Center and the Division of Student Affairs, offers a wide variety of events and programs on issues related to identity, race, ethnicity, religion, history and culture. These events range from the “Issues in Judaism” lecture series and events reflecting on the experiences of Holocaust survivors to speeches by authors and journalists such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Charles Blow, and are often sponsored in partnership with campus organizations, including Hofstra Hillel.” None of these authors and journalists spoke about antisemitism.
In my story, I quoted a student who questioned why antisemitism wasn’t included in the “No Hate” series and who insisted that it should be “seeing that antisemitism is prevalent in the United States and on this campus.”
Other students I interviewed expressed trepidation about discussing Israel in front of their classmates. One student in particular wanted to do a public speaking assignment on her experience living in Israel but changed the topic of her project at the last minute out of fear.
The upper management, consisting of the editor-in-chief and the managing editor, looked over my antisemitism piece before our print deadline, which they never did for any other article. They completely shot it down and insisted once again it be reworked as an opinion piece. The news team supported me and went back and forth with upper management in a Slack group chat that I could see. I remember the editor-in-chief and managing editor twisting my words and saying that I said things that I didn’t say. The messages were being sent in the group chat for hours and I didn’t want to respond emotionally.
The next morning I responded in the group chat that I was not willing to rework my reported article as an opinion piece, saying that to do so would take away from the experiences that students had faced or the feelings they had felt. The piece never ran, and after that experience, I almost left the newspaper. However, it was nearing the end of the school year, and the upper management was graduating. After they left, the environment didn’t feel toxic anymore, but another article on antisemitism wasn’t attempted. I’m glad I stayed because the news section was like my family.
After October 7, 2023, the former editor-in-chief unfollowed me on Instagram (big surprise there). When Hamas attacked Israel, I was in my last semester of graduate school. I was no longer a part of the newspaper for other reasons. Over the last year after I graduated in December 2023, I have wondered whether that is a good or bad thing that I had not still been at the newspaper during that period. The campus protests didn’t start until after I graduated, and on some level, I was grateful to not be there. On another level, I wish I had been because I know that I would have been the only voice that would have shared a perspective that no one wanted to hear–the only voice at my college paper who would have supported Israel.
And so I was encouraged to read Tom Gjelten’s thoroughly and thoughtfully reported piece–which, it goes without saying, is not an opinion piece. Antisemitism is still prevalent on campuses and might be getting worse, but I’m proud that there are Jewish students who are still willing to stand up for what they believe in (as seen in Moment’s recent piece on Stanford) and fight for what they think is right–even if the majority of people tell them it’s wrong.