By Jonathan Falk
(JTA) — We were used to a pretty steady stream of calls, texts, and emails reporting things like a swastika on a bathroom floor, a Jewish student being punched or a threat that the kosher dining hall would be shot up. As the person leading Hillel International’s Israel Action and Addressing Antisemitism program, my team and I had developed an unfortunate fluency in these incidents: what they meant, how to respond, and what came next.
Then, in the middle of April 2024, something shifted. Students and others staged an anti-Israel encampment in the middle of Columbia’s campus, and within days, my inbox looked like a fire alarm had gone off simultaneously across the country as more than 100 campuses followed. The tents multiplied. And what happened around them was not only standard protest: students chanting for the elimination of Israel, antisemitic tropes displayed openly on posters, Zionist students physically blocked from parts of their own campuses. For many Jewish students, the encampments felt like a message directed specifically at them: You don’t belong here. This moment confirmed just how isolated, vulnerable, and misunderstood they had become on way too many campuses.
Now that we have some distance from spring 2024, it is worth asking what we have learned since and whether we are prepared to be honest about the answers.
Some things have improved. Some campuses are less visibly chaotic. Some interventions have worked. But the encampments were never the whole story. They were one highly visible expression of a deeper problem — a problem that did not leave when the tents did.
Since the encampments, the most important thing we have learned is that antisemitism is adaptive. When one form becomes less acceptable or more constrained, another emerges. And what has emerged over the past two years is more diffuse, more ideologically embedded, and in some ways harder to confront than a tent city on the quad.
The hatred did not disappear after the encampments — it migrated. More than half of what Jewish students experience now shows up online: in posts, anonymous messages, group chats, and the steady churn of conspiracy and incitement. A campus can look calmer and still be deeply unhealthy.
And it has persisted regardless of what’s happening in the news cycle. We continue to see antisemitism on campus even when an immediate conflict fades from the headlines. That tells us the issue is not limited to one conflict or one protest wave. In too many places, there is now a deeper culture in which Jews are treated with suspicion, Zionists are cast outside the moral community, and anti-Jewish hostility is rationalized as politics.
Two specific developments have accelerated this. The first is the normalization of Holocaust inversion — the idea that Jews today, or the Jewish state, are the new Nazis. This is not criticism. It is a way of weaponizing Jewish memory against Jews, draining the Holocaust of its meaning while recasting Jewish identity as uniquely suspect. The second is the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest, Sanctions campaign playbook. When BDS comes to campus, antisemitism reliably increases, not only at the final vote, but throughout the campaign itself, which stigmatizes Jewish students and isolates Jewish voices long before any resolution passes.
The good news is, in the past two years, we have also learned what actually makes a difference.
Clear rules, consistently enforced, work. When schools establish expectations and follow through on them, harassment and intimidation decrease. This sounds obvious, but it had to be relearned at enormous cost to Jewish students on too many campuses. Security matters in the same way. Students feel it when adults take their safety seriously. Visible deterrence and thoughtful security planning change behavior. Too often, security was treated as an overreaction or as a panicked last resort. We learned that it is frequently what allows Jewish life to continue with confidence.
But enforcing rules and improving security only address part of the problem. The encampments taught us that campus antisemitism is fundamentally a climate problem, not a conduct-management problem. What gets normalized, what gets excused, what university leaders are willing to name clearly — that is what shapes whether Jewish students feel they belong. If a school removes tents while leaving the ideas and norms that enabled them untouched, then that is not a solution, it is a surface repair.
Taken together, these lessons clarify what universities and the Jewish community must do next.
First, education matters. Campuses cannot rely on crisis response alone. They must invest in helping students, faculty, and administrators understand antisemitism and respond with clarity.
Second, enforcement matters, but it is not enough. Universities need to go beyond reactive responses and do the deeper, proactive work of strengthening their codes of conduct and student and faculty disciplinary procedures so expectations are clearer for everyone long term.
Third, Jewish students need more than protection. They need places where they can live Jewishly with joy, confidence, and belonging.
Fourth, universities and the Jewish community must continue investing in Jewish student resilience and leadership so students are not only protected in difficult moments, but they are equipped to lead, respond, and thrive through them.
I still receive calls and emails from Hillel professionals navigating hard moments on campus. But the nature of the requests has shifted. I see fewer urgent Slacks about immediate chaos. More are about the quieter, more entrenched problems: the hostile syllabus, the student group that got excluded from a coalition, the administrator who didn’t know how to respond and didn’t ask. The problems are less dramatic and in some ways more stubborn.
What I hope for, and what I believe is possible, is a future in which these calls become fewer and fewer. Not because antisemitism has been eliminated, but because universities have built the knowledge and the habits, and the institutions will address it early and more effectively to strengthen what all students need to thrive. That is the work we at Hillel are helping to lead: partnering with universities to improve campus climate, strengthen expectations and accountability, and invest in the resilience, leadership, and flourishing of Jewish students. Campuses where education, stronger conduct systems, consistent enforcement, and genuine investment in Jewish life have changed the climate enough that the next generation of Jewish students doesn’t have to spend their college years wondering whether they truly belong.
The encampments forced a reckoning. That reckoning is not over. Universities must continue to educate, enforce their rules, and create the conditions for Jewish students not only to be safe, but to live with pride and joy. This path forward is clearer than it was two years ago, and the universities willing to take it seriously have the chance to make a real difference.