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Can an Israeli and a Palestinian restaurant coexist peacefully in the shadow of Columbia University?
In the fall of 2023, in response to protests following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Columbia University closed its wrought-iron gates. Since then, the Ivy League school in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood has rarely left the news cycle. With the encampments, student occupation of Hamilton Hall, police in riot gear, congressional hearings on campus antisemitism, and ICE arrests of student activists, Columbia has become a flashpoint in debates about free speech, antisemitism and the limits of dissent.
The encampments are gone, as are the hostage posters. There are no more protests and counter-protests outside the campus gates, but soon the remnants of that political fight may play out in the opening of two restaurants, one Palestinian, one Israeli.
Ayat, the fast-growing Palestinian chain owned by Brooklyn-born couple Abdul Elenani and his wife Ayat Masoud — the restaurant’s namesake — is opening on 106th and Amsterdam Avenue. They’ve named it Hinds Hall Ayat, which was what student activists called the occupied Hamilton Hall in 2024. Hind was a five-year-old girl killed during Israel’s assault on Gaza that year.
Seven blocks north, Miznon, the international Israeli pita chain owned by Eyal Shani, the 67-year-old Tel Aviv celebrity chef known as the godfather of Israeli cuisine, is expected to open on 113th and Broadway, though no date has been set.
Miznon pitches itself as a destination for elevated Israeli street food, while Ayat specializes in Palestinian soul food, meaning larger homestyle platters. The concepts might be different as well as the vibe, but both offer superb, freshly baked, pillowy pita stuffed with spiced meats and topped with brightly flavored pickles and tahini.
The two restaurants arrive at different moments in their trajectories. Shani has been an internationally recognized chef for decades, with 60 restaurants from Singapore to Los Angeles and a Michelin star in Manhattan. Ayat opened its first location in a former Bay Ridge tanning salon five years ago. It now has 10 outposts, and Al Badawi, another Palestinian restaurant owned by Elenani and Masoud with two locations, was named one of the city’s 43 best restaurants in 2025 by New York magazine.
Owners of both restaurants say their decisions to open in the neighborhood are coincidental, and motivated by business, not politics. But in a conflict with competing national identities and claims to the land at its core, food has become a powerful proxy. To eat a babka from an Israeli bakery, or kunafa from a Palestinian, has become political. At the same time, restaurants have become targets of activists. Israeli chefs are accused of appropriating traditional Arab foods and bearing responsibility for Israel’s policies, while restaurants with displays of Palestinian nationalism are accused of promoting violence.
A mile north of Columbia, Tsion, an Ethiopian Jewish restaurant in Harlem, closed earlier this year after repeated harassment over its owner’s pro-Israel stance. Both Miznon and Ayat have had locations vandalized and staff threatened simply because they are Jewish and Israeli or Muslim and Palestinian.
All of this is avoidable. Just a couple blocks away from Ayat’s new location, Claire’s Kitchen Cafe on Manhattan Avenue is owned by Israelis and offers an “Israeli Bowl” of marinated chicken on its menu, alongside Greek and Mexican options. Claire’s, like nearby Halal shawarma spots Zaad and Zurna, pitches itself as Mediterranean, a commonly used catchall label that avoids controversy, but renders the experience generic: hummus scooped into a bowl stripped of the culture that produced it. Ayat and Miznon offer something different — the experience of a Palestinian family meal in East Jerusalem or a taste of a hip Tel Aviv food stall — powerful statements in themselves, with meanings shifting over time.
The Ayat story
In 2014, Elenani, then a student at City College, opened a food stall at Gansevoort Market in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. The food was “Palestinian orientated,” but he says he didn’t have “the balls” to say so. Instead, he gave it the more generic name, MTerranean. When the market closed in 2016, so did the restaurant,
Elenani, now 33, grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the son of Egyptian immigrants during a time of increased Islamophobia after 9/11. In a January interview with the British-based online publication Middle East Eye, he recounted how at the age of five, he witnessed his mother, who wore a hijab, called a terrorist.
