Editor’s Note: This story includes mention of potentially triggering situations, including harassment, hateful language and antisemitism.
Oct. 7 this year marked the first anniversary of the devastating Hamas-led attack on Israel, and the beginning of the subsequent war. It also marked the third day of reflection after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
Rosh Hashanah and the 10 following days served as a time of coming together for many Jewish people. For a moment, many could put the past year’s fear, confusion and anger aside as they embraced their communities.
But there were reminders of the past year everywhere. At IU Hillel’s services, a table sat empty in memory of the hostages still held in Gaza. Issues regarding the war were openly discussed.
When Jewish student leaders looked back at the past year, they told the Indiana Daily Student they looked back on a year of struggle, of being unseen, of othering, of togetherness, of students feeling the world tearing them between war and school. For some, feeling like a target was put on their back for identifying as Zionists, for wearing a Star of David necklace, for being Jewish.
The Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, left around 1,200 in Israel dead and 250 taken hostage. About 100 hostages are estimated to still be in Gaza, a third of whom are believed to be dead. The Israeli military began a ground invasion later that month. Most of Gaza's population of 2.3 million have been displaced since the start of the subsequent war, with more than 42,000 dead and nearly 100,000 injured.
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It’s the afternoon of Oct. 7, 2024, and pro-Palestinian protesters are spray-painting the sides of the bridge on Eagleson Avenue. They’re telling passersby to come to the pro-Palestinian demonstration at Sample Gates that night.
A pair walk past. “Vigil for Palestine at 7:30! Will you be there?” a protester asks.
The two don’t respond. “We’re Jewish,” one says to the other after they clear the bridge. “What the fuck?”
The bridge’s layers of paint, pressure washed every so often, record a living history of the divisions on campus that the Oct. 7 attack unearthed. The pro-Palestinian group paints inverted red triangles over blue hearts and Stars of David. A pro-Israeli group later sprays Stars of David over the Palestinian flag right in front of its painters.
More than 800 community members later that day went to a separate Oct. 7 vigil, put together by Jewish organizations, for the nearly 1,200 killed in the Hamas-led attack and the 100 hostages still in Gaza.
Jewish student leaders said they felt disgusted that pro-Palestinian groups would organize a vigil on that solemn day for Israelis and many Jewish people around the world. Another student leader said they felt relieved. There would be no protests at their vigil. They were separated physically.
Still, the separation is a symptom of a year of division that, more than anything, has made many Jewish students feel othered.
Divides on campus escalated significantly since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023. The night of Oct. 9, 2023, became the first indication of unearthed tension on campus, as IU Hillel and IU Chabad organized a vigil at Dunn Meadow to honor those killed in the attack.
The vigil one year ago was planned to take place at Sample Gates, but IU recommended it be moved to Dunn Meadow because of a large expected turnout. The Palestine Solidarity Committee simultaneously held what it originally called a “counterprotest” at Sample Gates, where attendees said they were advocating for peace.
During Hillel and Chabad’s vigil, several people drove past yelling “free Palestine” and waving Palestinian flags. That, Jewish students in attendance have told the IDS, made them feel mocked.
The 100-day pro-Palestinian encampment this year that furthered many of these tensions is gone, cleared by the university before the start of the fall semester. Some Jewish students said they feel this semester has been calmer so far. Still, Jewish student leaders said they don’t know what the future will look like as the war continues and escalates. The uncertainty is jarring.
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Alvin Rosenfeld, director of IU’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, primarily studies historical antisemitism, which has stemmed from religion, conspiracy and more recently, he said, the conflicts in the Middle East.
The FBI recorded nearly 2,000 hate crimes against Jewish people in the U.S. in 2023, a jump from the about 1,300 hate crimes recorded in 2022. Anti-Jewish hate crimes made up two-thirds of all religiously motivated hate crimes last year.
