I walked onto the Sarah Lawrence campus after Thanksgiving break and I saw it immediately — an entire wall covered in spray paint: “ZIONISM IS RACISM + GENOCIDE,” “F** NORMALIZATION,” and at the bottom, in red, “FREE PALESTINE.”

It was not a poster that could be removed, nor a handheld sign carried by students for an hour and then forgotten. It was painted directly onto the physical heart of the college, on a building that every student must pass on the way to classes, dorms, the dining hall, and the library.

I stopped walking — not out of shock, which is hard to muster after the last 14 months, but out of something closer to recognition. This is what Jewish students have been telling me for years: the hostility is no longer atmospheric or abstract. It is literal. It is on the wall.

There are many ways to debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On a truly open campus, students would do exactly that: argue, challenge, learn, read history, confront complexity. They would take intellectual risks, not moral shortcuts. But graffiti like this is not an argument. It is an accusation — an act of ideological reductionism that targets not ideas, but people.

For Jewish students, especially those who identify as Zionist, this lands one way: You are unwelcome here. You are immoral. You are dangerous.

This is the part administrators pretend not to understand: Zionism is not an exotic ideology. For most Jewish students, it is the simple belief that the Jewish people — like any other people — have a right to self-determination and safety. It is an affirmation of peoplehood, identity, and continuity.

Even students who criticize Israeli governments, who oppose settlements, who long for a two-state solution, still recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish homeland. To equate that belief with racism and genocide is to cast those students — by virtue of something core to their identity — outside the bounds of moral community.

When that message is spray-painted on a central wall, its effect is not symbolic. Every student sees it — and not just Jewish students. Its message — that Israel commits genocide and is inherently evil — is etched into the mind of every student who sees it. And many will just accept it as fact. In 20 years, these students will be the ones running American governments and corporations. 

For years, Sarah Lawrence has struggled with the dynamics this moment exposes. I have written repeatedly about the school’s culture of ideological sorting and quiet intimidation — an environment where the loudest voices enforce the narrowest moral boundaries.

Students report that they self-censor. They tell me they avoid certain courses. They confide that dissent is treated as betrayal. They describe a campus where activism substitutes for analysis, and where social risk-taking is punished far more swiftly than academic laziness.

Jewish students hesitate before raising their hand in class. They scan the room before mentioning Israel. They avoid posting anything online about their identity. They watch friendships quietly erode. They walk campus angry and also in fear (and after all the violent attacks on Jewish students, those fears are justified). 

One student told me she now takes a longer route to her dorm each evening — not because she fears debate, but because she is tired of being told, in giant letters, that her very existence is genocidal. Another confided that she now speaks in one course only when she’s certain no one will turn her comments into accusations. These are not abstractions. They are the lived experiences of 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds trying to learn on a campus that tells them they are a moral problem.

University leaders, by contrast, often default to vague bromides about free discussion and open dialogue.

In theory, those are admirable commitments. But in practice, they evade the real issue: the climate created when a minority community’s identity is treated as inherently illegitimate. Administrators know perfectly well how group-based invective affects other communities. They know how words can undermine belonging. They would never allow a wall to remain covered in sweeping condemnations of any other minority group.

Only when the target is Jews do they behave as if the harm is ambiguous, as if the insult might still count as “conversation.”

Nor is Sarah Lawrence alone. Across the country, campuses have seen similar eruptions of anti-Zionist hostility. The pattern is national: the word “Zionist” has become a socially permissible euphemism for “Jew,” giving cover to old prejudices dressed in the language of justice.

Universities cannot resolve the geopolitics of the Middle East. But they can absolutely control how they respond to explicit acts that undermine trust, safety, and dignity. They can distinguish between critique and dehumanization. They can insist that campus discourse meet the minimal standards of civility. They can refuse to let slogans replace scholarship. And they can recognize that Jewish students deserve the same institutional protections as any other minority community.

This requires courage — moral, civic, and institutional. It requires telling activists on all sides that a university’s purpose is not to reenact global conflicts, but to learn about them with rigor and respect. It requires resisting the drift toward ideological litmus tests. It requires defending the idea that disagreement should not mean denigration.

At Sarah Lawrence, where the ideals of openness and inquiry are already fragile, it becomes a warning. Either the college recommits itself to pluralism, open inquiry, and mutual respect, or it allows a new orthodoxy — one rooted in fear, exclusion, and performative moralism — to become permanent. 

Jewish students will remember which path their institution chooses. And so should everyone else.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.