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Touro Talks are timely conversations engaging college students, thought leaders and experts from around the world on academic and contemporary issues. Hosted by Touro University president, Dr. Alan Kadish.
Touro Talks is sponsored by Robert and Arlene Rosenberg. If you would like to sponsor, please email tourotalks@touro.edu
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[Dr. Alan Kadish] Welcome, everyone. And we have four speakers tonight, two students and two faculty members at universities around the country. And tonight, we'll be talking about antisemitism and protests on college campuses. And to begin with, we'd like to hear the personal experiences of each of our participants.
Rather than introducing all four at once, I'll introduce each of them as they begin their presentation. And as it appears on the flyer and with a-- perhaps alphabetical order, we'll start with Dr. Bar-Halpern, who's Director of Intensive Outpatient Treatment Service at the Boston Child Study Center and is a clinical instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School.
She provides consultation and professional workshops nationally and internationally about evidence-based treatment of psychiatric disease. She earned a bachelor's degree at Tel Aviv University and a doctorate at the University of Hartford. She offers therapy and training in both English and Hebrew. Welcome, Dr. Bar-Halpern, and tell us what your experience on the Harvard campus and at your Study Center has been over the past few months.
[Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern] Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'll start by saying I'm not on the Harvard campus. I'm treating people from Harvard and assisting some of the medical faculty there to just navigate this really difficult time.
So I'm a clinical psychologist. What I see in my clinic is what we're all experiencing, but the other side of it. I'm seeing people that are feeling scared, hopeless. I'm seeing trauma, a lot of it. I'm seeing people that are afraid to leave their dorms and leave their house sometimes. And I see Jewish people that are afraid of being Jewish. I see people that are-- they need to decide between safety and their Jewish identity.
So for a few examples, in my clinic at Boston Child Study Center, I've been seeing people that were affected after October 7 from Massachusetts area. And other than the Israeli group, a lot of Jewish-American. From the Jewish community, some of the students are saying that they're afraid of leaving their dorms, that they lost friendships, they were kicked out of different study groups. They're saying that they can't go in the hallway without being triggered when people are calling globalized Intifada.
For Israeli students, for that specific thing, globalized Intifada basically means the trigger of their past. Some of them, including me, we lived through the Intifada. We were afraid of taking the bus. We were afraid of opening the newspaper in the morning.
So when you live in that environment and then you're expected as a student to do your finals and complete your work, it's almost impossible. You're constantly in a hypervigilant state. Your fight-flight-freeze reaction is on. You can't expect students to actually study for their finals when their prefrontal cortex is not working.
And then you have parents, and you have parents that are afraid for their kids' lives. They have parents that are worried about their kids' graduation and about their education in general. And an interesting piece that I want to mention, not only Jewish. I see a few people that are affected by it that are not Jewish at all.
One of my client mentioned that they feel completely alone and isolated because they're against those protests, and they're worried about some of their friends. And they're in this weird situation where if they're going to go to the protest, they're betraying some of their good friends. And if they're not going to be in the protest, they're not going to be invited anywhere anymore. They're going to be the others.
I just met the other day with the father of a client that, again, non-Jewish, that their kid is going to protest, and the father is against it. And that creates some conflict within the family as well.
So I think we're seeing something that I definitely never experienced before as a third-generation Holocaust survivor. Those are the stuff that I grew up on from my grandparents. I'm a trauma clinician, so speaking from trauma lens, our trauma network is activated.
This sits on a lot of transgenerational trauma for a lot of people. Specific phrases are going to be triggering. Safety is not something to take for granted. A lot of my patients are saying that they're looking for a friend to tell them, are you going to be my safe place? Can I hide in your house? 2024, and Jewish people are asking, can I hide in your house? That's where we're at right now.
This is in college campuses. Like I said, it's also in families. We're seeing ripped apart families. I have a few clients that came for family therapy because the parents and the child cannot agree about Zionism. They can't sit on Friday dinner. They can't have a conversation about it.
So there's a lot of effect. There is effect of the mental and the well-being. And if this is going to continue, we're going to see a long-lasting effect on anything related to mental health, physical health. You know, I'm thinking about the ACE studies when people were under stress for a long period of time.
