For Jewish American college students, last fall began with optimism: finding old friends on campus, new books stacked on dorm-room desks, curiosity about the semester to come. But what followed the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 crushed that optimistic spirit: Zionists are not welcome. Go back to Poland. Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists. Jewish students across the country were targeted and vilified; they lost friends; in some cases they were told by administrators that their safety could not be ensured. To mark the end of a year like no other, we have collected short reflections from college students across the country. These are not stories about Israel but about America; they are not about the war in Gaza but the one at home. Ronnie Volman University of California, San Diego Ronnie Volman is a freshman at University of California, San Diego. I was born in Israel and have been living in the United States since I was 3. On Oct. 7, as I frantically read the news, a friend on campus told me the attack was my fault and that I am directly “responsible for bombing kids.” Another classmate told me that I can’t possibly be peaceful because “Zionists are genocidal.” Yet another tried to insist that they don’t hate all Jewish people, just the Jewish people of Israel. The vast majority of my friends and family reside in Israel. Despite being over 7,000 miles away, I remain very close to them. I am in frequent contact with my friends, some of whom have to face the reality of enlisting in the IDF in the upcoming months, while I have the privilege of studying in the United States. I distinctly remember the immense anxiety taking shape as I received WhatsApp messages on Oct. 7 from family and friends living in central and south Israel. The anxiety never truly disappeared, with the importance of their safety being something that I think about constantly. Following Oct. 7, I lost countless friends and peers on campus for standing up against the undeniable rise in antisemitism, with my lived experiences as a Jewish person repeatedly undermined. I have been shunned and ostracized by a campus community that I once trusted to be an inclusive, open-minded forum for discussion. My former friends have deemed me to be a supporter of genocide, a colonizer, and an aggressor for not hiding my identity as an Israeli student. Rather than forming a ground for compassion, words such as “Zionist” and “Israeli” are now thrown around as insults. ...

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