The Quiet Work of Standing Behind Jewish Students

Against panic, projection, and the urge to take over.

Jewish history has taught us to take antisemitism seriously, that we should always try to catch it early and that we should respond accordingly. That instinct has kept us alive. It has also trained us, at times, to respond to emerging threats with speed rather than calibration. On today’s campuses, where power is diffuse, visibility is deceptive, and students occupy a structurally vulnerable position, that inherited reflex deserves closer scrutiny, not because it is wrong, but because the terrain has changed.

Over the past decade, I’ve had the privilege of working closely with Jewish students on campuses across different countries, political cultures, and institutional systems. I’ve seen moments of extraordinary courage and clarity, and I’ve seen moments of exhaustion, confusion, and real vulnerability. I’ve also spent a great deal of time working with parents, grandparents, alumni, and communal leaders who care deeply about those students and want to help.

What follows is not a corrective, and certainly not a critique of concern. It is an attempt to distil a few lessons that recur across contexts. Patterns I’ve seen often enough to trust, and mistakes I’ve sometimes made myself. If there is a throughline, it is this: the way adults show up around campus antisemitism matters almost as much as what they do, because students are not only responding to hostility on campus, but to the signals they receive from the people who stand behind them.

1. Regulation Before Reaction

One of the most consistent lessons I’ve learned is that effective support begins with regulation, not strategy.

Campus antisemitism rarely arrives as a neat, isolated incident. It activates inherited vigilance, an existential fear for the Jewish collective shaped by memory, intergenerational trauma, and a long record of institutions responding late or inadequately. That fear is not irrational. It is part of the Jewish historical inheritance. But when it moves too quickly from the adult nervous system into the student’s situation, it can unintentionally communicate a destabilising message: this is too dangerous for you to navigate; someone else must take over.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff offer a useful lens here. In their book, “The Coddling of the American Mind”, they observe that “fear is contagious,” particularly when transmitted by trusted authority figures, and that adults often end up “teaching young people to see the world as more dangerous than it really is, and themselves as less capable than they truly are.” Their formulation, to “prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”, has resonated with me precisely because it captures something I’ve watched play out on campus again and again.

This distinction between reaction and leadership mirrors an argument I’ve made elsewhere: that Jewish communities often confuse urgency with effectiveness, and visibility with strength, a dynamic I explored more fully in the first essay I put out just over a month ago, when I first began writing publicly again. In practice, the work looks deceptively simple: staying calm, asking clarifying questions, and allowing students to narrate their own experience before it is interpreted for them. Existential fear does not disappear when ignored; it needs somewhere else to go so it does not overwhelm the student’s capacity to act.

2. Avoid Turning Students Into Symbols

Another lesson I’ve learned over time is how easily students can be burdened by meaning that does not belong to them. In moments of heightened communal anxiety, Jewish students are sometimes spoken about as evidence: proof that universities are broken, that antisemitism is unstoppable, that catastrophe is inevitable. Even when motivated by love, this symbolic framing can quietly erode student agency. 

Stanley Cohen’s work in “Folk Devils and Moral Panics” helps explain why. Cohen describes moral panics as moments when “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.” These moments compress complexity, inflate stakes, and reward immediacy over judgment. 

Campus antisemitism discourse is vulnerable to this pattern from multiple directions. Jewish students may be cast as villains by activist movements, or as symbols by their own communities. Neither position leaves room for them to be what they actually are: students navigating real constraints, finite energy, and imperfect choices. As I discuss in my essay “Six Principles That Actually Matter Right Now on Campus”, advocacy loses its footing when students are treated as props rather than protagonists. 

One of the most supportive things adults can do is insist (quietly but firmly) on seeing the student first, not the symbol.

3. Support Student Leadership Without Replacing It

A third lesson, and perhaps the hardest to practise, concerns intervention.

Over the years, I’ve seen many well-intentioned adults step in decisively (emails to presidents, calls to donors, political pressure) often motivated by the belief that institutions only respond to external force. Sometimes that assessment is correct. But when intervention bypasses students entirely, it can create unintended consequences on campus.

Administrators tend to experience such moves as escalation. Other students often read them as outside interference. And Jewish students themselves can experience them as a loss of agency, however unintended. This reflects a broader structural problem I’ve written about before: substituting visible action for organising power. A few weeks ago, I argued that activity without scaffolding rarely produces change, a lesson that applies just as much to “real world” advocacy as it does to campus strategy.

None of this denies power asymmetry. Students do not hold equal leverage inside universities, and there are moments when restraint is forced rather than chosen. But as Haidt warns, over-institutionalising conflict can weaken the very capacities students need to develop. The task is not to avoid intervention, but to coordinate it with students, so that external pressure strengthens rather than replaces their leadership. This is where a theory of change becomes useful, as I have outlined in earlier pieces.

4. Offer Perspective Without Minimising Experience

One of the great gifts older generations bring is historical perspective. One of the risks is timing.

I’ve learned that comparisons to “worse times” rarely land the way they’re intended. They can flatten present experience rather than contextualise it. Cohen’s analysis of moral panics reminds us that collapsing nuance (whether through alarmism or minimisation) undermines judgment.

A more constructive posture is context without dismissal. Yes, antisemitism has taken more violent forms. And yes, contemporary campus environments present their own disorienting challenges. Strength is not the absence of fear; it is the ability to remain engaged without hardening or withdrawing.

5. Trust Proximity Over Projection

One of the most practical lessons I’ve learned over years of campus work is this: the people closest to a campus almost always have the clearest view of what is actually happening on it. This sounds obvious. In practice, it is surprisingly hard for communities to honour.

When antisemitism spikes, information begins to travel quickly, but not evenly. Commentary from national figures, social media amplification, second-hand anecdotes, and outdated assumptions often outrun on-the-ground knowledge. Parents and grandparents, acting out of genuine concern, can find themselves relying on sources that feel authoritative but are several steps removed from the daily realities of campus life.

Proximity matters because campuses are not abstractions. They are ecosystems with specific cultures, power dynamics, personalities, histories, and fault lines. What escalates a situation on one campus may defuse it on another. What looks like administrative indifference from afar may, up close, be a slow and imperfect negotiation shaped by internal constraints that are invisible externally.

This is why students themselves, along with the campus professionals who work with them daily, are usually the most reliable interpreters of campus reality. They understand which relationships are functional, which channels are live, which administrators are movable, and which interventions will land as credible rather than performative. They also know when something is genuinely dangerous, and when it is being amplified beyond its actual scope.

Trusting proximity does not mean suspending judgment or abandoning accountability. It means recognising that accuracy flows upward from lived experience, not downward from abstraction. Parents and grandparents help most when they treat students and campus professionals as primary sources, not just messengers… asking what they are seeing, what they are worried about, and what they believe would actually help.

In my experience, many well-intentioned missteps happen not because adults care too much, but because they rely on information that is louder rather than closer. Re-centering authority around proximity restores proportion. It slows escalation. And it signals something essential to students: we trust your read of the terrain you are standing on.

The Long Game

After years of watching campus cycles rise and fall, I’ve become wary of treating every incident as a crisis. If what we are living through now behaves less like an interruption and more like a sustained period, then that demands stewardship rather than constant escalation.

The most useful question I’ve seen adults ask is not How do we respond to this moment? but What kind of Jewish adult are we helping this student become? The answer rarely points toward urgency alone. It points toward calibration, trust, and restraint.

The line between support and overreach is real and contested. There are no formulas here. But standing behind students (regulating our existential fear for the Jewish collective, resisting symbolic projection, and intervening with rather than over them) has consistently proven to be one of the most powerful forms of advocacy I’ve witnessed.