It’s the only language they know.
A lthough Trump’s election has signaled a radical cultural shift against “wokeness” in America, some things haven’t changed. The keffiyeh kids are still at it, continuing to harass Jewish students under the banner of “Students for Justice in Palestine.”
Last week, on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau — also known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day — 60-some Ohio State University students, armed with bullhorns, posters, and winter jackets, encircled the Schottenstein Chabad House, OSU’s Jewish Student Center. The Chabad House — a temporary rental while the original building undergoes renovations — sits on a quiet residential street corner a few blocks from the main campus.
Inside, 130 students stood shoulder-to-shoulder and sat knee-to-knee in the house’s living area to hear the testimony of two Israel Defense Forces soldiers who were seriously wounded during the October 7 attacks. The event, titled “Courage & Sacrifice,” was sponsored by Belev Echad — a nonprofit dedicated to serving wounded IDF veterans — and hosted by a coalition of Jewish student organizations at OSU.
In the days leading up to the event, members of Students for Justice in Palestine’s Ohio State University chapter called on their comrades to assist in protesting the Chabad-hosted event through an Instagram post: “WAR CRIMINALS OFF OUR CAMPUS!”
Join us TOMORROW at 6:30PM, where war criminals directly complicit in the ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine will be on campus. These individuals played an active role in the brutal attacks that have devastated Gaza. . . . We vehemently oppose any attempts to commemorate or honor war criminals, in addition to any acts of normalization with the zionist entity. We will not stand by and allow them to be welcomed onto our campus.
In reality, these “war criminals” were victims of real war criminals — the Hamas terrorists who breached the Israel-Gaza border on October 7, 2023, to murder, rape, and maim Israelis.
Saar Arie, a combat medic in the IDF, was dispatched with his team to attend to the wounded families of the kibbutzim raided by Hamas. Arie saved many lives that day — including those of a baby and his parents who were trapped in a burning building. During a rescue operation, Arie was shot in the stomach and in the foot, and he was left bleeding for hours. After doctors told him he would never walk normally again, Arie pushed through months of rehabilitation to get back on his own two feet, with the help of a cane. He then re-enlisted in the IDF.
Maya Desiatnik served in the Border Protection Force as a noncombatant surveillance soldier — a “lookout” — with 22 other young women. When Hamas ambushed their base, the female soldiers had no weapons with which to defend themselves, so they hid. After struggling to penetrate the barrier, Hamas gave up and lit their whole base on fire. Crouched in the command room alongside her fellow lookouts, Desiatnik started to cough up blood and black tar as the smoke intensified. Fifteen of her colleagues — and close friends — died in the fire. Seven more were taken hostage. Desiatnik was the only lookout to escape. After months of physical and psychological rehabilitation, she too re-enlisted in the IDF.
Speaking over the screams, car horns, and megaphones of the SJP students outside, the IDF soldiers told their stories to a large, captivated audience.
Ironically, SJPOSU’s original post — which was meant to intimidate guests of the Chabad House event — rallied the pro-Israel students of OSU to attend. Ava Zweig, a freshman at OSU and co-founder of the group Students Supporting Israel, helped host the event. She told National Review that RSVPs for the event weren’t very high — until SJPOSU’s contemptuous post.
Zweig estimated they had “maybe, like, five RSVPs; it was bad. The day before the actual event, we’re freaking out trying to get everyone to sign up. Then, SJP posts in conjunction with OSU Divest and Jewish Voice for Peace in a collaborative Instagram post.” She continued, “after that, we got 130 students . . . to RSVP and attend that event,” including “a decent amount who weren’t Jewish.”
Adam Kling, a fourth-year student at OSU and student leader of Chabad, described the scene to National Review. Kling said, “Just for safety reasons, we had about five or six security guards that we hired, and the Columbus police also showed up.” Because of the collection of screaming students out front, “the two soldiers had to basically jump over a fence in the backyard to sneak in so they could avoid them.” Zweig added that Arie “was on a cane,” but he still had to “make his way up to the house from the back stairs.”
While the private security may seem excessive, it has become the norm for most public Jewish organizations. Kling mentioned two recent acts of violence against Jewish students at OSU in the past two years: In November 2023, two Jewish students were approached by a group of guys leaving a bar who asked them if they were Jewish. After saying yes, “one was punched in the nose, broke his nose. The other was punched in his jaw and broke his jaw. And then the next day, our Hillel was broken into and vandalized on the anniversary of Kristallnacht.”
As the students made their way up to the house to attend the talk, they were met with antisemitic slurs from the SJP crowd. Zweig said, “It was just ironic for a bunch of people who were calling for peace to be screaming ‘globalize the intifada,’ ‘baby killers,’ ‘war criminals, come out, we know you’re in there.’ They didn’t skip a beat. And so hearing all that, even though it was only like 60 people, they’re loud. They’re all screaming, and we’re in a little rental house.”
For many of the younger students attending the event, this was their first personal encounter with radical antisemitism on campus. Kling, a senior student, said he is “numb to hearing those words.” As he said, “If I got one dollar for every time I was called a racist, terrorist, white supremacist just because I’m Jewish, I’d be out of college right now buying a house for myself.”
Once the event concluded, attendees were directed to stay inside the house until all the protesters had dispersed. While the initial chaos was over, the campus fallout was yet to begin.
The student-led newspaper of OSU, The Lantern, published a biased article about the event, which sympathetically quoted SJP student leaders and failed to report the protesters’ conduct.
Jane Shevkin, student vice president of OSU Chabad, submitted a letter to the editor concerning The Lantern’s reporting. Shevkin’s letter corrected the previous article, which failed to mention that the 60-some SJP protesters were screaming anti-Israel chants at the gathering of mostly Jewish students. “Ohio State’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter stood outside with their faces covered, and its members proudly shouted their Jew hate. . . . After the event ended, a few protesters stayed around to ensure we got their final message for us ‘to kill ourselves.’”
SJPOSU was quick to attack Shevkin for setting the record straight. The group posted on Instagram:
The contents of the article spew vile and disingenuous statements with the sole purpose of demonizing Muslims, Palestinians, and Arabs. . . . We, Students for Justice in Palestine at The Ohio State University, condemn The Lantern for platforming explicit hate speech masquerading as ‘journalism,’ and we reaffirm our commitment to vehemently opposing any and all manifestations of normalization of genocide, settler colonialism, and zionism within our universities.
While the rest of the country has rejected this mode of critical race theory, the keffiyeh kids just can’t help themselves — it’s the only language they know.
Despite SJP’s best efforts to miseducate their fellow students, the truth remains. As Zweig said of the event: “These students, let me tell you, were sitting there, captivated. And really, really [engrossed] in every single word that these soldiers said. . . . Obviously, it was so distracting to hear all the chanting, but it was a very memorable night that I think every single student who was there wouldn’t have missed for the world.”