His parents modeled how to navigate a diverse city, even one that was at times hostile to Muslims. His father owned Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee shops and several Dunkin Donuts, including one with a Kosher certification in Brooklyn. “In the first grade,” he told me in a phone conversation, “my mom used to give me certain Christian gifts or certain Jewish gifts to give to my teachers when it was their holiday.”
After MTerranean closed, he turned his focus to growing his chainlet of Cocoa Grinder cafes and a Bay Ridge bagel shop. When the pandemic wiped them out, he faced a choice about what to do next. “Going through COVID and seeing how fast things can change, and losing everything overnight, it built a thick skin,” he told Middle East Eye.
He rented out a former Bay Ridge tanning salon with his wife, Palestinian-American Ayat Masoud, 31, whose family owns the Halal market Balady nearby. “I remember thinking I’ll just be very bold about Palestine and not care about what will happen after,” he said.
Masoud, a former prosecutor in the Brooklyn DA’s office who has a private practice, developed the menu with her East Jerusalem-born mother. They included not just the mainstream Levantine staples of hummus and shawarma, but harder to find traditional dishes like Mansaf, heaps of lamb cooked in a thick yogurt sauce served with rice, and Palestine’s national dish, Musakhan, a half chicken roasted with sumac and caramelized onions served over freshly fired taboon bread.
Their goal was to transport customers to Palestine. “If I can eat mansaf over here in New York and think, ‘wow, this tastes just like when I was in Jerusalem,’ that connects those two dots,” Elenani told me. This time, Elenani chose the less generic name, Ayat.
At first, he recalled, many customers called it “Pakistinian cuisine,” confusing Palestine with Pakistan. “I think that was the first moment where I thought I’m going to drive myself to the max to make sure I open up as many locations as possible to communicate that culture and tradition,” he told Middle East Eye.
While MTerannean came and went with little notice, Ayat is leaving its mark. There are now seven Ayats in New York City, one in Texas, one in Princeton and locations set to open in DC and Philadelphia. Elenani plans to franchise and expand to 20 locations nationwide within the next year.
Ayat’s biggest growth has been in the two-and-a-half years since the Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Palestinian-American families gather over heaps of rice and meat, keffiyeh-wearing activists show solidarity over mint tea, and then there are many just curious about the cuisine and culture of a people who are almost solely portrayed in the American media in terms of violence, either as victims or perpetrators.
But the representation of Palestine comes with a price. Ayat was bombarded with thousands of fake one-star reviews after Pete Wells gave it a rave write-up in The New York Times in 2020. Since Oct. 7, according to Elenani, locations have been vandalized, and staff members have been called terrorists and threatened.
In the face of hostility, Elenani says, he always responds with kindness in accordance with his faith. In 2016, when a Cocoa Grinder cafe was robbed of thousands, he didn’t call the police. Instead, he posted a letter of forgiveness outside the store. “If the money you stole was to better you and your family’s living, then I forgive you,” it read. And this past Thanksgiving, when an Islamophobic caller threatened him and his staff, he invited him to the restaurant.
“I didn’t respond with hate,” he told me, “He ended up coming in and he apologized. He gave me a hug. I feel like people just need to hear a little bit from other backgrounds, just to understand each other.”
Still, Elenani and Masoud have not softened their political stance. Diners at Ayat’s other locations are greeted by murals of the Al-Aqsa Mosque looming over Palestinian children held at gunpoint by IDF soldiers. The menu calls to “End the Occupation” in Arabic, English and Hebrew. In 2024, the restaurant caused controversy with its seafood section title “From the River to the Sea,” a slogan, Elenani claims, is a call for equality, but which the Anti-Defamation League says is an incitement to genocide. The phrase remains on the menu in the original Brooklyn location, but at other locations, the menu reads “From the Rind to the Seed,” a tongue-in-cheek play on the watermelon as a pro-Palestinian symbol
When I asked Elenani how he weighs the risk of alienating customers against the mission of representing Palestinian culture, he pushed back on the premise. “One thing about Palestinian cuisine — you cannot keep politics out of it,” he said. “But I don’t even call it politics. I call it oppression. I call it genocide. Politics is Democrats and Republicans. We’re talking about who’s living and who’s dying.”
