Anti-Israel demonstrators protest outside the main campus of Columbia University during the Columbia commencement ceremony in Manhattan, in New York City, US, May 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

I am part of the last class of university students who experienced campus life before Oct. 7, 2023. That day changed the trajectory of my college experience in ways I never anticipated. I expected to be intellectually challenged at Columbia and to have conversations that explored differing views across the academic and political spectrums. Instead, I was forced to defend my identity.

The blind hate that propelled that slaughter followed us home to our campuses. We endured a horrifying tenfold increase in the number of antisemitic incidents on college campuses in 2024-25 over the 2022-23 school year, the last year before the attacks. Anti-Israel “encampments” physically seized buildings on many campuses, leading at some schools to the cancellation of in-person classes, commencement ceremonies, and essentially all organized campus life.

Things have improved at American universities since that low point. The hostages have come home. Thankfully, most of the encampments have ended, with campus incidents of antisemitism down 66% in 2025, from 1,694 to 583; protest-related incidents fell by 83%, vandalism by 51%, and assaults by 72%.

And yet, a profoundly disturbing “new normal” has replaced those ugly years. Jewish, Israeli, and pro-Israel students all too often find themselves marginalized and excluded. Forty-two percent of Jewish higher education students reported experiencing antisemitism during college; 25% said they had felt or been excluded from a group/event because they were Jewish; 34% had avoided displaying their Jewish identity; and 38% had avoided expressing views on Israel.

I was a freshman at Columbia University on Oct. 7, 2023. I had barely begun my college experience when the campus I had been so excited to call home suddenly became a place where I felt so unwelcome. During those first weeks of unrest, while putting up posters of civilians kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza by Hamas, I was screamed at, called a “dirty Jew,” and told to “get the f**k out of here.” I remember the complete and utter shock of realizing that someone could look at me, know virtually nothing about me beyond my Jewish identity, and decide that I did not belong.

Three years later, despite the disappearance of encampments and the decline in headlines, I still find myself navigating the same underlying hostility and questioning whether my identity as a Jew will ever be fully accepted on the campus I have spent my entire college career trying to comfortably call home. My experience is not unique to me, but has become a new normal for Jewish students across the country.

There are fewer tents on the quad, fewer canceled commencements, fewer headlines. But a campus where a third of Jewish students hide their identity and nearly four in ten censor their views on Israel is not a campus at peace. It is a campus that has normalized exclusion.

University leaders should not mistake declining incident counts for a job well done. They have a legal obligation under Title VI to guarantee Jewish students equal access to every program, space, and opportunity, and a moral one to enforce their own conduct codes the first time they are broken, not after a federal judge orders them to.

I remember campus life before Oct. 7, 2023. Normal is not the absence of encampments; it is Jewish students living openly in every corner of campus life, and until university administrators deliver that, none of us can accept this as normal.

Galia Labowitz is a Columbia University and Jewish Theological Seminary Joint Program student studying Cognitive Science and Jewish Ethics.