USA
Meet the Jewish students turning down Ivy League offers because of Jew hate
Yeshiva University’s “Blue Square Scholars” programme helps transfer students who no longer feel safe at Ivy League universities
August 1, 2024 07:04
Yeshiva University’s “Blue Square Scholars” programme helps transfer students who no longer feel safe at Ivy League universities
August 1, 2024 07:04v America’s universities and colleges thrive on philanthropy – on donations by alumni and high-profile luminaries as a way of giving back, funding new programmes and building new schools.
Or alleviating financial burdens for debt-saddled students, as billionaire Robert F. Smith did in his 2019 commencement address at Georgia’s Morehouse College, when he shocked the 400-member graduating class with news that he would be personally eliminating all of their loans.
Robert Kraft, billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, is also no stranger to university donations, having donated millions of dollars to his alma mater, Columbia University, since graduating in 1963. But in April 2024 he announced that he was no longer comfortable donating to the university while protesters on campus continued harassing Jewish students and chanting antisemitic slogans.
Since then, Kraft, who also set up the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism after being awarded the Genesis Prize in June 2019, has pursued other philanthropic ideas, including a $1 million donation to Yeshiva University (YU) in late June.
Though relatively modest in scale by his standards, this might be Kraft’s most impactful action to date. YU’s “Blue Square Scholars” programme (funded by Kraft) was set up out of necessity – to help YU accommodate transferring students who no longer feel safe at Ivy League universities across the United States, including Cornell, Penn and Columbia. By May 2024, YU had already seen a 53 per cent increase in student transfer applications from Yale, Cornell and Columbia compared to the previous year, having to lease more building space to accommodate additional student housing.
“At a time where hate has been unleashed across our universities, Jewish students are feeling isolated and unsafe. Yeshiva is providing a safe haven for these students… where they could live and study free of fear for being who they are,” a joint Kraft-YU statement read.
One such beneficiary was 19-year-old Eliana Samuels. Attending Columbia University was her life-long dream, an academic path her mother, Dr Roya Rahmanian, also pursued 25 years ago. In December 2022, Eliana was accepted to Columbia. She could hardly wait to commence studies in the autumn of 2024 and explore the field of science after a gap year in Israel.
Then October 7 happened and Columbia University became the country’s epicentre of mass student protest, some of which turned violent, leaving Jewish students feeling unsafe and unable to return to campus. The university’s tepid response to the protests forced Eliana to make one of the most unthinkable decisions of her life. “The idea of being on a campus where I have to avoid certain people and places, where I’m afraid of getting hate crimed, and where I can’t tell anyone that I’m a Zionist or Jewish because of what they might do to me, was genuinely terrifying,” Eliana said.
That prompted her to write a letter to Columbia’s undergraduate admissions office last month, where she said: “As a direct and proximate result of Columbia University’s failure to protect its Jewish students, to address the blatant and violent antisemitism on campus, and to provide a safe environment in which Jewish students can learn, I am hereby officially withdrawing my registration from Columbia University effective immediately and will not be attending the university in the fall.”
Eliana decided to transfer to Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, a move her mother wholly supported. “I realised my daughter was just not going to have the same experience I did years ago, going to a school with a thriving, protected Jewish community – it’s a totally different place,” Dr. Roya Rahmanian told the JC.
Eliana is not alone. Ashley Byck, 23, is another student transferring from Columbia to YU. After accepting a spot to pursue graduate students in speech-language pathology at Manhattan’s only Ivy League university, Byck, the great-grandchild of Holocaust survivors, said her decision to move to YU was prompted by the news that many Jewish students at Columbia were transitioning to online learning to avoid harassment on campus.
“The sense of isolation, hatred, and exclusion was overwhelming,” Byck said. “It was alarming to see such blatant antisemitism, and even worse to witness the student body’s and administration’s indifference. We’ve always said ‘never again’, and yet there it was.”
Students aren’t the only ones leaving elite universities. Last December esteemed Mexican Jewish computer science professor Dr Mauricio Karchmer resigned from his post at MIT due to the university’s antisemitism problem – or a “campus without compassion,” as he put it – eventually joining the faculty at Yeshiva University.
Parents of high schoolers – even toddlers – have also had to re-evaluate where they want to send their kids to college. For Samantha Nassimi, a social media consultant and mother of four children between five and 13, the genocidal slogans of “Intifada, Intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” chanted across US universities gave her serious pause. “At that point, I decided there was no way my four children would attend a regular college unless it was a private school like Yeshiva University or Touro College,” she said. “Sadly, some colleges have made it clear to the Jewish community that we are not welcome.”