We're getting there. It didn't start on October 7. We're just seeing more of the ripple effect of what happened when people are not educated enough and using hate and calling it free speech.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Let me-- I know you're seeing people who are specifically traumatized, but in speaking with them, do you have a sense of how pervasive this is?
[Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern] This goes--
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Because you're seeing the ones who are troubled, obviously. So my question is, do you sense-- have a sense of how pervasive this is?
[Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern] This is going deep. I think for most of the Jewish population, definitely all the Israeli population, we all experienced secondary trauma after October 7. No doubt.
You know, when I started seeing people-- individuals from Massachusetts, I was trying to organize the mental health support for the individuals here with a group of amazing therapists. We did it for free. We just wanted to help. And it was very interesting. It shifted from the first month or so, this acute stress of, is my family safe? What's going to happen? Almost like this existential existence. What is going to happen?
And then it shifted to, what's happening here in the US? What's happening around the world? Am I safe as a Jewish person? So it's not just about October 7 anymore. We're seeing people that are having trouble concentrating, trouble sleeping. They might not meet full criteria for PTSD, but there's definitely symptoms out there for almost everybody that I've been seeing.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Great. Thank you so much. We'll get a chance to talk a little bit more after we've heard from each of our speakers. Let's go to one of the students next. Talia Segal actually is now no longer a candidate, but apparently they've had-- you've graduated from Georgia Tech, correct?
So Talia was a biomedical engineering student at Georgia Tech and served as president of Hillel. She's been a member of Hillel International Leadership and has served as an advocate for Jewish students. So tell us a little bit about-- Georgia Tech hasn't been in the news as much as some other campuses. Tell us a little bit what it's been like at Georgia Tech.
[Talia Segal] Yeah. First, thank you so much for having me. I think Georgia Tech is really a historically apolitical campus, and so we really haven't seen any of those more extreme protests or encampments, things like that, on our campus. It was also that our semester was ending earlier, and so things were wrapping up. People were studying for finals when a lot of that was happening around the country.
But even here, we saw protests where Hamas and Hezbollah were praised. And I think we shrugged it off because we knew that things could be so much worse. But to have to be OK with that is pretty absurd, I think.
And then to speak to what Dr. Bar-Halpern said, which I think was really a good overview, is this level of emotional safety that we're dealing with. Even at Georgia Tech where students haven't had an issue feeling physically unsafe, I think a lot of us are just kind of constantly on edge.
We're not really sure who we can talk to about what. We've been pushed out of certain other communities that we once found sort of peace and friendships in. For example, in the queer community at GT, there was a big argument in the group chat about Zionism and things like that. And it was very othering for me and several of my friends in that chat. And so having to pick and choose between our communities is really frustrating and harmful.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] How many Jewish students are there at Georgia Tech?
[Talia Segal] I believe around 500. We have kind of a small but mighty, tight-knit Jewish community.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] And how many of the students would you say have really felt this viscerally in terms of being excluded, being-- even if indirectly harassed, from the way you describe it?
[Talia Segal] Yeah. I think at least to some degree, probably 100. And then really closely feeling it, I think the group is closer to 20 or so. Those are just my rough estimates.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Sure. Well, you're in a great position to make those estimates, so thank you. We'll be back with you in a moment when we have some more conversation.
The next speaker is going to be Professor Oren Gross. Welcome. Oren Gross is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and the Irving Younger Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota. He also works at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. He's an expert in international law, security law, the Middle East, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
He holds a degree from Tel Aviv University, graduating first in his class, and degrees from Harvard Law School. He served as a Senior Legal Advisory Officer in the International Branch of the Israeli Defense Forces, JAG, or Judge Advocate General's Corps. I guess to start with in this introduction, Professor Gross, perhaps you could just tell us a little bit about what's been going on campus at Minnesota.
[Oren Gross] Sure. Thank you very much, Dr Kadish. And thank you for putting this together. And thank you for the audience for taking the time to be here today.
I want to start off by saying kind of where I speak from. I'm not going to speak as the Associate Dean of the law school. I'm going to speak as a Jewish leader on campus, as a Jewish professor, as an Israeli professor, a Zionist professor, and a professor in one of the universities who unfortunately signed one of the shameful appeasement agreements with the protesters.
