Immediately after Oct. 7, a growing number of Jewish college students felt a connection to their Jewish identity and sought out Jewish events on campus. But the feeling didn’t last for everyone.
That’s according to a new study by Tufts University researcher Eitan Hersh, who found that levels of Jewish campus engagement spiked after the attacks in fall 2023 but fell down somewhat by the spring — even as growing numbers of Jewish students said they felt their identities were under threat amid a wider backlash to Israel’s actions in Gaza.
The Tufts study is one of the deepest quantitative dives into campus Jewish life to emerge since the Hamas attack on Israel and the start of Israel’s war in Gaza. Titled “A Year of Campus Conflict and Growth: An Over-Time Study of the Impact of the Israel-Hamas War on U.S. College Students,” the report comes at the beginning of a new school year, as universities and Jewish groups across the country are struggling with how to respond to hostile environments for Jewish students.
“I think the Jewish community writ large is right to be very concerned about this issue,” Hersh, who co-authored the report with research assistant Dahlia Lyss, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the environment for Jewish students on campuses after Oct. 7. “The social dynamics on campus are quite bad.”
The survey, funded by the Jim Joseph Foundation, is based on surveys conducted with more than 1,000 Jewish and 1,500 non-Jewish students at nearly 200 campuses with major Jewish presences, as well as focus groups with Jewish students, non-Jewish students and a mix of both. It builds on research about campus antisemitism that the demographer began in 2022 and includes responses from some of the same students over the course of three years.
Surveying the same groups of students immediately after, and then months after, Oct. 7, Hersh found that their feelings of connection to their campus Jewish communities and their attendance at Jewish events both spiked right after the attacks. More than 40% of Jewish respondents felt close to a Jewish community after Oct. 7, versus 26% the year before — but this number fell to 33% by spring 2024. Jewish students who reported attending Jewish events at least on an occasional basis leapt from 54% in 2022 to 75% after the attacks, then fell slightly to 68% in spring 2024.
The report also found that wealthier Jewish students were more likely to support Israel than less wealthy ones; that more Jewishly engaged students were more likely to have negative views of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and that Jewish students largely perceived their universities as being biased against Israel, while pro-Palestinian students believed the opposite.
Another recent study, published at Brandeis University, found that around one-third of non-Jewish students hold sets of beliefs hostile to Jews or Israel. Hersh’s study, in the same ballpark, found that one-fifth of non-Jewish students set out to deliberately socially ostracize their pro-Israel peers. (The Brandeis survey also found that almost a quarter of non-Jewish students said they preferred to not be friends with people who support Israel existing as a Jewish state.)
Gisele Kahalon, a Jewish senior at Drexel University working with the Orthodox college student outreach group Olami, advocates for changes to the Title VI antisemitism reporting system during a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., March 19, 2024. She is flanked by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina (left), Olami staff and other Jewish college students. (Courtesy of Olami)
In focus groups, some Jewish students described intra-Jewish divisions on campus, between those who back Israel and the smaller but vocal contingent who support Palestinians.
“At least on my campus, there is a section of pro-Palestinian Jewish people and if you are neutral or pro-Israel, you are on the other side,” one student said. “It has created two different groups of people, and it is really hard to connect to people who are Jewish and also super pro-Palestinian.”
Another offered a snapshot of an increasingly polarized campus dialogue in which the broad category of “Zionist” is frequently demonized. “There are some people who are not willing to believe that I can hold both opinions: that I can both be upset about what’s happening in Gaza and still believe in Israel,” they said. “Some people just assume that all Zionists believe that it is good to be killing people.”
Such responses point to a deep anxiety among Jews in college, Hersh said.
“The Jewish students are kind of anguished, because they’re like, ‘Why am I not allowed to have a complicated view on this?’” he said. “You just have to fall in line in this campus environment.”
The declining engagement revealed by the study as the year went on could reflect a return to pre-Oct. 7 norms over time. But Hersh said he thought the “social cost” that many Jewish students feel they pay merely by attending campus Jewish events, in a climate where pro-Palestinian activists have increasingly targeted Hillel and other Jewish groups for their support of Israel, could also play a role.
“There are so many students that are on the fence about how much Jewish life might be part of their campus life,” he said. “And the campus culture has made it so that it’s a very fraught decision to go to just a Jewish program on campus.”
Jewish students’ views of Israel itself remained relatively unchanged after the attacks, as roughly the same proportions of respondents said they believed there should continue to be a Jewish state in the region and that they felt some connection to Israel.
Hersh said he was intrigued by the survey’s findings that Jewish students’ support for Israel correlated with their socioeconomic background. While Jews were more likely than not to support Israel regardless of status, more affluent respondents were the most likely to support Israel (more than 70% do), while less affluent Jews were the most likely to oppose its existence (more than 20%). The findings held even when accounting for the likelihood of “upper-class” Jews to grow up in strong Jewish communities.
“One thing I would like to do through this report is bring more attention to socioeconomic class as a thing to be thinking about,” he said. “I actually don’t think Jewish organizations think about it as much as they maybe should, because it’s a big division, and it’s particularly a big division among students who don’t have robust Jewish backgrounds.”
In views voiced by many pro-Palestinian campus activists, and articulated by the Tufts focus groups, the Israel debate is often perceived as being between largely Jewish “Zionists” who back everything Israel does, and anti-Zionists who don’t support the state at all.
But Hersh’s study offers an alternative: that the most Jewishly involved students on campus are also the harshest critics of Israel’s leadership.
Jewish assessments of Netanyahu generally got worse the more Jewishly involved the student was, with more than 50% of students from “high” Jewish backgrounds saying they had a “poor” opinion of Netanyahu. (Only a very small number of Jewish students overall felt he was doing an “excellent” job.) Jewish students in focus groups also mentioned their opposition to Netanyahu more frequently than non-Jewish ones.
When asked, in their focus groups, what preferred solution they would like to see in the Middle East, many students — both self-proclaimed Zionists and anti-Zionists — offered up some version of a two-state solution.
“I think that there should be a compromise where Palestine can be free but Israel can also have its own nation,” one non-Jewish student said.
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