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Jewish college students are going south.
Even before the Ivy League upheavals of the past two years, Jewish students had been slowly drifting away from the elite campuses of the Northeast. Now, as some seek respite from the protest movement that erupted after the Israeli response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of southern Israel, the drift has become more like—sorry—an exodus. And selective colleges outside the Northeast, sensing an intensifying disdain for Ivy League schools among Jewish teens and their parents, are tripping over one another to recruit these students.
The recent wave of anti-Israel campus activism, and accompanying incidents of anti-Semitism, have mostly taken place at a small number of hyper-selective schools. And high-school seniors have noticed. The population of Jewish undergraduates at Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania shrank by 3 to 5 percent from 2023 to 2025, according to data gathered by Hillel, the national Jewish student organization. (Only Hillel tracks these numbers, because colleges generally don’t monitor religious affiliation.)
Of course, many Jewish students still apply and get admitted to the Ivies, and anyone who gets into these top colleges is still very likely to attend. But anecdotal reports suggest that a significant number of high-achieving Jewish teenagers are deciding not to apply to them at all. In Hillel’s 2024 survey of 427 Jewish parents, nearly two-thirds said that they had eliminated a college from their child’s application list because of concerns about anti-Semitism. And nearly every rabbi and professor I spoke with for this article knew students who, once admitted to an elite northeastern college, opted to go somewhere they perceived as more welcoming. Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox school in New York, usually sends more than a dozen graduates to Columbia each year. Last year, it sent zero.
To selective colleges elsewhere in the country, the situation presents an opportunity to poach talented Jewish students who might previously have gone to an Ivy League (or so-called Ivy Plus) school. These schools have cracked down on protests and taken pains to differentiate themselves from their Northeast peers. “We absolutely are hearing from our administration partners at strong schools in the South and Southwest that they want to take advantage of this moment to recruit top Jewish students,” Adam Lehman, the CEO of Hillel International, told me. “And, by the way, they’re succeeding.” Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier told me, “We want to create a place where there’s thriving Jewish life, just like we do for all the other students. But again, it’s particularly salient right now because of the contrast with other universities.”
[Rose Horowitch: The elite-university presidents who despise one another]
Historically, one or two Ramaz graduates in a given year would apply early-decision to Emory University, the head of Emory’s Chabad chapter told me. Last year, 12 did. (Chabad is a Hasidic group that focuses on outreach to nonobservant Jews.) Jewish-student interest in Emory, as well as in Vanderbilt, has more than doubled since October 7, 2023, rabbis at the universities told me. Vanderbilt’s Hillel had to hire new staff to host all the prospective students who wanted tours; the university’s undergraduate Jewish population has grown by 20 percent in the past two years. The University of Florida’s Hillel chapter experienced a 50 percent increase in student participation from 2021 to 2025. Clemson University—a South Carolina school not often associated with vibrant Jewish student life—saw its Hillel grow fourfold over the same period. Southern Methodist University, near Dallas, now appears to have more Jewish students than Harvard, Hillel data show.
These colleges are recruiting Jewish students not out of pure munificence or southern hospitality, but because it can be very good for their bottom line. “Jewish families are historically philanthropic and give back, Jewish students are more likely to pay full tuition, and having a substantial percentage of Jewish students helps create a more successful university environment,” Mike Uram, a Jewish nonprofit leader and the former head of the University of Pennsylvania Hillel, told me. This strategy was once used by Ivy League colleges to rise in the rankings. Now southern schools are running the same playbook.
The history of Jews in the Ivy League is long and tumultuous. The universities capped the number of Jewish students they admitted from the 1920s to the ’60s. According to former Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, this was for Jews’ own good: “The anti-Semitic feeling among the students is increasing, and it grows in proportion to the increase in the number of Jews,” he wrote in 1922, by way of justifying discrimination. To keep that number under control, admissions offices emphasized “character,” a code word for WASPiness. But in the following decades, Jews—who make up only about 2 percent of the U.S. population—reached a representation of 20 times that on some Ivy campuses. The achievements of Jewish academics, and donations from Jewish alumni, helped place America’s top universities among the best in the world. By the turn of the century, according to Hillel, UPenn was one-third Jewish.
That didn’t last. In 2010, the University of Pennsylvania was about 20 percent Jewish, and six years later, 13 percent. Hillel data suggest that Yale, Harvard, and Columbia also all saw significant declines in their Jewish population from 2015 to 2023. Dartmouth and Princeton, which enrolled fewer Jews to begin with, saw their shares drop a few percentage points too. (The dynamic wasn’t universal; at Brown and Cornell, the Jewish population grew over the same period.) Leonard Saxe, a social-policy professor at Brandeis University, attributes much of the change to universities shifting their admissions objectives to focus on recruiting first-generation, international, and racial-minority students.
At the same time, southern colleges began courting Jewish students in an effort to raise their academic standing. Schools such as Duke, in North Carolina, and Vanderbilt, in Nashville, built out their Kosher dining halls and Jewish-studies programs. “Yes, we’re targeting Jewish students,” then–Vanderbilt Chancellor Gordon Gee said in 2002. “That’s not affirmative action. That’s smart thinking.” Tulane, in New Orleans, pioneered this tactic; its undergraduate population is now 40 percent Jewish, according to Hillel. (“We’re not trying to recruit Jewish students per se,” Tulane President Michael Fitts says, “but we’re trying to create a supportive community, and we will act affirmatively against anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination.”)