And what I want to do is maybe look at some of the arguments. What's going on the ground, we all know, but some of the arguments that we've been hearing from faculty, from students that are protesting on the ground and take some of those arguments apart.
So one type of argument is that what we're dealing with is a peaceful protest that is an expression of free speech. And I would argue, seeing what's happening in Minnesota, seeing what's happening in other universities, that this is anything but peaceful. It could be peaceful in the sense that maybe no immediate violence is taking place, although in some places, such as Columbia, we've also seen violence.
But there's hateful, there's threatening rhetoric, and there are threatening actions. To give some examples certainly from my campus we've seen messages that are publicly on display, praising the Intifada. As we all know, in the two previous Intifadas, thousands of Israeli civilians lost their lives in acts of terror. Declaring, and I quote, "Nothing but hate for Israel and Zionism," and again, quote, "Death to Zionism," and expressly vowing that solidarity means attack and by any means necessary under an image of an armed figure.
And especially in the aftermath of October 7, there is no mistaking in what that actually means. Those statements, if they were not bad enough, when you add to them the blocking of entrance and passage to Jewish students and faculty, they really bring back images straight from 1930s Germany.
Now, one of the arguments that we've been hearing in the last few days is that it is right to be concerned about genuine antisemitism, but this is not genuine antisemitism. The implication is, in other words, that what we witness, what we see on campus is not genuine antisemitism.
Now, there is an obvious issue with expunging, if you will, calls to violence by any means against Jews as somehow not genuine. But there's a bigger issue here, and that is, who gets to call and to determine what is and what is not genuine antisemitism?
And in fact, all other minority groups are given priority and frequently exclusivity in calling out speech, threats, acts that target them. BIPOC students call out racial animus. Women call out misogyny and sexual harassment. LGBTQ+ call out homophobia and transphobia, as it should be.
But when it comes to Jews, matters change. Jews are not only not given exclusivity in calling out antisemitism. They're often not even given any voice at all in doing so. So the lived experience of Jews and of Jews alone is ignored and erased.
Moreover, I would say even when the possibility of antisemitism is somehow acknowledged, it is immediately mitigated. When you talk about racism, you don't say racism and. But it has become a token that when you talk about antisemitism, you immediately say antisemitism and. Antisemitism and Islamophobia, antisemitism and something else, for fear that if you just say antisemitism that, you know, is not good enough.
If the same vitriol, the same conduct were directed at any other group, no context would have been sought. It would have been clear that this needed to be shut down.
So we move to the next argument that we've seen in Minnesota and in other places. Fear not, we are told, I was told recently by several colleagues, because some of my best friends, if you will, are Jewish, or in the current Jewish version, JVP, Jewish Voice for Peace, or INN, If Not Now, are with us. And since they're Jewish, they cannot be anti-Semitic. And since our cause is their cause, we are not anti-Semitic either.
This is, of course, the wonderful as a Jew crowd. I'm not going to talk about the useful idiots and maybe beyond. We can talk more about this later on.
But what I would say is that Israel is central to Jewish identity, something that not only Jewish tradition, values, history, affinity, religion, culture tell us, but also the overwhelming majority of Jews throughout history and those living today. Rejecting the right of the Jewish people and only the Jewish people to self-determination, which is, after all, what Zionism is about, means that JVP-- by the way, I have not heard of a PVP-- and the like no longer identify themselves, if you will, as Jews in any real and meaningful sense, or maybe they are as Jewish as Jews for Jesus are. They are what Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy have termed un-Jews.
There is one last thing that I want to mention, and we have seen this in Minnesota kind of in a manifest way, and that is even if there is a recognition that some sort of antisemitism took place, it is treated as low on the hierarchy of offense.
The subjection, if you will, of antisemitism to perceived higher forms of offense was made clear in a statement by a professor at my university, University of Minnesota, who was a candidate recently for the position of Associate Dean for DEI in the College of Liberal Arts. And they called into question the rape of Israeli women and girls by Hamas terrorists because it was racist to say that Hamas-- that is, men of color-- committed rape.
Forget MeToo. Ignore We Believe You. Those do not apply to Israeli and Jewish women because there are, if you will, bigger offenses involved. And regardless, we support by all means necessary and by all means necessary also involves rape.
