Five Jewish college students report being assaulted in the last month, as Oct. 7 anniversary approaches

University of Pittsburgh students Asher Goodwin and Ilan Gordon were walking to the first Shabbat service of the school year on Aug. 30 wearing yarmulkes. As they made their way to the campus Hillel building, they said, an older man wearing a keffiyeh approached them from behind and started to beat them with a large glass bottle. 

“He grabbed my Star of David necklace that I was wearing and ripped it off,” Goodwin told NBC News. “I am struck on the back of my neck and the bottle shatters. Glass shards cut across my neck.”

The man, whom police later identified as Jarrett Buba, a 52-year-old white man from Pittsburgh, also allegedly struck Gordon in the right cheek, according to court papers. Buba was charged with two counts of felony assault. A judge denied Buba bail, and he remains in custody.

Goodwin said he doesn’t think his school is doing enough to protect Jewish students. “Currently we have low expectations for any kind of university pre-emptive response, or actions, to ensure [things] don’t get out of hand,” Goodwin said. 

A spokesperson for the University of Pittsburgh said it “unequivocally condemns antisemitism” and will provide campus police escorts to Jewish students during the upcoming Jewish holidays. 

After the attack on Goodwin, two Jewish students at the University of Michigan were assaulted in separate incidents off campus. And on Friday, a group of six to eight men assaulted another Jewish student off campus at the University of Pittsburgh while using antisemitic slurs. The FBI has opened an investigation into whether the attack constitutes a federal hate crime, NBC News has reported. 

With the new school year underway nationwide, law enforcement officials say they are seeing antisemitic violence as the anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel approaches. At the same time, more radical protest groups are publicly grieving Israel’s recent killing of the longtime leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.

“His martyrdom, his ideas and legacy will remain a beacon of hope for thousands to honor after him,” Within Our Lifetime, one of the most disruptive protest organizations in New York, posted on X.

Samidoun, a Canadian-based nonprofit group that praises Hamas and Hezbollah and is one of the most extreme groups involved in campus protests, also lamented the killing of the leader of Hezbollah, which U.S. officials blame for killing hundreds of Americans.

“Death to enemies and the racist Zionist entity,” wrote Samidoun, whose name means “steadfast” in Arabic. “Victory to the resistance.” 

Charlotte Kates, a co-founder of Samidoun, which has also conducted teach-ins and letter-writing campaigns on campuses since at least 2012, said in a wide-ranging interview with NBC News that the demonstrations won’t end anytime soon.

“There’s many actions and demonstrations being mobilized,” Kates said, referring to the anniversary of Oct. 7. “I would expect that people are going to be getting out in the streets.” 

Although some people have engaged in violence and attacks on Jewish students, the majority of the campus demonstrations have not resulted in arrests or injuries. And pro-Palestinian activists have long stated they are not anti-Jewish, and that being anti-Israel is not antisemitic. 

They also argue they too have suffered violence, discrimination and intimidation at work and at school. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, reported this spring that they received 921 education-related complaints in 2023, including bullying and discrimination, a 219 % increase over the previous year.

They said there were numerous violent attacks on Palestinian, pro-Palestinian and visibly Muslim students around college campuses, as well as harassment of visibly Muslim students or students wearing keffiyehs. 

The group cited multiple incidents since Oct. 7, including the stabbing of a Palestinian man near the University of Texas at Austin in February after he attended a pro-Palestinian protest and an attack on protesters at a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA in May. In New York that month, a Jewish driver struck a protester with his car at an off-campus demonstration involving Columbia students. CAIR also said incidents of police brutality against students occurred.

“There have been numerous violent attacks,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, CAIR’s national deputy director.

In an effort to curtail violence and disruptive protests, dozens of colleges and universities across the country rolled out new policies, or clarified their existing rules, this summer to prevent building takeovers, dayslong encampments and property damage, which has cost schools millions of dollars.

Earlier this month, a bipartisan group of Congress members asked the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to share information on an “alarming rise in antisemitism on college and university campuses.” A commission spokesperson said the request is currently under review.

And Kenneth Marcus, who ran the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights under former Presidents Donald Trump and George W. Bush, said more attacks are possible if universities are lax.

“The real danger when no one is enforcing rules is that lawlessness can lead to very serious violence,” he said. “It may be that many of the protesters simply want to express their point of view, but the conditions are increasingly ripe for serious criminality and violence.”

On Sept. 15, a student at the University of Michigan was assaulted by a group of men after they asked if he was Jewish, police said. The Ann Arbor Police Department in Michigan said the case is currently being investigated as a “bias-motivated assault.”

Then on Sept. 21, another Jewish student at the University of Michigan said he was approached by a group of people outside a Jewish fraternity house off campus and one of them punched him. An Ann Arbor police spokesperson said the incident is not being investigated as a bias-motivated crime. The University of Michigan is stepping up patrols on and around campus, a university spokesperson said Monday.