As antisemitism has risen during the last year in the United States, Rosenfeld said there have been no violent incidents reported in Bloomington. But he said reports of harassment and targeted violence nationwide, especially at other college campuses, make many Jewish students wonder if violence could happen at IU next.
There have been at least six reported assaults on Jewish students on or around college campuses nationwide since June of this year. Two students at the University of Pittsburgh were assaulted earlier this month.
The concern about violence is nothing new. Fear of violence toward Jewish people jumped after a white supremacist killed 11 and wounded six at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.
“That's something that just comes with being Jewish,” IU Hillel Social Chair Shayna Grossman said. “And it might not be this campus in particular, but I could be walking on the streets at home, and something could happen.”
“We're kind of raised to always be aware,” she added.
Several IU Jewish student leaders told the IDS they’ve heard about instances of dorm vandalism, mezuzahs — small scrolls with Torah verses attached to doorposts of some Jewish homes — being torn off door frames and other incidents students have reported to Jewish community leadership. Incidents of mezuzahs being torn off doors is nothing new to IU — another instance happened two years ago.
The IDS has not been able to independently verify these events with police reports and additional interviews. Jewish student leaders told the IDS that many Jewish students would feel uncomfortable speaking to the media if they hadn’t been quoted in stories before.
Grossman said she experienced antisemitism several times in the past year. After Oct. 7, her grandmother sent her temporary tattoos of the Israeli flag via Amazon. When she opened the mail, the package had X’s drawn on it, the Israeli flag tattoos had writing on them and the package included tattoos of skulls.
She said that if people wore clothes with Israeli flags on them, they would be harassed, especially during the encampment. Other Jewish students reported verbal harassment by pro-Palestinian protesters to student leaders, especially while the encampment was up.
An unknown man followed three other men from the Chabad House to their home April 27, during the beginning week of the encampment, according to IU Police Department Public Information Officer Hannah Skibba. A video posted on Instagram that same day showed the man banging on the windows of a house, throwing porch furniture and shouting a homophobic slur.
The IU Divestment Coalition, which organized the encampment, said in a statement it rejected claims that the encampment or its organizing was antisemitic. The group said reports of students who followed home and harassed have “zero association” with it, and that they wouldn’t condone the behavior.
“IUDC’s movement for justice in Palestine is against all forms of discrimination and racism, including antisemitism,” the IUDC said in the statement. “The false conflation of antisemitism with antizionism is a dangerous practice that disregards statements previously put out by Jewish faculty, staff, students and community members at the encampment as well as the presence of Jewish faculty, staff, students and community members in our organizing.”
Lilia Wolf, a Jewish student and organizer with the IUDC, said she’s felt separated from much of IU’s Jewish community because of her anti-Zionist beliefs and pro-Palestinian organizing.
Wolf came to IU looking for a Jewish community after being one of the only Jewish students at her high school. But she said she’s been called “not a real Jew,” a “traitor” and been harassed for her organizing.
That even spread to physical threats. At the clash between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protesters at Sample Gates on Oct. 9, 2023, she said pro-Israeli protesters threatened to beat her up.
Since then, Wolf said she’s been able to carve out an anti-Zionist Jewish community — last year she went to an anti-Zionist Jewish professor’s home for Hannukah.
“There's a community in that sense, and that will continue to grow throughout undergraduates, graduates and faculty,” she said.
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Jewish students and faculty also said they felt threatened by social media posts from pro-Palestinian campus organizers.
Aidan Khamis, an encampment leader, reshared a post on X reading, “Fuck Israel. Fuck the US. Fuck your presidential elections. Fuck capitalism. Glory to Hamas. Glory to the Palestinian resistance. Glory to harbingers of the death of global capital. Glory to communism.”
Khamis told the IDS in May that he mistakenly reshared the post. However, he called discussions over the post “a distraction from the genocide.”
“The only people that should be condemned are the people committing genocide,” he added in a follow-up. “Those who are resisting the genocide cannot be condemned in how they are resisting the genocide.”