So what's the response to all of this? We don't need any more-- some sort of hypos presented to faltering university presidents who stumble to recognize outright that calls for genocide of Jews are in violation of the university's codes of conduct, regardless of context. We see this in action.
Several institutions such as my own have gone as far as to sign appeasement agreements with the mob. Brown, Northwestern, Rutgers, Johns Hopkins, Minnesota, and others have done so. And speaking of appeasement, I'm sure you all remember the incident in the backyard of Catherine Fisk and Erwin Chemerinsky, the Dean of Berkeley Law School, in which a pro-Palestinian student kind of hijacked the microphone and started spewing pro-Palestinian/Hamas venom.
And a few days ago-- I don't know if you've noticed this-- last week, I saw a headline that read "UC Berkeley--" I quote-- "UC Berkeley opens civil rights investigation into backyard confrontation between a law professor and a student." Wonderful, I said to myself. Finally, Berkeley got it right.
Not so fast. What is the investigation? The investigation is whether Catherine Fisk, the law professor in whose house this act happened, harassed the Muslim student during a dinner in the backyard of Fisk's house when the student interrupted dinner at the professor's house with a speech. And Professor Fisk tried to stop her by putting an arm around the student's shoulder and saying, leave. This is not your house. It is my house. And then trying to pull the student's microphone out.
This is now a subject of investigation of harassment at Berkeley. The messaging, the signaling, I would just say-- and with this I will end-- is that threats and lawbreaking pay and matter. And more importantly, the Jewish faculty, staff, and students do not. Thank you.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Thank you. We'll get a chance to talk about some of the issues you raised in a couple of minutes, but I want to get to our last speaker, Marie-Alice Legrand, who I think is just about to graduate from Columbia Law School. She's originally from Germany, and has studied in a variety of institutions, both in Europe and in the United States, and is already admitted to the Paris bar, and will hopefully start at corporate practice at Wachtell Lipton, a law firm in Manhattan, in the near future. Columbia's certainly been in the news a lot. [SNEEZE] Excuse me. Tell us a little bit about your experiences.
[Marie-Alice Legrand] Thank you so much for having me. And thank you to the other speakers, to Dr. Levine and Dr. Kadish, and for all the participants at tonight's webinar for listening.
So the situation at Columbia is constantly deteriorating. And we have been observing a very steady normalization of violence, both in the form of words, but also in the form of actual physical violence and harassment.
I want to speak very briefly on my experience as the Founder and President of Law Students Against Antisemitism, which is a student organization which was formed after October 7 with the purpose of educating about both historic and contemporary forms of antisemitism, hoping that a better understanding of the subject matter helps our peers to better identify what is actually antisemitism. And we also have the ambition to really humanize the people who are actually impacted, because I think a lot of times antisemitism only focuses on the perpetrators and less so on the actual victims.
Getting officially recognized by the Student Senate was quite the ordeal. We got rejected the first time. And it was only after outside stakeholders made their voices heard, such as alumni and other trustees at the university, as well as media raising attention to the fact that Law Students Against Antisemitism was the only student organization which was denied funding by the Student Senate on the grounds that it just did not agree with the organization's purpose. And more specifically, our organization has been very transparent, that we abide by the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which is the most mainstream and the most widely adopted definition.
And this-- the entire process of presenting before the Student Senate was, frankly, quite humiliating. We've been subjected to 90 minutes of very hostile questioning and comments, and there were students who banded together and distributed very slanderous pamphlets about our organization. And I think that really showed that the fundamental bias and resistance to any-- yeah, to any work on antisemitism at the law school-- more than the law school universe, Columbia clearly, as has been reported in the newspapers, has completely abandoned its enforcement of its rules and laws in general.
And the protests that we've been observing for, I believe, two to three weeks created an environment that was so hostile that even I, who I'm not Jewish, have not felt safe to go to campus. They outrightly supported Hamas without any ambiguity. They were showing pictures of the Hamas logos on their phones. And they sang those chants, which literally called for genocide. And eventually, the entire situation escalated when they decided to take over Hamilton Hall, which is a university building, and they held a janitor hostage.
