College Students Are Still Finding New Ways to Marginalize Jews on Campus

By Shabbos Kestenbaum

Friday, May 08, 2026

 

I never thought I would spend so much of my college career fighting my university to take antisemitism seriously. During my time in college, I wrote to Harvard’s antisemitism task force more than 40 times to ask the university to take action against the harassment of Jewish students and other discriminatory actions happening on campus. I never received a reply. It took a federal lawsuit to get the richest university in the world to act.

 

I’m far from the only Jewish student who’s been forced into activism. Antisemitism on college campuses is part of a nationwide pattern, one we have come to expect for years. The latest example comes from New York City: On May 1, the United Student Senate at the New School voted to suspend all funding for and collaboration with its chapter of Hillel, a student group dedicated to prayer and programming for Jewish students on American campuses. The student senate’s Registered Student Organization Compliance Committee produced a 38-page report accusing Hillel of extensive ties to violations of international law, citing the organization’s participation in Birthright, Onward Israel, and Hillel on Base, as well as its hosting of a Jewish Agency Israel Fellow. The student senate classified Hillel as not in good standing and announced in an Instagram post that “effective immediately, Hillel at The New School is ineligible for funding from or collaboration with the USS in any capacity.”

 

This is believed to be the first time a student government in the United States has voted to sever ties with Hillel. Not the first boycott, divestment, and sanction (BDS) resolution. Not the first call for divestment. The first time a student government moved to defund and disaffiliate from the primary institution of Jewish communal life on an American campus. This is a new front, and it requires a new level of urgency from administrators.

 

Within 24 hours, the university issued a statement making clear that the student senate does not have the authority to determine the recognition, funding eligibility, or official status of student organizations, and that Hillel “remains, as it always has been, in good standing.” Swift, unambiguous, and delivered through official channels. That is leadership. My first reaction upon reading this statement was not surprise that a student government had tried something this brazen. It was surprise that an administrator did not need a lawsuit to do the right thing.

 

For years, the collegiate anti-Israel campaign operated through BDS resolutions targeting university endowments. Administrators eventually learned to reject them: Brown voted down divestment in 2024, before Bowdoin and Dartmouth rejected it in 2025. But the extremists have adapted. When they could not capture the endowment, they attacked Jewish life directly. Hillel is the home for Shabbat dinners, holiday celebrations, and the infrastructure that makes Jewish belonging possible on campus. Defunding Hillel is not a political statement about Israeli policy. It is an attempt to dismantle the foundation of Jewish existence at a university.

 

The numbers confirm it. Hillel International recorded 2,334 antisemitic incidents on campuses during the 2024–2025 academic year, a tenfold increase from the year before October 7. A 2026 American Jewish Community study found that 42 percent of Jewish students have experienced antisemitism on campus, and 34 percent hide their identity out of fear. This is the environment in which a student senate felt emboldened to attack Hillel and strip its funding.

 

The student senate has already doubled down, announcing the funding pause will remain. The administration must hold its line with consequences: If a student government is using its authority to shut out the cornerstone of campus Jewish life, its authority to allocate funding should be reviewed.

 

Every university administrator should be watching. The question is not when other student governments will target Jewish life. It is whether those administrators will respond like New School President Joel Towers, who took 24 hours to reject the USS’s actions, or like Harvard, which took years and a federal lawsuit. The playbook has shifted from endowments to Jewish life itself. The response must shift with it.