Farewell From an Accidental Activist
The turmoil at Columbia forced me to take a stand. I would do it all over again.
I remember the first time I stepped foot on Columbia’s campus.
It was a brisk February morning in 2020, just before COVID-19 ravaged our campus. Students lounged on Low Steps, chatting with their friends and basking in the sun. The campus was alive—students, faculty, and, yes, visitors (the gates were open!) moved at a pace mirroring New York City.
It is not an exaggeration to say that as soon as I saw the view of Alma Mater overlooking Butler Library, I knew that this was my place. Whenever someone asked me why I chose Columbia, I’d say “I don’t know. It just felt like home.”
Looking back on it now, I think it had something to do with shelter. The campus, although open to the public at the time, was a retreat from the bustle of New York. If I ever needed a respite from the various street performers or honking car horns, I could simply return to Morningside Heights.
The Core Curriculum seemed like a shelter from the echo chambers I’d grown accustomed to in high school. Even though I would be challenged by discussions on some of the greatest works humanity has to offer, I would simultaneously be free to enjoy the freedom of open and critical conversation.
After I was accepted, I even decided to walk onto the swim team, giving me a home in the sport I had loved for nine years prior.
Everything about Columbia seemed like a safe shelter where I would be comfortably challenged for the next four years. But this feeling of comfort was short-lived.
In November 2021, the fall of my freshman year, my Spanish instructor informed our class that graduate student workers across the University would be going on strike due to failed contract negotiations. While I was initially happy to be freed from three weeks of Spanish class, I soon had to navigate picket lines and protests in Low Plaza—the same spot that drew me to Columbia. I saw my friends’ Core classes, supposed havens for critical discussions, canceled. I even saw my first ever tree-lighting ceremony get disrupted by the student workers union.
I didn’t agree with the protestors’ method—I found that they made it difficult to maintain a productive academic environment. Protests, even for a noble cause, shouldn’t interfere with the lives of everyday students, many of whom may support the cause. But I understood the student workers’ reasons for striking, and I commended the chutzpah they showed in standing up for their beliefs.
During the strike, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t feel the need to—they believed that protests should be total disruptions, and I simply disagreed.
I maintained the same response to subsequent protests about other issues in my sophomore and early junior years: I had a good life on the team, relatively sheltered from campus politics, and I wanted to keep it that way.
Looking back now, in some respects this was a very privileged way of thinking. I could afford to relax and outside of homework and my athletic responsibilities, and I had few worries.
Then October 7 happened.
When I saw the first wave of pro-terror social media posts from my fellow Columbia students flood my feed, I was shocked by my own naivety. I was not prepared to believe that my classmates would side with the terrorist group that had massacred my people.
On October 12, 2023, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel students gathered on opposite lawns. If there is any image that encompasses the division we still feel today, it is this one. While Jewish and Israeli students mourned the 1,200 civilians killed by Hamas in the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and prayed for the return of the 250 hostages in silence, the pro-Palestinian side chanted triumphantly. Their slogans of “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” and “Intifada Revolution” pierced through the campus just five days after the Hamas attacks.
I felt powerless. These protestors—my classmates—were openly calling for violence against Jews.
When I got back to my dorm later that night, I remember having a visceral reaction. One I had never felt before and have never felt since. I felt every emotion all at once: sadness, anger, disappointment, and shock. I knew my desire to live a “normal” and sheltered college life could not exist on a campus where students chanted pro-terror slogans so proudly. If there was any time to take a stand, it was now.
For once, I felt like I couldn’t stay on the sidelines.
Fortunately, my path to self-expression was already well in place. Earlier that year, I joined a new publication called the Columbia Independent (if you ever got a copy under your door, congratulations…you’ve hit “unc status” at Columbia). I was looking for a place to freely express my ideas, and I was impressed by how this magazine seemed like a place where I could comment on campus politics and the world beyond without boundaries. But politics wouldn’t necessarily be my focus. In fact, my first piece was about something entirely unrelated: campus sports teams.
However, just a few short weeks after the first round of protests, I got started working on a piece I never thought I’d need to write: a Jewish perspective on SJP and JVP’s misuse of the term “genocide.” I remember that researching and writing the piece was immensely fulfilling—I felt like I was using the skills cultivated in my liberal arts education to make an immediate difference.
But that piece was never published in the Independent, due to internal strife and mismanagement. Instead, it ended up in a new campus publication called Sundial. I remember being drawn to Sundial’s mission, which included a dedication to the “cross-pollination of ideas” across a campus filled with echo chambers. I knew Columbia was filled with interesting people with fascinating takes on higher education, and Sundial seemed like the perfect place to meet them.