And yeah, it's incredibly disturbing. And at this point, truly terrifying that the administration and the people who should take on leadership roles such as faculty have accommodated the student protesters and have made their demands legitimate by even-- by even acknowledging that the university is now going to look into how it's going to invest in its stocks and how it handles future relationships with other universities, which I find as a German deeply, deeply troubling because the BDS movement is illegal in Germany.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Columbia was in the news a few days ago for having called the police in to clear out the protest camps. Have you been on campus since then?
[Marie-Alice Legrand] No. No, I haven't.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] When is graduation scheduled?
[Marie-Alice Legrand] It's scheduled on Monday, but it's off campus.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Off campus?
[Marie-Alice Legrand] Yes.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] And it's only the law school graduation, right? They've canceled the general graduation?
[Marie-Alice Legrand] Correct.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] All right. So let me ask the group to come back on, and I wanted to discuss a couple of questions with the group, and then we have some specific questions from the audience. So just for the group, it sounds like the consensus among all of you is that things are pretty bad.
We've been pretty lucky at Touro, but at many other campuses there have been protests. There have been hateful comments. There's certainly been an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. Why do you think this has happened? Why has it gotten so bad? Nobody wants to take that.
[Marie-Alice Legrand] Well, I think that the-- I think the core is really an indoctrination and a worldview, which has been propagated for, I don't know. I imagine 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. It's very deeply rooted at this point. And entire research fields, such as postcolonial studies and other aspects that cater to this worldview of just really dividing the world into the oppressed and the oppressor and denying-- reserving humanity for only specific groups of people who-- who fall into-- who meet their criteria of-- yeah, of a quote, unquote, almost like "righteous" person. In their opinion, a righteous person is a person who's oppressed and faces the most oppression. And they just--
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Yeah. So I would agree with you completely. One of the things that was very instructive is that there was an op-ed in The New York Times about a week ago, which looked at the Contemporary Civilization curriculum. And I took the same course a few decades ago at Columbia. And while the classical readings were the same, the modern readings were totally different. And they were all radical, anti-democratic, anti-capitalistic approaches, which espoused exactly the worldview that you describe, which is that everyone who's powerless as righteous and everyone in power is evil.
And of course, nobody's actual experience reflects that, right? We all know that good or evil seem to be independent of wealth status. Statistics would, in fact, suggest an inverse relationship. But regardless, we know people who are righteous and not righteous, regardless of income level or power. And the idea that just because someone's been successful that automatically makes them the oppressor is one that's permeated a lot of the readings.
And so I think what's happened at Columbia didn't happen in isolation. Everyone at Columbia takes the same course and reads radical worldview, which has been inculcated by a generation of professors. It's not just a decade. And that's what-- in my view, you're absolutely right. That's one of the things that has brought on what's been going on on campuses.
[Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern] Can I add on that?
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Yeah, please.
[Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern] I completely agree. And I think part of the problem is also education. There's not enough education. And especially now, people want the quick info. Just the snap of the headline of a news-- not even a newspaper. A TikTok, a Facebook.
And a problem with that is that you and me are going to have very different algorithms of social media. And it's going to look like everybody's agreeing with me or everybody's agreeing with someone else. Nobody's doing the deep dive, the digging in to really understand.
This is a complex conflict. I am from the Middle East, and I don't really get it. After October 7, I did a deep dive. I was-- there's a phrase in the world, in psychology. It's called traumatic invalidation. It's the idea that someone is denying your trauma. And when they do it again and again, you're starting to really believe them, that maybe it's me. Maybe something is wrong with me. I can't really trust my own emotions.
And that's what happened to me after October 7th. I was denied my right to grieve and went straight into defending. And when that happened, I started to do a deep dive, and I went back and started reading. What's happening in Israel? What's happening in Gaza? Are we a colonial state? Are we doing apartheid? Is there a genocide?
And I'm from there. How many people from the US can say that they actually do that? And not only one side. I went to read both sides. I went to read some Palestinians' voices. I tried to do my research to be educated so when I have a discussion, I know what I'm talking about and I'm not just quoting the last TikTok that I'm seeing.
And I think that's part of the problem. People don't have the time or the energy to invest in really understanding, and then we have a herd. We have people just following the leader. And whoever is louder and yelling, that's the voice you're going to hear.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Now, I think Professor Gross pointed out a small number of inconsistencies in the current atmosphere. But I think you're absolutely right. Understanding history, and not starting it on a particular date, which is convenient for your point of view, is pretty important.
