A student group at Columbia University issued a statement that said that “no Jew is safe” until the Palestinian territories were “free.” The statement came amid significant concern over the rise of antisemitism in the growing college campus protests.
The college’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild sent out an email addressed to the “Jewish students, faculty and trustees blocking divestment and urging the violent crackdowns on campus.” It read that these individuals “threaten everyone’s safety.”
“Yet you continue to claim to speak for all Jews. Keep our names out of your mouths. You, who called us ‘Judenrat,’ put us on lists of ‘bad Jews,’ and cheered the brutalization of our comrades, do not represent us,” read the message.
The email accused Jewish groups of having “repeatedly cried wolf with claims that anti-Zionist speech was antisemitic.” The group claimed that the accusations of antisemitism “diluted the very real instances of antisemitism.”
“Our safety cannot be predicated on the oppression of others, whether campus protesters or Palestinians. No Jew is safe until everyone is safe, and no Jew is free until Palestine is free,” read the message sent across campus.
Columbia has been ground zero for many of the protests, which have since grown into a nationwide phenomenon. Students created a tent city in one of the main squares of the campus, which was then copied by students at multiple colleges nationwide.
One of the campus protest leaders wrote that her dissertation was “on fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760-1860” and cited a phrase from Karl Marx in the description. She said that she was “particularly interested in theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination.”
The Ivy League student, who bravely demanded humanitarian aid from her oppressors at Columbia University, is writing a dissertation about “the fantasies of limitless energy in the Romantic imagination…a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx’s term for the disruption of energy… pic.twitter.com/m0dSTTuG1z
— Ritchie Torres (@RitchieTorres) May 5, 2024
She further said that she previously worked “as a political strategists for leftist and progressive causes and remain active in the higher education labor movement.”
