The Morningside Heights Tent City
Pivot to remote: Happy Passover to those who observe. And to Columbia University students who happen to be Jewish: Enjoy your remote learning.
For those who’ve just tuned in, the pro-Palestine tent city encampment at Columbia—and several other universities across the country—keeps getting razed and then resurrected. But new video keeps emerging showing the treatment Jews on campus are facing, and it…does not make the protesters look good.
“Repeat after me: We have Zionists who’ve entered the camp,” says one protester, referring to Jewish students. “We are going to create a human chain…so that they do not pass this point and infringe upon our privacy and try to disrupt our community,” chanted the students, in unison, as if they were Jonestown cultists. At least one student, a visibly Jewish sophomore named Jonathan Lederer, says he was pushed and shoved by the mob, which also threw objects at him “from close range.”
What is happening at Columbia? The “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” is essentially a tent city set up by students protesting not just Israel’s military campaign inside Gaza but also Columbia University’s “continued financial investment in corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine,” set up by Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace. The students have all kinds of odd and only tangentially related demands, including expecting the university to sever all ties with the New York Police Department (NYPD).
Last week, the universities—both Columbia and Barnard, which partners with Columbia and basically functions as an undergraduate college of the university—sent administrators into the throngs of protesting students to let them know it was time to break it up and disassemble the tent city, which was in violation of Columbia policy. When this failed, NYPD cops were sent in and arrested 108 students on Thursday evening. (Several sitting senators have called for the National Guard to be sent in to break up protests, which is surely overkill.)
The daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.), Isra Hisi, was among those arrested. “She had no idea she would end up suspended, homeless, and left without food within a matter of days,” according to The Daily Beast, which seemed to think the sob-story lens was the way to go.
Following these arrests, the tent city simply sprang back up. Student demonstrators told Jews to “go back to Poland.”
“Say it loud and say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” added others, chanting.
Sit at home: “All faculty whose classrooms are located on the main Morningside campus and equipped with hybrid capabilities should enable them to provide virtual learning options,” said the university yesterday, which has scheduled final exams for May 3–10. “Faculty in other classrooms or teaching spaces that do not have capabilities for offering hybrid options should hold classes remotely if there are student requests for virtual participation.”
This feels like it has marks of the pandemic era all over it: In the absence of capable leadership, relegate students to remote learning—an unserious, worse form of teaching that could surely be gotten for cheaper than Columbia tuition. In the absenc
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