Inside the Campus Uprising for Palestine
College campuses across the United States have become sites of mass protest actions against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. They include Columbia University, New York University, Harvard, and Yale. Police have arrested hundreds of people, including those who have set up on-campus protest encampments.
Activists have been vilified as antisemitic, even though they include sizable numbers of Jewish students. At Columbia University, many of the students participated in a seder to mark Passover during the protest.
Meanwhile, the discovery of a mass grave containing more than 300 bodies in southern Gaza has lent even greater credibility to genocide allegations against Israel. The United Nations reported that victims were found stripped naked with their hands tied.
Shana L. Redmond, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity at Race at Columbia University, has been among faculty members involved in the campus protests. She spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about campus repression and false accusations of antisemitism.
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Sonali Kolhatkar
joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.
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