There have been at least six physical attacks against Jewish students or other Jewish people since June — including five since late August — on or near college campuses, according to court filings and police reports. 

At least two are being investigated by police as potential hate crimes. Two of the victims whose cases were not classified as hate crimes agreed to be interviewed. Both said they believed they were attacked because they are Jewish.

Anti-Israel protests spread across campuses and cities after Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack, which killed more than 1,200 Israelis and resulted in 250 people being taken hostage. More than 42,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza, according to Palestinian health officials.

More radical protest leaders who oppose the existence of the Jewish state say they are merely expressing their right to speak out against an unjust war and the mass slaughter of civilians. But law enforcement experts and Jewish advocates point to the six incidents since June where Jewish students were assaulted, as well as reports of harassment and intimidation, as evidence of continued antisemitism.

In early September, fears grew in the more observant Jewish community after federal prosecutors indicted Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, 20, a Pakistani national living in Toronto, on terrorism charges. Authorities said he planned to carry out mass shootings at Chabad Jewish centers in the U.S. The centers, which hold orthodox religious services and educational classes, are also part of programming at hundreds of campuses across the country.

The Anti-Defamation League recently released a report that found at least 28 assaults on Jewish students or bystanders at or near universities during the 2023-24 academic year ending in May. Cases included several students who say anti-Israel activists shoved them or attacked them while they held an Israeli flag.

At Tulane University, a student said their nose was broken after a protester struck them in the head with a megaphone. The ADL said it found zero assaults covering the previous academic year. The organization continues to track violent incidents.

“This is a different movement today than it was even six months ago, and we ignore that at our own peril,” said Oren Segal, ADL’s vice president of the Center on Extremism.

An NBC News review found that at least 50 colleges and universities have enacted reforms, or revised policies, since the summer. But few academic institutions have explained how they plan to enforce the changes, or how they plan to keep students safe.

In August, the University of California, Los Angeles, and New York University, which were both sued by Jewish students who said they were victims of harassment and antisemitism, announced two of the most notable policy changes.

UCLA, where Jewish students said they were banned by protesters from entering a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” now can’t allow people to exclude students from any campus programs, spaces or activities. At NYU, it is now a violation of school rules to discriminate against “Zionists,” or those who support Israel.

Judges have ruled that the First Amendment protects a large swath of protest activities, including demonstrating in public spaces. That encompasses posting violent language on social media, as long as it doesn’t contain specific or actionable threats.

But it does not give protesters carte blanche. In a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back over 80 years, the high court has allowed restrictions on the time, place and manner in which demonstrations can take place.

That means universities are allowed to ban demonstrations and encampments that are not pre-approved by the school or continue late into the night. Universities also can prevent protestors from disrupting everyday life on campus — such as blocking access to buildings or shutting down classes and events.

“You cannot be protesting with drums on the quad, or you cannot have a bullhorn at 10 p.m. or 2 a.m.,” said Kristen Shahverdian, program director of Campus Free Speech at PEN America, an organization that promotes free expression. “There’s a time when protests, or other otherwise protected speech, can take place.”

Civil liberties groups quickly criticized the new rules as efforts to restrict free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the University of California, Santa Cruz, which in May temporarily banned students and faculty from campus after protesters failed for “many weeks” to heed orders to leave an encampment.

Law enforcement officials said they have the legal authority and ability to curb violent protests, harassment and other crimes on campuses. But there is friction when schools initially tell their campus police and outside law enforcement agencies to stand down, and officers later have to scramble when asked to contain demonstrations.

“It’s a balancing act for campus law enforcement,” said Mike Marshall, president of the Virginia Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators who is also Virginia Military Institute’s police chief. “Sometimes it takes a catastrophic event to occur at your school before sometimes either policy or security measures are implemented.”

Campus policing leaders say they have studied law enforcement responses to the rash of protests this spring and say they are better prepared for an expected surge in demonstrations around the anniversary of Oct. 7.

Maureen Rush, who spent 27 years as the University of Pennsylvania’s vice president for public safety and the superintendent of campus police, said university and city police departments will respond more quickly to protests. She also said that many of the new approaches being adopted by the universities this fall respect both students’ right to protest and students’ right to be safe on campus.

“Should it happen again, the response time will be quicker, more effective and schools will have their crisis communications ready to go,” said Rush. “Most campus policies and procedures around First Amendment freedom weren’t written for this kind of conflict.”

In recent weeks, protesters at two colleges and one university have taunted Jewish students outside or near events held by Hillel, a century-old mainstream Jewish organization at more than 600 colleges and universities nationwide that supports Jewish life on campus.

Protesters with Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP, say Hillel centers and people who attend its gatherings are fair game because, for decades, Hillel has helped to organize free student trips to Israel, known as Birthright. After a Hillel protest on Aug. 29 at Temple University in Philadelphia, the SJP chapter posted why they demonstrated in a post on Instagram.

