This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.

Last year, as I was applying to college in the fraught months after the Oct. 7 attacks and amidst the anti-Israel protests roiling campuses, I shared with JTA readers my criteria for picking a school. I explained how I was looking for campuses where students felt safe to be proudly Jewish, and where weekly Shabbat dinners and other gatherings were signs of Jewish vitality.

When I committed to Western Washington University in Bellingham, I had already decided that my best choice, given campus protests, was a school close to my home in Oregon. WWU’s active Hillel and Jewish Student Union reassured me that I would be able to find a community of Jewish students when I needed one.

Unfortunately the Jewish community is a small safe haven in a school where Jewish concerns about antisemitism are ignored.

A few weeks after I committed, I discovered that WWU had its own pro-Palestinian encampment. While I couldn’t find much mainstream media coverage of the situation, I received the campus-wide emails from the university president which, I later learned, significantly downplayed the situation.

[In a statement on May 31, 2024, WWU president Sabah Randhawa wrote that he “heard from many other members of the university, including some from the Jewish community, who have felt unsupported and unsafe during this time. The safety and well-being of all our students, faculty and staff is my first responsibility.” Read the whole statement here. — Ed.]

At the time, I assumed the encampment had been fully condemned by faculty and was going to be quickly shut down. Eventually, I would learn that hundreds of faculty signed on to a........

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