So just one comment about what you mentioned about social media. Actually, all social media is not created equally, and this is what impelled Congress to pass the bill about TikTok. Most social media does exactly what you suggested, which is connect you with people who make the same kind of comments and feel the same way.
The TikTok algorithm is actually different, and TikTok's algorithm is actually designed to promulgate a specific viewpoint, regardless of what you personally believe, which is why we actually banned TikTok at Touro 10 months ago because we figured, even though we didn't have some of the more current research, we knew at that point that the algorithm was designed by the Chinese Communist Party to espouse a particular point of view rather than simply be what the other social media outlets do, which is try to connect you with people who think in the same way.
What's going to happen with TikTok is still unclear. The Chinese government has said that they're not going to sell it. And this may become another international conflict area between the United States and China because the bill was passed and signed. Professor Gross, do you want to add anything regarding why you think the situation has gotten this bad? You said a bunch of things earlier in your comments.
[Oren Gross] I agree with everything that was already said with the oversimplification. You don't need to do the deep dive that Miri has been doing because all I need is oppressed, oppressor, and the rest follows from that. So if you will, it's the lazy person way out.
You know, I used to think that antisemitism in many European countries was on the surface, and in the United States it was somewhat buried behind a veneer of respectability. This is no longer the case. It erupted out. Anti-Zionism is the new face, if you will, of antisemitism.
And I would-- you know, if all of this has not been depressing enough, I suspect that what we're going to see in the coming months is going to be even worse rather than some sort of amelioration. The situation on the ground in Israel, in Gaza, in the northern part of Israel is still extremely volatile.
And let's not forget, we are in an election year in the United States. We have seen the polarized discourse in previous years. We can expect that this is going to be the case here. I very much expect that the issues that we are talking about today are going to be front, left, and center of everything.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Yeah. So unfortunately, I to some extent agree with you. The only thing I think that may calm things down a little bit, although it may move the protests from college campuses to the street, is that, you know, graduation's in the next couple of weeks. And it could be that at least some of the more visible protests on college campuses will die down over the summer.
Well, it remains to be seen. And I agree with you completely that the situation is far from resolved internationally, and that certainly will have echoes in what's going on in the United States.
Let me ask-- let me turn to a couple of questions from the audience. And Talia, would you like to weigh in before we turn to those questions?
[Talia Segal] Sure. I think just the only other point that hasn't really been touched on is the university funding aspect, which I don't know too much about. I'm by no means an expert. But I think it's kind of crazy that Qatar and these other Middle Eastern countries have influence over our education system here.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] So I agree with you about that completely. And you know, some funding truly comes without strings, and other is designed to promote specific professors, specific points of view, and to amplify the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel narrative. Let me turn to a couple of questions from the audience. There are some comments and then a large number of questions. Sam, I'm going to ask one or two questions, and then you can try to screen some of the rest of them as we come through.
So the first question that is one that's been asked frequently is, how is it, given that both in the Palestinian territories and certainly in Hamas that the LBGQT community is treated so badly, how is it that those organizations have aligned themselves so closely with Hamas? And as Talia, as you described, excluded Jewish students? And is there no thought behind what reality represents there? Do we have-- does anyone have a sense of how that might be happening?
[Talia Segal] I guess I can attempt to weigh in. I mean, it doesn't make sense to me. I think the oppressor-oppressed narrative is a huge piece of it, and the queer community has always kind of tried to stand by the oppressed. And they just don't look at the bigger picture and seeing that Jews are 0.0-- or excuse me, 0.2% of the world population, and that we are, in fact, the minority.
I think, you know, some people are approaching it with very legitimate kind of humanitarian concerns, which is fair. But then some people take it a step too far and don't take the time to have an informed opinion, and just go based on this black and white kind of not nuanced view.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Yeah. Look, there certainly has been a humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. People have been killed. Civilians have been killed. Of course, many terrorists and fighters have been killed as well.
The question is where to lay the blame for that, not that it's a crisis. I think everyone, including almost all Israelis, would agree that it's a crisis situation, although things are being done to try to ameliorate it. I think the question is, where does the blame lie? And you know-- and that's where it doesn't even require that much of a nuanced conversation to recognize that Hamas started this war on October 7, and they're responsible for the death and destruction that's happened.