The Miznon story
If Ayat with its jugs of oil as decoration, faux olive trees and large platters made to share family-style represents deep rooted tradition, Miznon is the opposite. At each location, the menus along with wall art of pita sandwiches and poetic quotes about the food in Hebrew and English are drawn in chalk. Miznon means canteen, so there are few seats, and the food is offered in individual-sized portions and designed to be eaten quickly or taken to-go.
“The Israeli lifestyle is to live in the now as if it’s all going to disappear,” Shani told Surface Magazine in 2022 in describing Israeli cuisine. “We’re always looking for the new and mostly prefer to forget the past.”
At Miznon, that means vegetable-forward plates, like its star dish, a roasted baby cauliflower. Some traditional Middle Eastern dishes are prepared with a twist. Instead of shawarma, pitas are filled with “ribeye minute steak” or “a folded cheeseburger.” The vibe is cosmopolitan and modern. While Elenani and Masoud sometimes have oud players at their restaurants, Shani books DJs.
At the age of 30 in 1989, Shani opened the Jerusalem restaurant Oceanus. A former film student who taught himself to cook from a Julia Child cookbook, he had almost no culinary tradition to draw from. What he built became the foundation of modern Israeli fine dining, one rooted in the land with local tomatoes, eggplants, wild herbs and tahini, as well as a melting pot of the country’s multicultural influences.
“I just had a feeling that I have to invent the Israeli cuisine,” Shani said last year on the podcast, Being Jewish with Jonah Platt. He was inspired, he said, by the Palestinian women he watched in the Old City markets, carefully tending to a few tomatoes and cucumbers.
“They were my first vision,” he said. His other inspiration was the land itself — the mountains around Jerusalem where he gathered wild sage, thyme and hyssop. When asked about his relationship with those Palestinian women and what he took from them, he answered simply: “There’s no borders when we are talking about food.”
Shani closed Oceanus in 2000, the same year the Second Intifada began. In 2008, he and his partner Shahar Segal, a filmmaker and advertising executive, opened HaSalon, a high-end Tel Aviv restaurant. Two years later, his fame grew when he served as a judge on the Israeli version of MasterChef, where he became popular for his poet-philosopher approach to food. Others called for his removal after he penalized a contestant for living in a West Bank settlement.
In 2011, he and Segal opened the first Miznon in Tel Aviv, pitching it as a democratization of his fine dining sensibility. “Young people did not come to my other restaurants because they couldn’t afford it,” he told The New York Times. Paris followed in 2013, then Vienna, Singapore, Melbourne and, in 2018, New York. He now operates around 60 restaurants worldwide. In each one, he says, he spends weeks with the head chef, instilling them with his “spirit and beliefs” until, as he put it on the podcast, “I print my mind on his mind.”
While Elenani was afraid to call his restaurant Palestinian, and publishers hesitated to put Palestine on cookbook covers out of fear that it would be seen as a provocation, Shani was part of a global Israeli food wave. Israeli chefs like Yotam Ottolenghi in London and Michael Solomonov in Philadelphia won Michelin stars and James Beard Awards. The Israeli brand Sabra, part-owned by Pepsi, defined hummus for many Americans. Israeli food was having a moment. Palestinian food was shunned.
But things have changed. In July 2025, masked protesters stormed the Melbourne Miznon throwing food and chairs, damaging the restaurant. In a statement, the protesters claimed they targeted Miznon because the co-owner Segal was a spokesperson for the U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) whose food distribution system was accused of endangering the lives of Gazan civilians.
Two weeks later, amid calls to boycott Miznon, Segal stepped down from his position at GHF, but the controversy didn’t go away. Miznon London is the site of a weekly Friday protest by a Jewish anti-Zionist group against Shani’s initiative to provide meals for Israeli soldiers.
