The War at Home, Three Years After October 7

By Shabbos Kestenbaum

Wednesday, October 07, 2026

 

On the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks in Israel, perpetrated by Hamas, it would be easy to think that the conflict has passed and that Jewish life, both in Israel and America, is returning to its pre-war state of calm and normality. The news coming out of Gaza has slowed considerably as tensions have eased since the release of the hostages held by Hamas. Yet the memory of October 7 has lingered, opening a fissure that appears increasingly impossible to close.

 

On September 24, Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer with 3.1 million followers, spoke at Cornell University’s Sage Chapel, where he was hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Young Democratic Socialists. Six days later, he was invited to the University of Texas at Austin by the school’s University Democrats. More than 2,500 students signed up for the event.

 

It’s clear to those of us who are paying attention: These are radical activists who have chosen the DSA over the USA.

 

In April, Piker said, “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.” He has “no issue” with Hezbollah, and in August, he warned that if American Jews keep identifying with Israel, “eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” One week before he took the stage in Ithaca, he told Axios that the United States is worse than al-Qaeda “pound for pound as far as the number of deaths.” Two of America’s most prestigious universities gave him a stage, a microphone, and a line out the door.

 

For two years, university presidents insisted that the hostility toward Israel on their campuses was about Gaza. But with the war in Gaza paused and the Israeli hostages returned, the hottest ticket on campus this fall was a man who calls Hamas the lesser evil. Three years after October 7, the war is not over — not in the Middle East, and not on American campuses, where protesters’ tents are gone but the ideology behind them has moved into chapels and lecture halls, with the blessing of universities.

 

In 2025, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) counted 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States, the third-highest total in its history, including a record 32 assaults with deadly weapons and three homicides. The Gaza cease-fire was declared that fall, but antisemitism in America continued unabated.

 

During the 2023–24 academic year, anti-Israel encampments were established on more than 160 campuses. Last year, only around a dozen remained because the anti-Israel movement shifted from tent encampments to other forms of activism, which the ADL describes as “internal pressure and disciplinary evasion.”

 

Suspended SJP chapters at universities such as Tufts and George Washington simply disaffiliated from their schools and kept organizing independently. The University of Michigan student government attempted to freeze funding for every campus club unless the university divested from Israel. In 2024, activists vandalized the home of a Michigan regent three times. The next year, activists defaced the homes of four Wisconsin regents over one July weekend. Weeks later, National SJP published a manifesto branding university trustees the “Board of Butchers” and the university system “a keystone of empire” to be dismantled.

 

The targeting has extended beyond “Zionist” figures and organizations to purely religious institutions. Between October 2023 and October 2025, Jewish campus organizations, including Hillel and Chabad, were targeted in nearly 200 incidents of harassment and vandalism. An ADL survey found that, during the same period, more than half of Jewish faculty saw shadow boycotts on their campuses, and a majority of those respondents said that departments avoided co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups. Nearly three-quarters of all respondents, meanwhile, had witnessed anti-Jewish activity from fellow faculty, staff, or administrators.

 

Recently, Columbia student Noah Lederman, who was shoved against a wall in 2024 for wearing an Israeli flag shirt, aptly summarized the state of campuses today when he told Jewish Insider: “Campus is not better, it’s just different.”

 

For years, university administrators told American Jewish students and parents that the hostility they faced was a regrettable byproduct of a faraway war and that it would recede when the fighting did. The fighting in Gaza has receded. But American Jewish students returned to campus this semester to find the same student senates, the same faculty, and the same whispered exclusions.

 

Cornell gave Hasan Piker a chapel, and UT Austin gave him a crowd, but neither school has ever given its Jewish students an honest answer about why a man who believes America deserved 9/11 should be given either. It’s been three years since October 7, and we will no longer wait for one. We know what the war on campus is, we know who is fighting it, and we know that it will not end simply because the shooting in Gaza did.