So I think there are some-- some of the Middle East with two indigenous people and counterclaims is complicated. I don't think this is that complicated, but many other people don't agree with me.
I'm going to answer one question that talks about college presidents, and then I'll turn it over to Sam. So the question was that there are lawsuits against colleges, and will this make a difference? Will there be consequences for the leadership of some colleges, and will the government step in?
So there have been both private lawsuits as well as referrals to the US Department of Education for discrimination against Jewish students. And those investigations are ongoing, those lawsuits are ongoing, but they typically don't get resolved overnight. So will they make a difference?
Perhaps, but I don't think they will in time to make a substantial-- have a substantial impact on the terrible situations that are going on on campus now. And I'm skeptical that even by the fall that these lawsuits and US DOE investigations will have gone far enough to have an important impact.
How will college presidents be viewed? I think what we've seen in the news-- and I consider myself incredibly lucky. I've had both a very supportive board and by and large a supportive faculty. But I think college presidents in many cases right now have been caught between the boards of directors, which are generally made up of thoughtful people, Jewish or not, who recognize the complexity of the situation.
And by and large, even at places that have compromised with protesters, by and large the board members have done it reluctantly. So college presidents are really caught between the students, and in many cases, faculty on one side and the board of directors on the other side.
And as we've seen already, the fate of college presidents has been widely diverse. Some have had to resign. So far, they've resigned for not being tough enough on antisemitism. But there are votes of no confidence in college presidents who've taken action against protesters all over the country. And you know, even though a vote of no confidence doesn't automatically mean that a college president is removed, it makes their job more difficult.
And so whether there'll be a backlash as well against some presidents is hard to say. It's a tough job these days. I don't know why anybody wants to do it. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Sam, Professor Levine, to handle some more questions here.
[Samuel Levine] Thank you, Dr. Kadish. And once again, thank you all for joining us this evening. A number of members of our audience are interested in ways you might recommend universities could balance the right to free speech. And without getting into technical First Amendment issues, isn't there a place to be fair for protest? Isn't there a place-- and we hear these analogies to the '60s and to protest movements.
And Marie-Alice's point was well taken where Germany has a different history, and for that reason, does have significantly more restrictive rules when it comes to free speech, whether it's outlawing BDS, which would not be something that would be on the table in the United States. But what are your recommendations for ways to balance the free speech rights of, quote, unquote "protesters" versus obviously the overriding safety issues?
[Marie-Alice Legrand] I can speak to that. I think the current rules, if there would be enforced, really protect viewpoint neutrality. And given that universities are-- I mean, Columbia University is private, so you need to-- student organizations who organize protests need to follow the rules. They need to be sufficiently in advance be announced and need to be approved.
And I think the enforcement of the rules would suffice to protect the freedom of speech of everyone and the freedom to feel safe on campus as well. And also, using the IHRA definition, for example, which has been adopted by the State Department and which continues to be even more widely adopted, really provides a helpful framework to better understand-- to better discern when speech and when slogans cross the line into antisemitism, such as calling for the genocide of Jews.
[Oren Gross] I will add that while Columbia is private and many of those universities are private, even with public universities that are subject obviously clearly and directly to the First Amendment, there are restrictions that are recognized in the case law on the exercise of free speech. And limitations of time, manner, or place can be imposed.
Free speech does not, for example, include the heckler's veto. We've seen this in the past. Free speech does not mean that you can vandalize property. Free speech does not mean that you can break willy-nilly codes of conduct and university rules. So there is a place for balancing.
I have to say that I, for one, was not happy to see police on campus. I think it's a really bad sign in any democratic society when you start seeing police on campus. And there are times maybe when police can come in when things are really, really extreme. But short of that, even on public university's property, there are limitations. There are restrictions that can be imposed. And unfortunately, even when those were imposed, rather than, if you will, implement, rather than enforce those limitations, most universities caved in.
[Samuel Levine] Very significant points you both raise. Miri and Talia, any thoughts on those issues? Ways to balance free speech and the right for peaceful protest, as it's called?
[Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern] I heard a sentence yesterday that stayed with me. I was in a roundtable about fighting antisemitism with allies. And a former FBI agent said, not everything that is lawful is not awful. And what's happening right now is awful.
