Someone Had to Say Something

Eleven days after the October 7 massacre, as darkness settled over Columbia’s campus, I stood in the middle of a small gathering and realized that silence was no longer an option.

There were around thirty of us—Jewish and Israeli students, faculty members, and friends—holding candles and posters bearing the faces of the hostages taken by Hamas. Though most of us did not know each other, we were all, in one way or another, experiencing the same thing. Having spent the previous eleven days watching images we could not forget, reading names we did not yet know by heart, and trying to understand how so much life could be destroyed in a single day, we had come together because we needed an outlet for the fear, rage, and helplessness that had been building inside us. We had come because, in that moment, we had no one to turn to but one another. We had arrived as strangers. Grief made us a community.

We had not gathered there by accident. A week earlier, just five days after the massacre, I had stood in that same spot watching two opposing events. On one lawn, Jewish students stood silently for twenty minutes—one second for each victim of the massacre—crying, hugging, and trying to absorb what had happened. On the other lawn, hundreds of students, faculty, and staff beat drums, praised “the resistance,” rallied against coexistence, and called for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. They weren’t making an argument about borders or governments. Nor were they demanding a peaceful resolution to the century-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even before a single Israeli soldier had stepped foot in the Gaza Strip, a riled-up mob on campus was already celebrating the slaughter of civilians.

Watching in disbelief, I was unable to reconcile what I was seeing with everything I thought I knew about the people and institution around me. I had barely begun grieving the dead, grasping the sheer scale of the massacre, or worrying about my own family in Israel. Yet suddenly it felt as though another front in the war had opened—not by Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis, but by my very own academic community on Columbia’s campus. I stood there, jaw clenched, speechless.  I could not fathom how so many seemingly educated people could watch the murder, rape, and kidnapping of civilians and respond not with horror, but with glee. This was not political activism. This was not ideological disagreement. It was hatred. Pure and unadulterated hatred. Once I saw it, I could not unsee it.

The following week,  our vigil— for which we had secured all the required permissions—was supposed to take place on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library. But anti-Israel protestors had beaten us to the spot and occupied the space. In response, the university did what would become second nature over the coming year whenever protestors engaged in unsanctioned disruptions: Instead of telling them to move, the university told us to do so.

There was something deeply humiliating about being displaced from our own vigil. There was something profoundly painful about being unable to grieve in peace on our own campus. While we could have refused to leave, insisting that the university enforce its own rules and treat us with the same respect it afforded every other minority on campus, we stepped aside. We didn’t want a confrontation. We didn’t want to argue about politics. We weren’t looking for a fight. All we wanted was to mourn and be left alone. We had all come wounded, looking for somewhere safe enough to admit it. Grief-stricken, we found another corner of campus and formed a circle.

One by one, people cautiously stepped forward and began to speak. An Israeli woman whose husband taught at the university recounted the story of a young survivor of the Nova music festival who had watched her best friend dragged into a vehicle and taken to Gaza. A student holding an Israeli flag in one hand and raising two broken fingers with the other described how he had been attacked on campus while putting up posters of the hostages. A third speaker described the feeling that, once again, Jews had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Each story was different. Together, they described the same unbearable reality.

Some shared their frantic concern for relatives in Israel. Others spoke about the fear of being visibly Jewish on campus. Still others recounted interactions with classmates who’d celebrated the attack, professors who said nothing about it, and friends who suddenly seemed to treat Jewish grief as politically suspect. To the people in our circle, Israel was not an abstraction. It was the place where their parents lived, where their cousins had been called into reserve duty, and where people they loved were hiding in bomb shelters. Standing on one of the world’s most beautiful campuses, the distance between our lives and theirs felt almost unbearable.

As the final speaker stepped back, the circle fell silent. No one moved. It felt like the pause after lightning strikes, a collective holding of breath as we waited to find out how loud the thunder would be. Something was missing—we had named the pain and the astonishment, but not yet the source of the problem. I realized it was my turn.

At that point, I was still a business school professor who believed that my role was simply to teach, conduct research, and care for my students. I had never imagined becoming a public advocate. I had no prepared remarks. I was simply a Jew who had spent eleven days watching the world respond to the slaughter of Jews with denials, distortions, deflections, and delight. I was also a father—a Jewish-Israeli father—who saw his own children’s faces in the images of the murdered and the kidnapped.

Everywhere I looked, I recognized the same moral failure. The very communities and institutions that had taught me to show up for others had failed to show up for my own people in their time of need. The university that prided itself on belonging and inclusivity had allowed Jewish students to be pushed out of the conversation during their time of mourning. Faculty members who had built their careers around social justice had found reasons to excuse, minimize, or ignore the murder of Jewish civilians. Students who proudly proclaimed that they believed all women suddenly decided that Jewish women didn’t count. Colleagues who had taught me that silence was violence suddenly had nothing to say. Hostage posters were being torn down. Terrorist violence was being praised as resistance. Jewish fear was being treated as an inconvenience. Everything the university claimed to believe remained true—until the victims were Jews. Jewish lives had become the moral exception.

This moral failure was never about choosing Israel over Palestine. Nor was it about valuing one people’s lives over another’s. It was about recognizing that no political cause, regardless of how righteous it claimed to be, could justify burning families alive, raping women, or kidnapping children. It was about asking whether universities could still recognize that some acts lay beyond moral justification. It was about what we, as a society, stood for. Columbia’s leadership had pontificated endlessly about context, power, and history, yet fell strangely silent when Jewish lives were on the line. While we were still counting the dead and searching for the missing, people at one of America’s most prestigious universities were already glorifying those responsible. Someone had to say something. 

Someone had to say that this was wrong. Someone had to explain that Jewish students should not have to prove their humanity before being allowed to grieve. Someone had to force the university to see what was happening before it was too late. Columbia had broken the unspoken covenant every university makes with the parents who entrust it with their children: to educate them, challenge them, and keep them safe. Someone had to say that out loud. That someone would have to be me.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I thought about the people who had been murdered and would never breathe again. I thought about the children taken from their homes, their small faces a painful reminder of my own children. I thought about how easily my family could have been visiting Israel that weekend, with only geography and chance separating our fate from the victims. I thought about my Jewish students, who came to learn and were now deluged with hate. I thought about my non-Jewish students, exposed to so much brainwashing and normalization of horror, in desperate need of guidance. I thought about how, one day, I would have to explain this moment to my children. Exhaling all the air from my lungs, I stepped into the center of the circle.

I did not know what I was about to say. I didn’t know that the words I was about to speak would change the course of my life and career. I didn’t know how many people would later tell me they had felt the same fear but had been unable to put it into words. All I knew was that the leaders of our most prestigious universities had failed their Jewish students. All I knew was that silence had become impossible. If no one else was going to say it, I would.

So I did. And I have not stopped since.

Here I am.

Hineni.