Notes from a pro-Israel student: Our spaces should feel like home, not a hiding place

Being visibly Jewish on campus has never felt straightforward, but for the second anniversary of Oct. 7, we refused to shrink ourselves. My friend and I set up a stall in the middle of campus. Around us, we wrapped the pillars with hostage posters, hung Israeli flags and lit electric candles in remembrance. We had done the risk assessment, spoken about security and planned for almost every scenario—experience had taught us that visibility comes at a cost.

But the initial reaction wasn’t an explosion of noise; it was a strange kind of quiet. Hardly any Jewish students approached us. A few students paused, wide-eyed, telling us it was the first time they had ever seen an Israeli flag on campus. Some claimed that they knew far more about the war in Gaza than about the horror of Oct. 7, until they stopped and read our leaflets.

There were a few people who gave us looks, snickered or took photos in a way that felt hostile, but compared to what we had prepared for, it barely registered. This is a hopeful trend, but the only way it can continue is if more of us step up and show the world who we are.

As the day went on, something shifted. Jewish students who had initially been too nervous to be seen at the stall started to appear. Seeing photos of the stall online—open, calm, unmistakably ordinary—gave them the confidence to stop by. As a result, it was the public stall, and not the private Jewish event held for the anniversary, that sparked more engagement and conversation.

That shift reflected something I’d already seen leading both the Jewish and Israeli societies: on campus, fear often shows up as absence. We recently polled our community to get an honest sense of the mood on campus, and more than half of the community said that safety concerns are what keep them from showing up to Israel events. Many were supportive in private, but too anxious to be seen.

You can see it in the little details. Students ask not to appear in photos with an Israeli flag that might end up on Instagram. Even when we rebrand an event or image as completely non-political, people still sometimes hesitate to be associated with it.

This kind of retreat into invisibility becomes a kind of spiral of silence: People stay quiet because they assume they are the only ones, and that quietness exacerbates isolation. This unintentionally signals to the campus that Jewish presence is indeed something to be ashamed of or hidden. We move events into back rooms, share locations at the last minute and talk about security more than we talk about community. Events have been canceled—some even shut down halfway when protests turned threatening.

Hiding does not make Zionist Jews safer. It just reinforces the sense that simply being visibly Jewish or pro-Israel is dangerous. We succeed when we balance privacy with pride, though fear is not imagined. Incidents like the recent mass shooting during a Chanukah event for families on Bondi Beach in Australia remain a brutal reminder that Jewish visibility can carry real risk.

Still, terror cannot be allowed to turn what should be ordinary into something we only do behind closed doors. The community only really grows when there are visible, everyday moments in the middle of campus that say: We are here, and we are not hiding. Students shouldn’t have to second-guess their identity in places where they belong.

Momentum is important because isolation breeds vulnerability. Once a threshold of visibility is crossed, the dynamic shifts. Many of the anxieties that students carry are about what might happen—not what usually does—and so standing together in a confident, organized way can be its own kind of security.

To new students: You don’t have to make grand first appearances or dive straight into difficult situations. Come to one event that is just outside your comfort zone, and bring your friends. You don’t need to be the person at the stall or the face on social media. You can simply show up and stand with others, and that alone makes a difference.

Student leaders should do the careful security work, but not let student groups turn into bunkers. Our spaces should feel like home, not a hiding place.

The more pride we show in our identity, the harder it is for anyone to intimidate us out of it. It is far better to stand within a supportive crowd than to face hostility alone from a distance.

© JNS