Thread by @Eliana_Goldin

Now that I’ve graduated Columbia University, it’s time to talk about the worst antisemitic attack I faced personally on campus.

I was fired from the Columbia Daily Spectator for being an Orthodox Jew. It had nothing to do with my opinions on Israel. Here’s the story🧵:

For two years, I was a staff writer and then a senior staff writer for the Columbia Daily Spectator university news section. I had close relationships with the reporters and editors on staff. In the beginning of September 2023, I took a break, and then Oct 7th occurred.

I spent that semester advocating for Israel, and because that took up all of my time, I decided not to return to the paper as a reporter. But in February 2024, I applied to be a columnist to talk about “common ground” between Jews and Palestinians, and I got the job.

After I wrote my first column, people dug up my old social media posts to find something they could use to bully me, and they found a poll I had asked my Instagram followers months before October 7th. The poll said, “Would you k*ll someone from Amalek?”

Immediately, tons of Columbia students posted on their social media platforms that I had called for the death of Palestinians because of that poll. SJP posted it on their Instagram and it received 18,000 likes and had a ton of scary death threats asking about my identity.

A few days later, the head of Spec Opinion fired me as a columnist and canceled my column.

In the time when I needed support the most, the Columbia Daily Spectator — people I had once been friends with — left me to fend for myself.

And the thing is, Amalek has nothing to do with Palestinians. I explained that the question of Amalek is akin to the Binding of Isaac — a Jewish thought experiment on whether you would go against your own personal morality to follow God’s morality — but they didn’t care.

No matter how much I explained to them that Amalek has nothing to do with Palestinians, they didn’t listen.

When I told them that I had never even heard of Amalek being used as Palestinians until October 7th, they didn’t care.

Judaism was whatever they wanted it to be.

Just as it is Islamophobic to define Islam based off of extremists who take the religion out of pocket and use it for their own racist aims, so too is it antisemitic to do the very same thing with Judaism.

But that’s what Spec did. They defined my Judaism based on extremists.

Even after explaining all of this to the opinion editors, they posted an op-ed a few days later that said a Columbia student (me) was calling for the deaths of Palestinians on campus, and they linked to my Instagram poll.

This led to more of my peers thinking I was a monster.

To be honest, part of me thinks this might be libel, but I have no idea — I’m no lawyer.

All I know is that I told them the truth, explained to them the ins and outs of Amalek in the Jewish tradition, and then they published a lie that actively put me more in danger.

As a Jewish leader on campus, I spent my entire tenure trying to make more room for alternative viewpoints within the Zionist community. I went out of my way to engage in dialogue with people who disagreed with me, even when it was uncomfortable.

And yet when it came down to it, all people saw was what they wanted to see: that Orthodox Jews are racist to their very core because of their religious beliefs, and that Zionists have no room for Palestinians in their narrative.

Antisemites see what they want to see.

I sank into one of the deepest depressions I’ve ever experienced during this time. Everywhere I turned on campus, people gave me mean looks. The entire campus believed I was someone that I wasn’t. I even received a DM from a peer I’d never met calling me vile and disgusting.

I wish I had a nice way to wrap up this story, but I don’t. I dealt with the backlash, worked through the emotional turmoil, and kept living life because that’s what I had to do. It sucks, and the school paper still constantly receives recognition for balanced journalism lol, but I guess that’s life. All I know is I’m very excited to have graduated college and am excited for whatever my future has in store. I trust it’s all part of God’s plan for me, and it has certainly made me more empathetic to people who are subject to personal character attacks by a bunch of people who have never even met them. In that regard, I am grateful for what I experienced as a Jew on Columbia’s campus because it made me a better version of myself and definitely a better Jew. גם זו לטובה