Another, posted on X by encampment organizer Bryce Greene in January, reads: “For those who need to hear it, Hamas is morally superior to Israel in every way that matters.”
Greene stood by his tweet when asked by the IDS in May.
“It can make a lot of people uncomfortable to realize the state that they’re supporting is worse than the enemy that they claim to be fighting,” Greene said at the time.
The 1988 founding charter of Hamas — a group the U.S. designates as a terrorist organization — is explicitly antisemitic. The charter defines a struggle for liberation specifically against “Jews” and calls for a Muslim-ruled state in the region through the destruction of Israel. In 2017, Hamas outlined a new charter, redefining the struggle against “Zionists,” though it did not explicitly revoke the 1988 charter.
IU Hillel President Leah Sterbcow said many of the Jewish population at IU had seen the tweets, which she called radical and dangerous for the community.
Other antisemitic incidents have rocked Bloomington in the past year. On Jan. 8, Chabad at IU received an email from someone claiming they planted a bomb at the Chabad House. No explosives were found in or around the house, but the email was found to be part of a series of false bomb threats sent to Jewish cultural centers across Indiana.
Last month, a board with a swastika drawn on was found outside Congregation Beth Shalom on Third Street. Back in the 1980s, a neo-Nazi group set fire to the same synagogue.
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Sydney Zulich is a person of many firsts and many onlys on the Bloomington City Council. She’s the only renter, the only queer member. She’s the youngest at 21. She said she’ll always be in an “other” category, as the only Jewish person on the council.
Zulich sat in shock as a public commenter on Zoom cheered Adolf Hitler at a meeting in April. She was there when a speaker said “Every aspect of the media is Jewish. Every aspect of the government is Jewish. Our wars are fought for Jewish interest. Our whole existence is on Jewish supremacy.” Other speakers that night also made antisemitic, Islamaphobic and racist remarks.
She wanted to curl up into a ball. But 200 people were looking up at her. She thought about her colleagues who are minorities, to whom the hate was spewed as well.
“There’s nothing you can say in the moment that makes it better,” Zulich said.
As one of Bloomington’s preeminent Jewish leaders, she said, her words have power. She wanted to emphasize that she doesn’t speak for all Jewish people. But she said if anyone wanted to talk to her, because of her position of power and influence in Bloomington, because of her voice, they can reach out to her directly.
Over the past year, Zulich has felt people minimize her experiences as a Jewish person. Much of the antisemitism she remembers stemmed from her childhood in Ohio. In a school activity, a classmate drew a swastika.
To the classmate, Zulich said, the drawing likely meant nothing. But to her, she said it represented “the eradication of the Jewish people and a lot of other groups of people too.”
Sophie Shafran, president of Hoosiers for Israel, said a pro-Palestinian protester called her a Nazi at Sample Gates on Oct. 9, 2023. Originally at a vigil in Dunn Meadow that night, a pro-Israeli group later went to the PSC’s counterprotest at the gates, where a clash ensued.
“As the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, that one was probably one of the hardest comments to get,” Shafran said. “I don't feel welcome.”
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One day at the encampment, Rosenfeld said he spoke to a protester chanting “intifada, intifada!” He asked what the protester knew about the historical intifadas: armed uprisings of Palestinians against Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which ultimately resulted in the death of 1,500 Israelis. Israel's military response to both uprisings killed more than 5,000 Palestinians.
The word “Intifada” means “rebellion” or “uprising” in Arabic, and many pro-Palestinian protesters at IU and across the U.S. have said they use the word with that meaning. But Rosenfeld said the word is inextricably linked to the violent attacks on Israel for many Jewish people.
After Rosenfeld asked the protester what he knew about the historical events, he said they walked away without saying anything. That unwillingness to engage in dialogue, he said, is making issues worse and people feel more divided.
