Columbia Universitystudents are starting their semester wading through volatile protests and picket lines.
"We literally couldn't get on campus without protesters calling for intifada, revolution, 'We don't want two states, we want all of it," said student Eden Yadegar. "You know these are just a few examples of chants that clearly are not calling for peace, are not calling for a ceasefire, are not calling for coexistence."
Jewish students like Yadegar say their hopes for a better semester are already dashed.
Protests picked up as new students arrived on campus a week ago, and Monday afternoon protesters marched in uptown New York City, some waving Hamas flags or setting off flares and smoke bombs.
Pro-Palestinian protesters' demands vary by school, but many want their schools to stop supporting companies with ties to Israel.
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This new semester is already testing universities across America, including Columbia, whose embattled president resigned less than three weeks before classes were set to begin.
"There is no Columbia community right now and that's because for the last 11 months the Columbia leadership has been nowhere to be found. Our university leadership has enabled this sort of disruption," Yadegar said.
The school recently released a second report on antisemitism, detailing 500 Jewish and Israeli student accounts of "multiple instances of harassment, verbal abuse and ostracism, and in some cases physical violence."
The report says that students seeking remedies for bigotry went unassisted, that staff minimized their concerns and that DEI offices did not engage in complaints. It calls these issues "serious and pervasive."
"They have outlined no concrete steps that they're going to be taking to not only protect Jewish and Israeli students, but to ensure that campus can stay open and run, and that everyone can do what they came here to do, and that is learn," Yadegar added.
Faculty has also been caught in the crosshairs. Tom Facchine, an Imam from upstate New York, urged Columbia student activists to target outspoken Israeli professor Shai Davidai.
"How do we get him into trouble? What are the ways his professorship is in jeopardy?," he said. "How do we create a situation when he is in jeopardy? That might silence 100 other professors."
Yedegar says this isn't about free speech — it's about the nature of the speech and following Columbia's time place and manner guidelines.
"Every time I think it can't get worse somehow, I'm proven wrong, and it feels like the University has been in this accelerating downward spiral of moral rot, not only for the last year, but for years before that, and everything has come to the surface now. This is the breaking point."
Columbia, like many other elite universities, has dealt with lawsuits from Jewish students for failing to protect them.
A judge told UCLA it failed its Jewish students this spring when they were blocked from certain portions of campus, including entering buildings for their classes amid protests. The judge ruled the school has a responsibility to make sure Jewish students are able to move about campus safely.
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New York University took note of that ruling ahead of the semester and updated it's non-discrimination and anti-harassment policy to include using "Zionist as a substitute or codeword for Jew or Israeli." The mandate specifically bars litmus tests or exclusion of Zionists.
Rutgers University and George Washington University have suspended their chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Instagram permanently banned Columbia's SJP account. Nearly two dozen schools across the country have banned or restricted encampments and protests.