After spending more than a year on staff, I can say that my first impressions proved correct. The people on our masthead are diverse both in opinions and talents. They are some of the most interesting, funny, and intellectually curious people I’ve ever met. These are students who are well aware of our University’s strengths and shortcomings. It is a dynamic group, well-equipped to create the “virtual agora” we envisioned.
In short, Sundial and its team gave me the confidence I needed to speak my mind about campus antisemitism and politics. I cannot wait to see what our successors publish in the years to come, as the long-term consequences of Columbia’s turmoil will begin to compound increasingly.
If you had told freshman year Jack that I would eventually attend a pro-Israel rally on Broadway during the encampments last spring, I would have called you crazy. I even took an internship last summer at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an NGO advocating for “the safety of Israel and Jews worldwide.”
I even had a small victory in the fight against terrorism. For Sundial’s October issue, I wrote an investigative article tracking how many pro-Palestinian fundraisers promoted by Columbia University Apartheid Divest have ties to Hamas. In response, the Hamas-run Gaza Now news agency (one of the entities connected to the fundraisers) called me a “veteran Israeli Mossad agent inside Columbia University” on X and Telegram. They even photoshopped a lovely pig nose on my official swim team photo to accompany the post. I take that as a win.
As my involvement deepened in organizations like Sundial, I realized that I had a voice, and that I ought to use it.
This is certainly not the life I had intended to live when I applied to Columbia in the fall of 2020. Nevertheless, this newfound advocacy has inspired me to pursue a graduate degree in international affairs and, hopefully, public service in some capacity.
My four years at Columbia have taught me that no matter how desperate you are for it, comfort is not always possible. I often think of the trope of the “accidental activist”: One who becomes an advocate for a cause not because it’s in their disposition to do so, but because the issue affects their life. They’re people that aren’t always looking to debate hot-button issues. But they were pushed into a corner with their back against the wall, given no choice but to fight back.
Columbia brought out the fighter in me, whether I wanted that to happen or not. I didn’t used to be so interested in hot-button political topics, and I never wanted (and mostly still don’t want) my words to ruin social relationships. But the post-October 7 events on campus opened my eyes to the spread of antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and support for terrorism at Columbia. It seemed like the Western world had turned its back on my Jewish classmates and I, and this was a reality I couldn’t accept—the question then became: What will I do about it?
So, whenever you’re in a situation when you feel like you have nobody on your side, take a stand. Do not do so performatively—don’t make human chains excluding “Zionists,” take over the library during finals week, or chain yourselves to the campus gates in an effort to disrupt, and nothing else—that will get you nowhere. But there’s value in genuinely standing up for a cause, whether by way of accidental activism or not.
As a senior, I realize that I’m leaving Columbia in a time of turmoil—a far cry from the idyllic day I first arrived on campus. We’ve just lost a good chunk of our federal funding and have been made a pariah by the Trump administration. Multiple members of our community have been put in deportation proceedings. And the constant specter of protests and other turmoil from previous years looms as the fall 2025 semester approaches.
But I remember the crises that greeted me when I walked through the Broadway gates for the first time as a student: COVID-19, the student worker strikes, and high administrative turnover including the end of James Valentini’s (“Deantini”) deanship of Columbia College. All cataclysmic events.
Yet, as Elton John once sang, our institution is indeed “still standing.” The University may bend, but we don’t break. Every time something bad comes our way, whether it’s a global pandemic, disruptive encampments, or even the protests of 1968, we evolve and rebound. I firmly believe this is due to the values we hold as an institution: intellectual curiosity, vigorous discussion, and, yes, a willingness to stand up for what we believe in.
I know that one day, Columbia will restore its luster in the same way that New York managed to rebuild its skyline after 9/11.
Every time I walk through campus and sit in the spot on Low Steps that drew me here five years ago, it still feels like homecoming. Columbia will always have a special place in my heart, and if you’d ask me if I could do it all over again, I would. A million times over.
On June 4, 1968, Professor Richard Hofstadter of the history department delivered that year’s Commencement address. Although Columbia was just rocked by protests and building takeovers, Hofstadter recognized the need for stability and peace in everything we do. Columbia is, at its heart, a great school built on great ideas and people. If we remember that, then we can overcome every temporary hurdle.
Thus, I end this piece and my time as a student here with the same question Hofstadter asked 57 years ago: “What kind of a people would we be if we allowed this center of our culture and our hope to languish and fail?”
Jack Engel is a 2025 graduate of Columbia College. This is his last piece as a senior staff writer for Sundial.