As the climate on some campuses has turned threatening for Jewish students, we share essays from moms with kids at Yale, Northwestern and Brown. We also hear from a mother whose high school junior encountered protests on a recent tour of the University of Texas at Austin and from another whose son has decided to forego problematic schools like Middlebury.

---

Growing up in an American Jewish family in the 1970s and 1980s, our values were clear: Get a good education, have a successful career, raise a Jewish family, support the Jewish community. I embraced this ethos. I met my husband at a Hillel cookout at Brown University during freshman orientation. We started saving for college before our children were born. We sent our kids to Camp Ramah, signed them up for SAT tutoring, spent countless hours on college essays and took our children to visit selective colleges with strong Jewish communities.

Today, my American Jewish belief system is in turmoil. I remember how proud my immigrant grandfather was when I left for Brown. I’m grateful my grandparents don’t have to witness what is happening on college campuses today. I was raised to believe education was the ticket to a successful life, but my Jewish DNA knows to be alarmed when mobs of students are calling for intifada.

My daughter, following in her parents’ footsteps, is a student at Brown. Her Ivy League experience started with a campus full of possibilities. It is now a shrunken world where she studies at Hillel to avoid being harassed in the library and eats her meals at Chabad so she doesn’t have to walk through protesters to get to the dining hall. She’s seen her large friend group diminish to only Jewish students who support Israel’s right to exist. Former friends have severed their relationships with her because they “don’t want to be friends with someone who supports genocide.” 

This is not the American dream we saved her whole life to support. Now we must decide whether she will walk away from this dream, probably to finish college in Israel, where, despite the war, she feels safer than she does in New England.

Her younger brother is a high school junior weighing his college options. How can we balance our commitment to education with the anti-Israel climate? In college, I want my son to be secure, academically challenged, grow personally, make friends and possibly meet a future spouse. Is that too much to ask? Post-October 7 in America, it might be. Now when we look at colleges, we rely on the ADL Campus Antisemitism Report Card as much as we look at test scores and Jewish population.

I hear my grandparents’ voices as I shake my head and think, “What are we doing?” It’s hard to let go of a multigenerational dream. It’s also hard to ignore the survival instinct that eats at me every day when I see the news and when I talk to my daughter. And we would be naïve to think things will be better in the fall.

Part of me wants to take the money we saved for college and buy an apartment in Israel. Part of me thinks, “There is no way this could happen in America.” But it is happening. And hoping for better is not what enabled Jews to survive thousands of years of antisemitism. It is hard to let go of a lifetime of dreaming, planning and saving.

And if my grandparents were alive, they would probably tell me that it’s time to give up that American dream.

---

Randy Faigin is an attorney working in the area of voting rights and campaigns both nationally and in her home state of Georgia. She has a B.A. from Brown University and a J.D. from Vanderbilt University School of Law.