LONG READS Issue 990 · December 13, 2023

Poison Ivies 

“These universities have shown themselves to be evil at the core.” Why former UPenn patron David Magerman has given up on the Ivy League

Poison Ivies 


Photos: Alamy photos, Family archives

Jewish students at campuses across America have been on the sharp end of a surge in anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Israel activity in recent years. While pro-Israel speakers were harassed, university administrators sat by, and Jewish life on campus suffered.

In the wake of the October 7 attacks, that slow-burn deterioration turned to something far worse. Long before Israel had begun its offensive into Gaza, left-leaning academics joined an army of students in a vicious campaign of victim-blaming. Belated, pro-forma and equivocating statements from university officials against Hamas’s actions were drowned out by the ferocity of pro-Hamas support across many campuses.

At the very institutions that abound with safe spaces to shield students from discrimination of all types, expressions of vicious anti-Semitism were given the go-ahead.

Some donors tried to push back, leveraging their support to force the universities to treat the concerns of Jewish students with at least as much seriousness as fat-phobia, but the pro-Palestinian hysteria was allowed to continue.

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