I'm all about free speech. I am pro-Palestinian and I'm pro-Israel. I believe in a two-state solution. I'm Jewish. I'm Zionist. I am not pro-Hamas. And I think being able to be clear about what is hate speech and what is allowed is really important.
There are peaceful protests in different places. What's happening in universities in the US is not that. I think we've been seeing it again and again. I saw numerous videos about it. I heard people talking about it and people still denying that this is what's happening.
I think if there is a way to have a conversation when people are stopping and listening to understand and not to respond, that's where you start having a discussion, not just shouting slogans, and recognizing that there's a person on the other side. There is Talia on the other side. There's Marie-Alice on our side. There are people on the other side that are hurt by those phrases, those slogans, physically and mentally.
I haven't seen one protest, pro-Israel protest that was violent. Maybe I'm ignorant. Maybe it's not on my social media feed. Maybe it's not in my newspaper. I haven't seen anything like that.
And also, by the way, most of the protests that are here in the community that are against the protests on campuses that are by Israelis and Jewish people are with songs, are with American flags, are standing and united. There is nothing that says death to Arabs or to Islam. I don't think I can say the same thing about the other protests.
So in terms of what to do, universities, do your job and protect your students. Do your job. If I had a kid in college right now, I would want-- and I'm spending money sending them to college. I want this kid to be protected. I want my kid to be able to go to the library, to study to their test, to feel safe in their dorms, and not to be scared when they're leaving the house.
[Samuel Levine] Thank you. Talia, any thoughts?
[Talia Segal] To me, it comes back to education as well. I mean, we deserve to be protected. But I think the protesters also need to be held accountable. And as academic institutions, these universities need to make sure that students know what they're saying and know the power that their words hold. If someone's going to chant "from the river to the sea," they need to know what that phrase actually means. And so I think finding a way to hold students accountable and actually teach them about antisemitism and teach them the weight of the words that they're using is really important.
[Samuel Levine] Thank you.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Sam, I want to just address one more question, if that's OK.
[Samuel Levine] Please.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] So one of the questions was, several Jewish universities, Yeshiva University, Brandeis, and Touro as well have advertised ourselves as a safe haven for Jewish students in these turbulent times. And one of the questions that I've been asked by many people that's asked by one of our questioners tonight is, should we stay and fight, or should we try to retreat to safe spaces? And I have my own opinion about that question, but I want to throw it out to the group.
[Marie-Alice Legrand] I can speak to Columbia. So the reality is that my diploma won't be worth as much as it was a year ago. That's just a fact. That being said, Columbia and other great universities like Georgia Tech and numerous great universities in this country do provide certain-- have a certain-- yeah, they open doors.
And I think even though there are a lot of employers who today are rightfully very hesitant to hire those graduates, I still think that making these spaces effectively free of Jews is the wrong-- should be regarded as the wrong outcome. I think that those spaces are meant to be for everyone, and it's important to maintain a strong Jewish presence.
And at Columbia, we have a very strong Jewish community. It's there. They're very tight-knit. And I for one strongly encourage Jewish students to still apply. And they have great resources available among the Jewish community. And I don't think that's desirable anyway. It should not be acceptable that those places won't have Jews anymore.
[Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern] I think we have--
[Dr. Alan Kadish] In some places like Harvard Medical School, it's moot because only 4% of the class is Jewish right now. Go ahead, Miri, I'm sorry.
[Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern] No, I think we have to stay. You know, I met with a Harvard student yesterday, and she said-- it was brilliant. She said, I'm not regretting coming here. She's Israeli. I'm not regretting coming here because I am a person, and they're going to see me. They're not going to dehumanize me. They're going to try. But the more people we have that are Jews, that are Israelis here, they will be able to see us as human beings.
Now, with that being said, to your question, should we hide or not, I think it depends because I'm a fighter, as maybe you got from this conversation, and I have my limits. I would not go to slaughter like my family did in the Holocaust. I will fight.
And I will tell my patients, you need to be safe. So if it's not the right time to fight, don't fight. Be smart. Don't fight. Find the right people. Find the right time. But don't disappear. We can't go anywhere. It's just-- it's not a choice.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] All right. Thanks a lot, everyone. Sam, appreciate everybody's participation on these complicated issues.
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