“Israel is seen as violent,” Shani told the Forward last June noting a decrease in non-Jewish customers. “It’s not cool anymore, and we can feel it.”
‘Do what you gotta do’
Miznon’s intention to open near Columbia was first announced in 2023 and generated almost no reaction. Last August, when news broke that Ayat was opening nearby, the response online was immediate and sharp. One article called it the “‘From the River to the Sea’ Eatery.”
Elenani has leaned into the controversy. Since 2014 when he wasn’t bold enough to label his restaurant as “Palestinian,” there has been a shift. “It feels like now those Muslim 9/11 kids are having the moment where we can show that this city is our home,” Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, a Muslim-American author, told The New York Times, after Zohran Mamdani won the New York mayoral election. Elenani marked the occasion by closing every Ayat kitchen and feeding more than 4,000 Mamdani volunteers in Bushwick. Three weeks later, he announced the restaurant would be named “Hinds Hall Ayat”
Many in the community, still raw from two years of protests and divisions, would prefer places that facilitate dialogue, not deepen divisions. “I’d like to try Palestinian food,” Allison Lander, a 46-year-old piano teacher and Morningside Heights resident, told me, but said that she felt torn about going, given Ayat’s choice of name “Hinds Hall” and the political slogans on the menu.
“It’s hard for me to take a strong stance against Palestinians right now who are trying to draw attention to the conflict,” she said, but added that “you have to be more sensitive to Jewish community members.”
Shani, characteristically, has said nothing political at all. When I asked what a Columbia student should take away from eating at Miznon, he responded by email: “I want them to care about the experience inside the pita. The feeling, flavors and texture. I want people to fall in love with the pita.” Still, students who have promoted boycotts of pro-Israel businesses, might have opinions beyond the pita.
On Ayat opening nearby, Shani wrote: “We come from the same region and share many food behaviors, ingredients and ways of cooking, and those naturally inspire one another. Food is about bringing people together by reminding us of what we share.”
Elenani had more to say. “I have no idea if they’re even opening up there, but it’s all good,” he said. Still, he took issue with Shani calling his cuisine Israeli, when he says it is Palestinian. “I just wish they could appreciate the culture and cuisine, but not appropriate it and rebrand it into something that it’s not.” Then he offered them a name: “Do what you got to do,” he said. “Call it modern Mediterranean.”
The post Can an Israeli and a Palestinian restaurant coexist peacefully in the shadow of Columbia University? appeared first on The Forward.
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A new Hebrew press in Berlin argues that Israel doesn’t own the language
(JTA) — Dory Manor and Moshe Sakal, who run a press for Hebrew literature in Berlin, are often asked if their business is Israeli.
The partners in life and publishing come from Israel, though they have lived in Berlin and Paris for the better part of two decades. But they say their publishing house, Altneuland, is neither Israeli nor European. Instead, they sought to create a home for Hebrew literature from around the world — open to Israeli writers, but free from Israeli state funding.
Altneuland is the first non-religious Hebrew publishing house to set up outside of Israel since the state was established. Manor and Sakal founded the press in 2024, and this fall, Altneuland will launch in the United States.
“I believe that the Hebrew language is not only a national language,” said Manor, the editor-in-chief. “Hebrew has always been a global language, and even modern Hebrew has been an international language — mostly European, but not only — before the creation of the State of Israel.”
Manor and Sakal have expanded their mission from Hebrew literature to publishing Jewish authors across languages, including German, French, Russian and Yiddish. The U.S. launch will include an original English-language book by Ruth Margalit, along with English translations of Hebrew novels by Noa Yedlin and Itamar Orlev.
Altneuland is also the German publisher of “The Future is Peace,” a New York Times bestseller by Israeli Maoz Inon, whose kibbutznik parents were killed on Oct. 7, 2023, and Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah, whose brother died in 1990 after being tortured in an Israeli prison.
