College campuses locally and nationally erupted in unrest during the Spring of 2024 after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and while it spawned thinkpieces from national media, a group of researchers decided to talk to the students from around the country who were in the thick of the chaos.
“The data can be very helpful to campus professionals, parents, Jewish leaders more generally,” study author Jonathan Krasner said. “The data gives us a lot of insight into how students are feeling, how they’re processing the environment on campus, as well as what’s going on in Israel and Gaza.”
Krasner, the lead researcher on the study “Between Home and Homeland: Jewish College Students Confront the Israel-Gaza Conflict and Campus Divides,” will be speaking at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas’ annual meeting on Sunday, Oct. 12. Krasner will be having a conversation with Rabbi Jill Avrin, the JCRC’s first director of campus affairs – and Krasner’s former student at Hebrew Union College when Avrin was in rabbinic school. The event will be held at a location in St. Paul, and the location is provided upon registration.
Krasner’s team interviewed 36 university students from across the United States during the Spring 2024 semester as part of a study sponsored by the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University.
The goal, the authors wrote, was “to understand American Jewish college students’ experiences following Oct. 7; to gauge Jewish student reactions to the Israel-Gaza war, as well as associated events and attitudes on American campuses, including pro-Palestine activism and anti-Zionist and antisemitic expressions and interactions, as determined by participants.
“In short, our research question was: ‘How are Jewish college and university students making sense of the war and experiencing campus life post-October 7?’”
Krasner said that the events of Oct. 7 caught a lot of Jewish people on campuses by surprise.
“It really was a turning point, and it opened up a sort of reality that few of us – I’m going to include myself among them – were really prepared for,” Krasner said. “And I think that what this article does is that it, along with some other work that’s been done on the subject, is give us some hard data and some qualitative data that helps us to make sense of this new environment and to be more nimble in terms of how we go about reacting, responding, and hopefully helping the students and helping the community move forward.”
Avrin said that, in her role, the data is useful to help break stereotypes about how people tend to talk about Jewish students on campus.
“Often the way that people talk about Jewish students on campus is that Jewish students are either Zionist or anti-Zionist,” Avrin said. “Even some Jewish students themselves have said to me like that as soon as somebody finds out they’re Jewish, they ask them ‘Are you Hillel or JVP?’
“I can now turn to like real hard data that says that’s actually not accurate … it’s not a binary. Certainly there are students who might use that language as a way of self-identifying, but it’s much more complicated than that.”
Said Krasner: “One of the big findings of the research that I’ve done is that there is this what we call an unsettled center: Close to half of the people who we spoke with don’t feel comfortable with labels [and] don’t want to be labeled one way or another because I think they’re trying to figure things out. They’re trying to not oversimplify where they’re coming from, how they’re feeling.”
Ethan Roberts, the deputy executive director of the JCRC said that the nuance captured in the study is rare.
“We’ve all read the quantitative survey studies, but this was the first academic, qualitative research that we had seen,” Roberts said. “What we appreciated about it was the nuance that this is not a binary experience.”
The study identifies six distinct response categories: “Affirmed,”“Aggrieved,” “Retrenched,” “Conflicted,” “Disengaged,” and “Disillusioned,” which are based on ratings across seven areas which include connectedness, activism and emotional well-being.
The research findings highlight the intersection of global events and polarized campus climates, revealing tensions between Jewish identity, antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and political engagement. This study provides insights into how young Jews navigate vulnerability, community, and solidarity during a time of crisis, revealing responses ranging from pride to alienation.
“It was really a fascinating way to look at their sense of connectedness, knowledge, [and] engagement,” Roberts said, who added that the recent hiring of Avrin in a newly-created position helps them make a positive impact on campus. “It is really helpful to have this kind of research to know [and] really understand that students are going to require different approaches depending on where they’re at.”
Krasner said that conversations around college students’ connection to Israel reminds him of studies of a decade ago, where there was discussions around American Jews feeling as emotionally attached to Israel as their parents’ generation.
“I think what we’re seeing here is that that’s kind of the wrong question to ask, or at least it’s a very overly simplified way about thinking about this,” he said. “I think that people, a lot of people, whether we’re talking about people on campus or whether we’re just talking about Jews more generally, they are connected. But just because they’re connected doesn’t mean that they’re not struggling on some level with what their relationship with Israel is. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that they agree with everything that they’re seeing or everything they’re experiencing.”