“Hillel not only engages students with Israel but also actively promotes the narrative of Israel’s right to exist as an ethnostate,” SJP wrote.

About a week later, in Manhattan, the Baruch College chapter of SJP taunted Jewish students at a Hillel back-to-school dinner at an off-campus kosher restaurant. Protesters chanted, “How many kids did you kill today?” and “All zionists are racists,” according to a Hillel Instagram post.

Baruch SJP later wrote on Instagram that its “disruption” outside the kosher restaurant was a legal gathering to “call out the back-to-school dinner, while students in Gaza have no classrooms to go back to and no dinner to eat.”

The City University of New York, which includes Baruch College and 24 other institutions, said it was investigating the incident and was working toward improving its efforts to combat antisemitism and other forms of discrimination.

A CUNY spokesperson said that the Baruch College chapter of SJP had no official relationship with the school. “Despite its name, the organizing group is neither sanctioned by nor affiliated with Baruch College,” she said.

Adam Lehman, president of Hillel International, acknowledged that there is a growing trend of Hillels being targeted.

“There is no way to interpret that level of harassment other than as antisemitic,” Lehman said. “No one is asking that individual Hillel, or the students involved, what they think about the war in Gaza, or whether they support a two-state solution.”

Jewish legal advocates, Republican members of Congress, former Trump administration officials and several law enforcement leaders have questioned why the Justice Department has not launched federal investigations into what they say constitutes a pattern of intimidation and violence on college campuses.

Mark Goldfeder, director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, who also serves as general counsel for two dozen Hillel chapters, said he has sent letters asking both the FBI and the Justice Department to start to intervene in antisemitism cases. But neither agency has responded, Goldfeder said.

“If the Justice Department’s position is ‘we are going to wait until there is more violence,’ then the universities are going to say ‘this isn’t a problem until there is more violence,” Goldfeder said.

The FBI did not respond to requests for comment. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.

Since Oct. 7, there has been one federal conviction involving threats or violence against Jewish college students. In August, a federal judge sentenced Patrick Dai, 22, a former junior at Cornell University, to 21 months in prison for posting online threats to kill or injure another person.

Prosecutors said Dai made online threats against Jewish students at Cornell saying he would shoot up a dining hall that serves kosher food, and “bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig jews.”

The organization Within Our Lifetime kicked off its “Summer of Resistance” campaign in front of New York's Hunter College on June 21, according to the group’s Telegram posts. Samidoun and a local chapter of SJP also co-sponsored the event.

Ben Goldies, 54, wearing a “Bring Them Home Now” baseball cap in solidarity with the Israeli hostages held in Gaza, joined a small group of pro-Israel counterprotesters in front of the school. Within seconds, a man blew a whistle in his face, Goldies said.

“Next thing I know, he just punches at me with a motion to, like, cut me,” Goldies told NBC News. “I felt my eye, and then I saw blood. The police tackled him, put him in handcuffs.”

Alou Bathily, a 26-year-old Black man, was charged with third-degree assault, police said. Bathily pleaded not guilty, court records show. Legal Aid Society, who is representing Bathily, declined to comment.

A Hunter College spokesman said Bathily was not a student and the school has been working with students to promote civil dialogue.

Goldies, who needed five stitches over his left eye, warned that people should stop depicting campus protests as peaceful. “They are totally violent,” he said “It’s not about Israel, they’re just out there to try to attack Jewish people.”

Kates, the head of Samidoun, and leaders of other hard-line pro-Hamas groups, say they don’t randomly attack Jewish people at demonstrations. Rather, they said, protests turn violent due to clashes with the police and run-ins with Jewish counterprotesters who carry Israeli flags and become targets.

“If you were to carry other flags of countries and nations that have committed genocide, one might expect them to be taken away,” Kates told NBC News. “That’s really a very low-level of confrontation for actively going out and supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

Atid Malka, a 27-year-old Emory University law student who is Jewish, said he was attacked in April as he held an Israeli flag outside an Chabad synagogue off campus while two members of the Israel Defense Forces reserves spoke to a group of Jewish students inside.

Several dozen demonstrators attended a protest organized by the Atlanta chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation outside the synagogue, according to a PSL Instagram post. The post said “the celebration of genocidal war criminals is despicable.”

Malka told police that two men attacked him, punching his stomach, and tried to take his Israeli flag, according to DeKalb County police documents.

Faisal Khan,43, and Fahd Shoaib, 38, were booked on misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges, according to the Dekalb County District Attorney’s office. The case is still pending. Reached by phone, Shoaib declined to comment. Khan didn’t return messages.

Rabbi Zalman Lipskier, executive director of Chabad at Emory, said security is a top concern. The synagogue has armed guards at events and recently added cameras with license-plate readers to its parking lot.

Lipskier said that despite the demonstrations, he sees more Jewish students walking around wearing pro-Israeli clothes and necklaces.

“We’re vigilant, Lipskier said. “We are taking precautions and necessary steps to make sure our students are safe.”