In a time when thousands of authors and publishers globally have pledged to boycott Israeli institutions over what they identify as a genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, Manor and Sakal say that Altneuland is not a boycott. They work with writers who live in Israel and sell to Israeli bookstores. Establishing a Berlin-based publishing house made them ineligible for Israeli public funding so they could avoid the fraught question of accepting support from the government.
Sakal, the publisher, acknowledged that Israel was a center for Hebrew and Jewish literature, but said it doesn’t have to be the only center. “We are not replacing it,” he said. “We are doing something else.”
Altneuland allows the founders to work with Israelis while staying apart from the Israeli Ministry of Culture, which provides funding for Israel’s publishing industry, largely through literary awards.
In January, the ministry canceled its annual culture prizes. Culture Minister Miki Zohar, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, cited the political bent of the prizes and said their cancellation was owed to the organizers “clearly ignoring artists whose opinions are held by most of the country.” The cuts came shortly after Zohar launched an alternative state film award ceremony, cutting funds to the Ophir Awards — Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars — after it awarded best film to “The Sea,” about a Palestinian boy in the West Bank who attempts to go to Tel Aviv and see the sea.
Israel’s literary world, which pays poorly and lacks broad recognition, depends heavily on state-sponsored prizes.
“This government is, for me, an enemy of Israel and not Israel itself,” said Manor. “So no, I’m not boycotting anyone, but I don’t want to deal with the current Israeli government. I do want to deal with Israeli readers, with Israeli writers.”
Those writers share many of Manor and Sakal’s political views. The founders’ goal is to make Altneuland a home for Jewish authors with a liberal outlook — especially those who feel pressured by rising nationalism, whether in Israel or elsewhere.
Margalit, a Tel Aviv-based journalist, will publish a collection of her political and cultural profiles in Israel through a collaboration between Altneuland and Pushkin Press. Her book, “In the Belly of the Whale: Portraits from a Fractured Israel,” is coming out in September.
Margalit said she was drawn to Manor and Sakal’s “humanist spirit,” along with their ability to publish the book simultaneously in English, Hebrew and German.
“At a time when so many people are quick to jump to labels or cancellations, it was bracing to find thoughtful partners who were similarly aggrieved about the political situation as I was,” she said.
Arad’s Hebrew novel, “Our Lady of Kazan,” will be published in German by Altneuland as “Kinderwunsch” in July. Arad, an Israeli-born writer, has lived in California for over 20 years and authored 12 books of Hebrew fiction. One Haaretz reviewer summed her up as “the finest living author writing in Hebrew” who was “in exile in the U.S.”
Arad’s books, often featured on bestseller lists in Israel, tend to deal with Israelis living abroad. The theme fits into the global perspective of Altneuland, targeting readers who are curious about crossing national boundaries.
“I’ve been thrilled to see that Israeli readers are willing — even eager — to read stories about Israeli expatriates,” said Arad. “The experience of living outside Israel, whether temporarily for work or study or on a more permanent basis, has become a central theme in Hebrew literature.”
Altneuland takes its tongue-in-cheek name from Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel, literally meaning “old new land.” The founder of political Zionism envisioned a utopic, multicultural Jewish state where Jews and Arabs lived peacefully together.
“When we finally decided to call our press Altneuland, it was because our Alteuland, an ‘old new land,’ is a land without territories. It is the Hebrew language,” said Manor.
Berlin is a thriving hub for up to 30,000 Israeli expatriates. Among them is a growing community of writers and intellectuals, including some who left Israel out of frustration and anger at their government.
Manor and Sakal see another reason for making Berlin their home base. They view Altneuland as a continuation of Schocken Verlag, a Jewish publishing house in Berlin that improbably persisted through the 1930s. Schocken Verlag was a cultural lifeline for Jews under Hitler’s regime, publishing books by Franz Kafka, Heinrich Heine, Rabbi Leo Baeck and Shmuel Yosef Agnon, a founding father of modern Hebrew literature.
In 1939, the publishing house was finally forced to shutter and moved to British Mandate Palestine. The reestablished Schocken Books lives on today as part of Penguin Random House. But Manor and Sakal said their project aligns with the original Schocken Verlag — the one destroyed by Nazism.