Symbols have provoked similar debates, such as graffiti last month at Ballantine Hall and at the bridge on Eagleson Avenue on Oct. 7 which included inverted red triangles. Those triangles are often used by pro-Palestinian activists as symbols of their support.
Red triangles as symbols of Palestinian resistance have existed long before the current war but were popularized in the last year by Hamas videos identifying Israeli soldiers. Its meaning is still debated and unclear. But Sterbcow said the symbol itself is threatening and dangerous.
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Rosenfeld said antisemitic incidents were already on the rise starting around the turn of the millennia. But he said Oct. 7 escalated things significantly and made many Jewish people feel “vulnerable.”
That vulnerability, too, stems from an incredibly painful history. Golden eras of Judaism like under the Emirate of Cordoba, or in medieval Cairo, ended in violence, discrimination and exile. Rosenfeld said Jewish people in post-World War II U.S. have been able to integrate into society readily, but that lingering fear re-emerged after Oct. 7.
“I'd still like to believe that America's best traditions will hold up and continue to be hospitable to Jews and everybody else,” Rosenfeld said.
To understand why chants like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “we don’t want no two-state, we want ‘48” can be so offensive to Jewish identity, Rosenfeld said one must understand the connection between many Jewish people and the state of Israel.
Sterbcow described Israel as omnipresent in the Jewish tradition, from school teachings to history to religious texts to many Jewish peoples’ identities.
The connection also extends to the Oct. 7 attacks. Several students outside the Chabad House during the encampment told the IDS they had friends or relatives still held hostage in Gaza.
A lot of that feeling stems from the horrors of the Holocaust and millennia of antisemitism before that. The existence of a Jewish state represents security for many Jewish people. Zulich said many Jewish people in the U.S. are raised to believe that if antisemitism would envelop America, they would be able to move to Israel.
Sterbcow said the tension and hostility since Oct. 7 have deepened her connection with Israel. But her connection isn’t with the government, she said, nor the government’s actions. And because she feels the state is under attack, that connection has only grown stronger.
As Jewish students have turned more to their communities due to feeling othered on campus, student leaders said they have felt their community becoming stronger together. Israel, to many Jewish students, including Grossman, is that community extended to the form of a nation.
So when many Jewish students hear calls for its dissolution, they feel their extended community is threatened.
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After the Oct. 7 attack, Grossman said she had an awakening to become more involved in Jewish life on campus. She came to IU from Colorado — which made being hundreds of miles away from her family during the flaring tension at school surrounding the encampment more difficult.
Grossman said what makes the conflict on campus so hard is it’s directly between students. She said some Jewish students don’t know how classmates feel about their stances or whether people will be prejudiced against them for wearing Stars of David on necklaces or Israeli flags on their shirts. But around Hanukkah in 2023, as Jewish people began to come together after Oct. 7, she said she realized she shouldn’t be hiding her Jewish identity.
“Coming here and seeing that the world isn't as pure as I thought it was and seeing the hatred that can stem just from being Jewish was something I didn't think I would go through,” Grossman said. “But I think going through it made me stronger, and it's made me love Israel more. It's made me love being Jewish more.”
IU Hillel put the finishing touches on Oct. 13 on a paper tree of life whose saplings were sown more than a month ago. During a Sept. 3 vigil, participants were asked to fill out small green leaflets of paper with the names of hostages held in Gaza, including those confirmed dead.
During the following weeks, Hillel leadership worked to piece each of the 251 leaves together – one for each hostage taken in the Oct. 7 attack.
The Tree of Life is a religious symbol in Judaism, often used as a metaphor for the Torah. Now fully grown, the tree’s green paper leaflets stretch across a wall in the Hillel house.
“We took this bid on a Tree of Life to be something that we can look at to give us hope, to uplift us,” Sterbcow said. “Kind of just a reminder of the strength and the resiliency of the Jewish people.”
— Andrew Miller is a reporter for the Indiana Daily Student. Contact him at ami3@iu.edu.
