Rutgers Police Escort Jewish Students Out of Town Hall after Pro-Palestinian Protesters Call for ‘Intifada’ By Zach Kessel
Rutgers University president Jonathan Holloway held a town hall with students Thursday night aimed at offering the school community the opportunity to ask him questions. Before he was able to answer a single one, anti-Israel protesters unleashed chaos.
As Holloway attempted to address the crowd, “pro-Palestinian students interrupted the town hall and prevented the scheduled programming from happening. They shouted and tried to intimidate other students,” Rutgers student Sarah Shiner, who was in attendance Thursday night, told National Review.
The chants — as captured on video and shared on X — included slogans like “globalize the intifada,” “long live the intifada,” “from the river to the sea,” and “we don’t want no two-state; we want ’48.”
“What shocked me the most,” Shiner said, “was the fact that the Jews attending the town hall were escorted out by police, not the individuals protesting and breaking the rules.”
Holloway also had a police escort out of the building mere minutes into the event, leaving only half the security dispatched to the town hall there to protect the Jewish students who had come to ask their university’s president how he plans to handle antisemitism on their campus.
Shiner told NR that the environment on Rutgers’s campus is “extremely hostile” to Jewish students. The university’s student body recently voted in favor of two referenda calling on Rutgers to divest its endowment and academic affiliations from Israel. As the campaign in favor of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement vote went on, anti-Israel students posted flyers featuring a photo of a Jewish student next to the words “Free Palestine” across campus.
Neither Holloway nor any other Rutgers administrator has addressed the targeted harassment, though Holloway did issue a statement after the BDS referenda saying he believes “in engagement, not isolation,” and opposes any divestment plan.
The anti-Israel Rutgers Endowment Justice Collective posted an infographic on its Instagram page in advance of the town hall, urging members to ask questions accusing Holloway of complicity in “genocide” and “occupation” in response to his opposition to BDS.
A Jewish law student at Rutgers filed a lawsuit against the university in January, alleging that administrators violated his right to an educational environment free from discrimination on the basis of his Jewish identity, and the House Education and Workforce Committee — currently investigating Rutgers over its handling of campus antisemitism — sent the university a letter in March detailing several instances of faculty support for the October 7 attack and harassment against Jewish students.
Antisemitism on Rutgers’s campus did not begin on October 7. In May 2021, amid a surge in attacks against Jews in the United States, the university’s leadership issued a statement decrying the violence. They then apologized for doing so, saying they were sorry for failing “to communicate support for our Palestinian community members” and that the university’s “diversity must be supported by equity, inclusion, antiracism, and the condemnation of all forms of bigotry and hatred, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.”
Rutgers University spokeswoman Dory Devlin, in a written statement to NR, noted that Holloway announced his opposition to BDS after the referenda votes and downplayed the president’s exit from the town hall.
“Students who objected to President Holloway’s belief that the BDS movement is both wrong and counter-productive and who disagrees [sic] with his support for continuing Rutgers’ partnership with Tel Aviv University disrupted a meeting of the Rutgers University Student Assembly (RUSA) where the president was discussing topics of interest to RUSA,” Devlin wrote. “The RUSA leaders ended the meeting and President Holloway, with his driver who is a Rutgers University police officer, and other attendees left the meeting without incident.”
Shiner told NR that Holloway’s exit and the failure of campus police to quell the protest left her “just shocked.”
“We had to be escorted out by police and individuals protesting just continued to disrupt the town hall,” she said. “They weren’t escorted out. Instead, we were.”
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