[Franklin Foer: The golden age of American Jews is ending]
The chaos on left-leaning campuses during the 2023–24 academic year gave southern universities the recruitment opening they had been waiting for. At Harvard, protesters accosted an Israeli American student who later sued the university for allegedly not disciplining his attackers. At Columbia, 13 Jewish students told the student newspaper that they’d faced attacks or harassment in the days after October 7. The percentage of Ivy League Jewish students who reported censoring their opinions multiple times a week rocketed from 13 percent in 2023 to 35 percent the next year, according to a survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
Some Jewish students began looking for a way out. In October 2023, Lauren Eckstein was attending Pomona College, in California, one of the few elite liberal-arts colleges on the West Coast. The day after the Hamas attack, pro-Palestinian student groups released a post justifying the violence. A few weeks later, several of Eckstein’s professors, including much of the history department, signed on to an anti-Israel letter arguing that “the ongoing violence and terror inflicted by the Israeli state must be understood in the context of this settler-colonialism and Israel’s apartheid regime,” and that “condemnations only of specific acts of violence perpetrated by Palestinian armed groups can serve to disavow the roots of violence.” Her grandparents had recently made a $1.2 million donation to Pomona, but she nevertheless decided to look into finishing her degree elsewhere.
Around the same time, Washington University in St. Louis opened a midyear transfer program. Andrew Martin, the university’s chancellor, released a statement touting his campus’s tough response to protests that violated university policy. When protesters set up an encampment, for example, WashU swept it within hours. “We had no tolerance,” Martin told me. Daniel Diermeier, the Vanderbilt chancellor, issued a similar statement. The University of Florida, meanwhile, started a program on Jewish classical education. Clemson University launched a partnership with Israeli universities.
“Jewish students add value to a campus community in terms of their academic work, in terms of their overall commitment to elevating campus life through community service and partnerships, and through the way they stay connected to their alma maters—including as donors,” Lehman, the Hillel CEO, told me. Publicly, the leaders of these southern universities say that these choices are simply the right thing to do. But talk to administrators in private, and it becomes clear that they see in the struggles of elite northern universities a chance to steal away students who can help make their campuses more competitive.
It might be working. “From what I hear, the overall consensus is that the top schools for Jewish students to go to now are WashU, Emory, Vanderbilt, Tulane,” Eckstein told me. “It’s very different than when I was younger and so many Jewish students wanted to go to the Ivy League.” She said that she’d transferred to WashU so that she could fully focus on her studies and extracurriculars. I heard this sentiment over and over from Jewish leaders at southern schools; they told me that students chose their university because it gave them the opportunity to be apolitical. “It’s not so much that they want to go to a school that’s pro-Israel,” Zalman Lipskier, the head of Chabad at Emory, told me. “They just want to be left alone and be able to pursue their education, and pursue their goals and dreams without having to worry about if they’re going to get sucker-punched or harassed on their way to class.”
Whether such worries are wholly realistic is up for debate. The line between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism is nearly always contested; the anti-Israel protest movement on some campuses counts many Jewish students among its ranks. Meanwhile, southern colleges are becoming more popular with northeastern students of all backgrounds. No doubt some Jewish students have opted out of the Ivy League simply because they think the South is the place to be.
Even so, an atmosphere of fear has clearly taken hold among many Jewish families. Jewish leaders at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale told me that just about every parent of a prospective student asks if their child will be safe on campus. (Here I will resist the temptation to make any quips about Jewish moms.) Of course, the parents who reach out to campus rabbis in the first place are a nonrepresentative subset of Jewish families. Anxiety around anti-Semitism is concentrated among students who are religiously observant and more likely to participate in Jewish organizations, several of the rabbis told me.
Meir Posner, the head of Chabad at Yale, told me that he doesn’t think Jewish students’ physical safety is at risk on campus. But anti-Semitism shows up in subtler ways. “There is a perception that engaging or aligning oneself with any particular Jewish organization on campus is somehow an implicit political alignment,” he said. Posner and other Ivy League Jewish leaders stressed that there are still thriving Jewish communities on their campuses. But they fear that if the decline continues, it will lead to a kind of doom loop.
That point is, by all accounts, still a long way off. So many Jews apply to Harvard that it could probably fill its entire freshman class with Jewish students if it wanted to. Michael Courtney, the director of college counseling at the Modern Orthodox school Salanter Akiba Riverdale Academy, in New York, said that even though more kids are looking at southern schools, the best students still tend to end up in the Ivy League. Columbia and Harvard are highly regarded among graduate schools and employers; his students don’t want to cut themselves off from those opportunities. And many Ivy League campuses have taken steps to address anti-Semitism. Harvard, for example, recently promised to cover the cost of security for its Hillel chapter. In the most recent FIRE survey, 19 percent of Jewish students said that they often self-censor—closer to the 13 percent prior to October 7, 2023, than the 35 percent the year after.
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But holding back the competition will be difficult. The upstarts are sending recruiters to Jewish day schools in the Northeast, flaunting the strength of their Jewish communities in interviews and public statements, and portraying themselves as the antidote to Ivy League illiberalism.
Several close observers I spoke with believe that a durable realignment is under way. Jewish students being welcomed across the country is in many ways a good thing, of course. But the partnership between Jews and the Ivy League, which has been fruitful for both, might be coming to an end. “There is something very poignant, and maybe even sad, about seeing a community that was excluded for so long from fair participation in elite university life, and then overcame those barriers and flourished so much on those campuses—then seeing their numbers decline so precipitously afterwards,” Mark Oppenheimer, a professor of religion and journalism, told me. “It was a great triumph of American opportunity that Jews sparked the explicit design of restrictionist, anti-Semitic admissions policies in the years after World War I, and then overcame them and really took to higher ed like no minority group ever had before.” Oppenheimer taught for years at Yale. Now he’s at WashU.
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