June 17 (UPI) -- As commencement season comes to a close, many campuses remain riven by the Israel-Hamas war. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the undergraduate class president was banned from walking at her graduation after delivering a fiery -- and unauthorized -- speech accusing her school of complicity in Israel's campaign to "wipe out Palestine off the face of the earth." Anti-Israel protests broke out at graduation ceremonies across the United States, from Columbia to the University of California at Berkeley.
Since Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack and Israel's retaliatory invasion of Gaza, many American campuses have been punctuated by vigils, demonstrations and disruptions. But the loudest voices aren't necessarily the most representative. Activists' pronouncements on either side fail to capture the range of student opinion about the war and its reverberations at home, including the documented rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
This is certainly true for Jewish students -- buffeted by the war, the hostage crisis, campus protests and federal politics. Since January 2025, the Trump administration has used campus anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism as a pretext to assault higher education and implement hard-line immigration policies.
