Note: Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect students' identities
It had been a long few days, and a long year, which may have explained why the philosophy major stood on a chair in a full-body cow costume singing with a Hassidic rabbi.
At tables and on a makeshift dance floor, scores of Columbia students late Monday night were jumping, clapping and bopping to a Hebrew rendition of Next Year In Jerusalem, the song that closes the penultimate section of the traditional Haggadah. Around the corner were bull-horned chants of kicking Jews out of Israel and burning Tel Aviv to the ground. You wouldn't know it from the energy in here.
How I got to this Passover meal on New York City's 113th Street when most American Jews were in quiet homes or familiar hotels was a bit of a blur even to me. But its meaning -- as the campus seethed with division and anti-Jewish sentiment -- rippled through my soul.
I went to Columbia, but in a culturally earlier time, when if you took off your kippah or Star of David on campus it was because you were rebelling against your parents, not inoculating yourself from "Go Back to Poland" taunts.
My experience as a Jewish American was one of such easy tolerance you could forget it might be otherwise-- the balance point between an Ivy League history of intolerance and the moral-relativism-on-steroids that appears now to have made some students and faculty (I'm convinced it's not the majority ) think terrorists are the good guys. A golden time, in retrospect.
When concerns arose over how an official school event in a Catholic Church might make some traditional Jewish students feel, it was discussed privately, with administration and students quietly working out a solution, no protests, counter-protests or social media outrage in sight. I'm sure there was rancor over such issues. It was just not dominant or an end unto itself.
The situation at Columbia in the days leading up to Passover had upset me as a Jew but also as a person who still believes in the value of the campus experience. (Yeah, I'm the one.) Blissfully hanging out with Black, Muslim, Catholic, Hindu, Latino and Evangelical friends was a formative experience, a tonic for a childhood spent principally in Jewish institutions. The school had provided a sparkling chance both to explore and be forged by our global richness. Now that all seemed to be going up in smoke.
Forget walking around Columbia with so many different types of people --now you might not be able to walk around Columbia, period. A WhatsApp note from an Orthodox rabbi a day earlier had encouraged Jewish students to go home for their safety; the night before that a group of visibly Jewish students had been intimidated by fellow students in a BDS encampment into leaving campus, where out on Broadway they were harassed and called slurs by non-student bullies.
To see my youth so summarily extinguished wasn't just upsetting. It made me fear that this new Columbia generation -- not just the campus's 5,000 Jews, but all the people they'd interact with -- would miss out. The Jewish students would be unwilling to open themselves up to everyone around them (or just transfer). The idea plunged me into despair. And so here I was blowing off my family on the first night of Passover to spend it with a hundred Jewish kids of very different backgrounds in a Chabad House near the protests, hoping to see if there was, well, hope.
Outside the door a cop car and five burly men lingered in a kind of informal bouncer convention. A clever security strategy -- camouflaged enough not to invite confrontation, noticeable enough not to mess with. Inside, the rabbi, a compact and thoughtful thirtysomething named Yuda Drizin, stood on a chair and launched the proceedings on the parlor level of the aging brownstone, students seated on either end of several long tables below him.
Tuning out the noise
"This will be the only time we mention what's happening out there," Drizin said, gesturing toward the door as he began the seder. "Matza is meant to be eaten without talking. It's a kind of meditation -- a way to tune out the noise. I want us at this seder to tune out the noise." We were just far enough away not to hear what was happening outside. Now Drizin wanted us not to think about it either.
On the tables, alongside the traditional seder plates and wine, were accouterments like toy frogs and cattle to mark the plagues, injecting Purim into Passover. Some students tried on toy sunglasses that had been placed on the table in homage to the darkness plague.
Anxiety was not obvious. But it was visible in small ways if you knew where to look -- in how one student casually described an uncomfortable walk near the encampment on the way to her dorm a few days earlier; in the tense looks up to the door when it swung open during the Haggadah reading. (It was a matzah-seeking Jewish neighbor. Or Elijah.)
"It has been a long day. A very long day," a decidedly cool and confident junior named David sighed at one table. That morning he had chosen to put on a kippah for the first time since his bar mitzvah. As he walked down Broadway right outside Columbia's gates, a man on rollerblades approached him and said "What's up, k---?", using a slur. Before David knew it the person had bladed off, a rotating ball of hate right from a 1990's time machine. "I mean, rollerblades?" David said.
He wasn't just amused by the juxtaposition -- he found the quick exit a kind of cowardice. "If he hadn't left so fast I would have confronted him."
Coincidentally, a dean was walking by and saw what happened. He immediately came up and asked David if he was OK, offering support. Critics might eyeroll; where was the dean when Columbia was developing a reputation that made such bigots feel comfortable in the first place? But David appreciated the gesture. "He totally didn't have to do any of that," he said.
A grab-bag of ideologies
The rabbi moved the seder along, invoking a grab-bag of ideologies. He gave a little Hassidic homily. "The matzah has to be handmade, not machine-made, because liberation can't be automated -- you can't use AI to attain freedom." He passed out scallion stalks and asked students to play-hit each other to simulate slavery. (A woman of Persian heritage explained to her tablemates that this was the Farsi custom during the song of Dayenu. "But only during the chorus -- unless you really don't like someone.")