“What we find in both models is the possibility of a Jewish cultural space that is cosmopolitan, multilingual, humanist, non-national, and not dependent on a single territory,” said Sakal.
Altneuland has faced skepticism, particularly from Israel. Publisher and editor Oded Carmeli said in Haaretz, “The truth is that there aren’t enough Hebrew readers outside of Israel to support a publishing house – not even a bookstore, not even a shelf in a bookstore – and even if there were enough readers, no store in Berlin or Madrid would maintain such a shelf, for fear of repercussions.”
The Altneuland duo said their risky proposition is working out so far. Most of their Hebrew readers remain in Israel, where they are printing books in the thousands and going into second printings on select titles. But they are also cultivating a readership in Germany, where they print smaller special runs of Hebrew-language editions.
Naomi Firestone-Teeter, the CEO of the Jewish Book Council, said that Altneuland has emerged as pressure mounts on Jewish authors from the right and the left through “book bans, boycotts and cancellations.” (The council itself was recently criticized by dozens of Jewish authors for a “bias toward centering Israeli and Zionist voices.”)
“In this moment, we see their effort to build another home for Hebrew literature and Israeli voices as a meaningful contribution to the Jewish literary landscape,” said Firestone-Teeter.
Altneuland’s books in German and English are the fruit of collaborations with Pushkin Press and New Vessel Press. Manor said they were “positively surprised” when they began talks about working with publishers in Europe and North America. Those conversations began in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, and continued against the backdrop of a rising international chorus that has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. So far, no one has boycotted them.
“Usually we had interesting talks, very open talks with people who understood, in most cases, the nuances between our being a Hebrew publishing house and Israel as a state, Israel as a regime,” said Manor. “This is something that we could not predict when we created Altneuland.”
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Jewish library and Chabad near Buenos Aires attacked, Argentine Jewish advocates say
(JTA) — Counterterrorism officials in Buenos Aires are investigating after a Jewish library and a Chabad center in a suburb in the Argentine capital were attacked last week.
On Thursday night, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the Israeli Literary Center and Max Nordau Library in La Plata, according to a statement published Friday by the center’s board of directors. Multiple individuals “threw a blunt object filled with fuel at the front of the library, breaking windows and causing material damage,” the board said, noting that the device did not ignite and no one was injured.
The library, a secular educational center founded in 1912 that promotes Argentine Jewish culture, said it is reinforcing security measures in light of the attack.
On Sunday, the Chabad of La Plata was also attacked, according to DAIA, the Argentine Jewish community group, which condemned both attacks. DAIA, which first reported the Chabad attack, did not describe the nature of the attack beyond reporting no injuries.
“We are deeply concerned about the recurrence and the short timeframe of these incidents,” DAIA said in a statement.
The Ministry of Security of the Province of Buenos Aires and the Complex Crimes and Counterterrorism Unit of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police are investigating both attacks.
La Plata’s Jewish population numbers about 2,000, and its Chabad center has existed for more than 25 years. Argentina as a whole is home to the sixth-largest Jewish community in the world and the largest in Latin America, mostly centered in Buenos Aires.
“These acts of violence threaten democratic coexistence and the values of respect and pluralism that we defend our neighbors,” La Plata Mayor Julio Alak said. “We will not allow hatred and intolerance to have a place in our city.”
Argentina is the site of some of the deadliest attacks on Jewish institutions in modern history. A 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires killed 29 people, while a 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish community center left more than 80 people dead. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, a pro-Israel and philosemitic economist, has advanced efforts to hold Hezbollah and Iran responsible for their alleged role in the attacks after years of foot-dragging by prior leaders.
The incidents in La Plata come as Jewish institutions around the world are on high alert amid a string of attacks since the start of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran in February. Several synagogues and Israeli outposts in Europe have faced arson attacks that a group seen as tied to Iran have claimed responsibility for staging. No one has been injured in those attacks.
