The students Teen Vogue spoke to for this piece report experiencing or witnessing harassment on their campus toward anti-Zionist activists, including those who are themselves Jewish. Emanuelle Sippy, 20, a Princeton University junior who led her school’s Shabbat for Ceasefire, tells Teen Vogue about an encounter she had while attending a pro-Palestine rally near her New Jersey campus. In a video from the October 28 event, a university staff member can be seen attempting to snatch Sippy’s phone, seemingly pulling some of her hair in the process, as the college paper The Daily Princetonian first reported.
In an email to The Daily Princetonian, a Princeton spokesperson wrote: “The University takes this matter seriously and has begun a review of the situation. We have reached out to a student involved to offer support and resources.”
The campus organization Sippy leads, Alliance for Jewish Progressives, has also been targeted by what has been dubbed a fleet of “doxxing trucks” sponsored by the Jewish Leadership Project. A Princeton University spokesperson declined to comment on these matters further for Teen Vogue.
Princeton is one of many campuses to see unrest stemming from these protests, and pro-Israel organizers, too, have experienced harassment. At Columbia University, for example, pro-Israel Jewish students were recently followed and yelled at to “go back to” Poland and Belarus, according to a report in the Columbia Spectator.
In a statement responding to those recent antisemitic incidents, Columbia University Apartheid Divest Coalition, the student group coalition behind the campus encampments, condemned any form of hate or bigotry and “stand[s] vigilant against non-students attempting to disrupt the solidarity being forged among students — Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, Jewish, Black, and pro-Palestinian classmates and colleagues who represent the full diversity of our country.”
Shabbat for Ceasefire organizers like Sabrina Ellis, a junior at the University of Los Angeles, say they feel like they’ve found that solidarity with their fellow anti-Zionist Jewish peers. She and the other Jewish young people that spoke to Teen Vogue for this story say that, even in instances when there was no explicit hostility, anti-Zionist students feel alienated in mainstream Jewish spaces, which they say are mostly Zionist. “You can’t agree to disagree on genocide,” Ellis says.