Bananas and chocolate spread adjoined the more typical parsley and saltwater. "The point is to do things differently enough to make people ask, and bananas and chocolate make people ask," Drizin said. A little while later he upped that ante when he had several students, including David, dress up in cow and tiger costumes and run mischievously through the room to mark the animal plagues.
For swaths of the seder politics seemed far away. Students -- many of whom did not know each other -- traded familiar undergrad table chatter: where they were from, where they wanted to live after graduation, a tai-chi class that was life-changing. Bottles of wine were smuggled in; some applauded (or ribbed) other students' readings of Haggadah passages.
These were Jewish students from Boston to Seattle, Bergen County to the San Fernando Valley. There were Black Jews and Yemeni Jews and Jews from Belgium and Jews from Miami Beach. "Shouldn't you have returned to the Jewish homeland for Passover?" one wag asked the Floridian. "I'm a rebel," he answered.
A Passover night different from all over Passover nights
But there was no escaping that this was a Passover night different from all other Passover nights.
When the line in Dayenu was read thanking God for delivering the Jews to the Land of Israel, one student sang "The Land of Israel" more loudly, with pointed emphasis.
Another talked about regularly bringing dozens of members of his campus running club to Caffe Aronne, the coffee shop on the Upper East Side that shortly after Oct 7 became a political flashpoint when several employees quit over the owner's support of Israel. (Hundreds of Israel supporters soon showed up to buy coffee.)
The student said he would be at the BDS encampment the next day. When the person sitting next to him, a nose-ringed junior named Deborah, raised her eyebrows, the runner smiled and said "I'm joking, I just have a class near there, that's not me," as he reached inside his shirt to pull out a dog tag proclaiming his support of the Israeli hostages.
David mentioned Shai Davidai, the business-school professor and pro-Israel provocateur who has described the campus environment as "1938" and called for the resignation of university brass. "I don't get the point -- he's not convincing anybody," he said.
Another cited embattled president Dr. Minouche Shafik, whose testimony to Congress last week about the measures to control antisemitism now feels like it was given during the Pharaonic Period. "She tried to use Columbia-JTS as cover," said a student enrolled in one of those joint Jewish Theological Seminary programs. "And Stefanik was awesome, she wasn't having it."
Drizin himself violated his no-outside-world rule a few times.
Describing Jewish tradition's preference for round matzah over square, he said, "There's an important lesson here: liberation can't have sharp corners, it can't be edgy. It has to be done with a sense of completeness," in what seemed like both a riposte to the angry chants outside and a call for a more zen response in the room.
And when the service came to the Haggadah's famous line of, "In every generation they stand against us to destroy us and God saves us from their hands," Drizin couldn't resist a nod. "This is a message for the present," he said, as a number of students murmured their agreement.
A pointed rebuttal to the protests outside
Then they moved along -- to singing, to ritual foods like maror and haroset, to a meal that stretched on.
By the time the students came to the post-meal chanting of the Hallel and the singing of Next Year in Jerusalem -- and a cow-clad David had jumped on a chair to sing with Drizin -- the seder had both sidelined politics and served as a pointed rebuttal to it. If campus out there was making Jews feel uncomfortable, in here flowed evocations of what gave Jews comfort; if the outside world kept dredging up a painful history of antisemitism, these proceedings reminded of the rituals that over the centuries had eased that pain. After all, they were here, a hundred young joyous Jews, freely celebrating Passover.
The tendency from outside a hotbed is to think in all-or-nothing ways -- either people are paralyzed by fear or they are bravely putting it behind them. But of course that's not how it works. Both can be true. For these Columbia Jews everything was fine and not fine. This was their normal lives and entirely abnormal terrain.
As the seder wound down, a sophomore named Gila, a human-rights major, told me a few of her classes focused on the Middle East. I asked her how it was going.
"We were studying the concept of genocide and there's a very clear definition, and I don't believe what's happening in Gaza meets it. But I could never say that in class -- everyone thinks it does, including the professor. And it wouldn't go well if I disagreed."
She continued, "No one is asking questions because they already know all the answers."
Yet she said she wasn't considering switching her major. "I really like it. And I can still learn a ton."
David had a sister in high school who recently got into Columbia, and he was going to encourage her to come despite everything. "There are some terrible people here. But," he shrugged, "there are some terrible people out there in the world too."
I felt a sense of reassurance, tinged only with a little sadness. My fear of a future Columbia bereft of Jews was unfounded; no one here was going anywhere. Even if the overall numbers in the next few years dropped, my alma mater -- which had provided me and so many other Jews with so much -- would continue giving plenty. It would just be a little harder, require a few more tradeoffs, mean a little more holding of the tongue.
Maybe for some Jewish students that wasn't worth it, or even objectionable. I wouldn't judge them. But for Gila and many others, that wasn't the case. Times wouldn't be as golden as they once were. But they'd still be pretty good. And they'd be good for this reason: because the Jewish students here would find a way around the institution's problems. Jews have found their way around much worse.
As the seder ended and students began to get their coats, Drizin called out to ask if anyone wanted a security escort home. Some people would be walking right through the protests. The security people were here, he explained, to accompany anyone who felt unsafe. To a person, the students shook their heads and said they'd be fine on their own.
Then they began streaming out, chattering with each other about classes and finals and Passover, saying they'd see each other around campus or back here, later in the holiday.
A proud Columbia Journalism School alum, Steven Zeitchik left The Washington Post last year to launch Mind and Iron, a humanist look at the future of technology.