Argentina has also faced homegrown antisemitism scandals. In September, a video of a group of Buenos Aires high school students on a graduation trip chanting “Today we burn Jews” went viral, earning condemnation from Jewish community advocates and even Milei himself. The group, from the private school Escuela Humanos, was traveling with Escuela ORT, a Jewish school.
Following the attacks in La Plata, comments on a local news outlet’s Instagram post about the attack on the local Chabad Sunday were filled with antisemitic tropes, including blood libel and false flag theories. Antisemitism watchdogs say false flag allegations, holding that an operation is staged to look like an attack in order to garner sympathy for the victim or attribute blame to another party, have flourished in recent years against Jews and Israel.
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Cornell’s Jewish president clashes with students following on-campus debate about Israel
(JTA) — Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff and student protesters are trading accusations after an incident in which protesters surrounded the president’s car following an on-campus debate about Israel.
The protesters, from a group called Students for a Democratic Cornell, released a video appearing to show that President Michael Kotlikoff had backed up into one of them while a protester shouts that the car ran over his foot.
In response, Cornell released its own video depicting what it said was a “harassment and intimidation incident,” its enhanced version of which it said offered “complete footage of the parking lot interactions, instead of clips to support a narrative.” That video shows students surrounding the president’s car as he tries to exit his parking space. After he eventually departs, the students continue to mill around with no obvious indication of injury to any of them.
In a statement of his own, Kotlikoff said that despite being surrounded by protesters who banged on his car windows, he waited until his backup camera showed a clear path before maneuvering out of the spot.
“The behavior I experienced last night is not protest,” Kotlikoff said in his statement, released Friday night. “It is harassment and intimidation, with the direct motive of silencing speech. It has no place in an academic community, no place in a democracy, and can have no place at Cornell.”
In an Instagram post, the protesters rejected Kotlikoff’s claims that they banged on his car and that they had previous records of misconduct on campus. They also reiterated their allegation that he had struck them.
The incident marks a relatively rare example of a clash between a university and pro-Palestinian student protesters two years after the student encampment movement roiled campuses across the United States, including at Cornell. The Ivy League university, like many others, enacted new rules designed to constrain protests that have kept demonstrations at bay amid pressure from the Trump administration to curb what it said was antisemitism among protesters. In November, Cornell agreed to pay $60 million to resolve federal antisemitism allegations.
Kotlikoff became Cornell’s president in early 2025, saying at the time that he was “very comfortable with where Cornell is currently” following “two relatively peaceful semesters” in which there were only isolated incidents that violated university rules around protest. He soon rejected pro-Palestinian students’ demands to cut ties with the Technion university in Israel. But he also urged the campus to foster academic debate around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The event that preceded his clash with students on Thursday represented a striking example of such debate. Sponsored by an ideologically diverse array of groups, including the pro-Israel advocacy groups StandWithUs and the Zionist Organization of America as well as the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which has previously been suspended for violating university rules, the event was the second in a two-part “Israel-Palestine Debate Series.”
The series was organized by the Cornell Political Union according to a format its website says it has long maintained. The format features a lecture by a speaker followed by formal responses from students and an audience debate.
In the first event, held earlier in April, the Israeli historian Benny Morris lectured on the topic “The American-Israeli Alliance Serves America’s Interests.” Morris is a liberal Zionist critic of the Israeli government whose work has included foundational research on the founding of the state arguing that many Arabs were expelled, rather than fled, during the 1948 war.
The second, on Thursday, featured the pro-Palestinian Holocaust historian Norman Finkelstein, who lectured on the topic “Israel Was Not Justified in Its Response to October 7th.” Finkelstein, who has criticized Morris for showing a pro-Israel bias, has compared the plight of the Palestinians to that of Jews during the Holocaust, and Students for Justice in Palestine posted a picture of its members posing with him on Thursday.
Kotlikoff offered introductory remarks at the event, which promoted a no-technology policy designed “out of respect to student[s] who will be given the opportunity to speak openly on a divisive topic.”
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