Fearing antisemitism, Jewish students declining to enroll at Columbia University

Some Jewish students who applied to Columbia and Barnard wrote emails to the University turning down their spots after following the news of the last academic year, speaking to friends at Columbia, and discussing with their families.

According to news website Columbia Spectator their correspondent spoke to six Jewish students who were accepted to Columbia or Barnard and declined their admissions offers, citing incidents of antisemitism and on-campus protests over the war in Gaza. Each of them said that they felt that Columbia would be unwelcoming for Jewish students.

Sarit Greenwood decided to apply to Barnard after visiting the college for a weekend during her senior year of high school. The idea of a “small women’s college” with access to Columbia’s research opportunities appealed to her, Greenwood said, and she felt that her passion for feminism and social justice aligned with the Barnard student body.

After receiving her acceptance letter, Greenwood plastered her water bottle and computer with Barnard stickers. She then moved to Israel to begin her gap year, where she hoped to learn about Jewish texts and traditions. Greenwood was in Jerusalem on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas launched an attack on Israel.

During her gap year, two of Greenwood’s Jewish friends at Barnard told her not to come, she said. One of them said she had her Star of David necklace pulled off during a walk to class, and the other, who is Israeli, said her mental health had declined during the academic year. Greenwood decided to withdraw her acceptance in March.

When Greenwood saw students organize the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” in April, she said she felt validated in her decision.

“To me, the encampment was a sign of like, ‘We’re not willing to talk. We’re just going to kind of sit here until the administration gives into our demands, or until we have to be taken away by the police,’” Greenwood said. “That was upsetting to me because that’s an indication of a community that’s not willing to face these issues in a respectful dialogue.”

Instead of attending Barnard, Greenwood said she is spending the 2024-25 academic year working in the Israeli government press office through a national service program. She values the American college experience, Greenwood said, but she is looking for “discord through discourse,” which she described as “a student body that’s respectful and graceful, inclusive of differing opinions, and willing to talk it out head-on.”

Raquel Schnall initially decided to come to Barnard because it “checked all of [her] boxes,” including having a robust Jewish life. But, during the encampments and sweeps by the New York Police Department in April, Schnall remembers thinking “‘I can’t believe I’m going there right now.’” Schnall decided to defer her acceptance at Barnard and enlist in the Israeli military.

Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Joshua Kahn, the dean of Jewish high school Torah Academy of Bergen County, sent out a letter to the school’s community in October 2023, writing that for university representatives to recruit at the institution, they must provide a “statement from their university leadership detailing their plans to protect and maintain the safety and security of our graduates on their campuses as Jews.”

“It is our hope that our collective stance in prioritizing the safety of our students will compel universities to address the severity of the current situation,” Kahn wrote.

By the planned time of the school’s annual college fair in May, Kahn had decided to cancel the event altogether.

“It felt tone-deaf to end up having these colleges in which our students were literally not able to access areas, and then to bring those colleges into us didn’t feel right,” Kahn said. “We felt that it would not have been a program that served the interest of what we’re trying to do.”

University spokesperson Samantha Slater wrote in a statement to Spectator that the “spike in antisemitism on our campus, around the country and around the world is serious” and that the University is “committed to sustained, concrete action to make Columbia a community where Jewish students and everyone feel safe, valued and are able to thrive.”

“At the same time, we are proud of Columbia’s vibrant Jewish community and the many opportunities Jewish students have to partake in both formal areas of study and informal and extracurricular activities to both celebrate and strengthen their identity,” Slater wrote.

Eden Shaveet, an Israeli-American student, graduated in 2024 from Columbia’s Bridge to the Ph.D. Program in STEM, a two-year program designed for students who have faced barriers to entering graduate programs. Shaveet was the first student to be accepted into the program for the computer science department.