In 1990, the director of the African American center at Penn State had invited Kwame Ture, born Stokely Carmichael, to address the student community. During his talk, Ture allegedly said: “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.” (This line was a common feature of the stump speeches he gave on campus tours around that time, perhaps most notoriously at the University of Maryland in 1986.)

But that day at Penn State, a Jewish student stood up and declared, “I’m proud to be a Zionist.” He was then hit in the face. At the time, the incident prompted the type of public criticism that college presidents are now so desperate to avoid.

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Illustrative.

Unfortunately, three subsequent attempts by other mediation groups to hold bridge-building workshops between Black and Jewish students were ineffective. The National Coalition Building Institute was then invited to campus. When I arrived, I started with the premise that no matter how painful or divisive things got, we could still change hearts.

We first brought the Black and Jewish campus communities together to each share their stories and life experiences. The Jewish student who had stood up that day and declared himself a “proud Zionist” shared with the group that his dad had escaped Germany in the 1930s. His dad had told him how terrifying it was growing up Jewish at that time. The student shared that those stories never truly resonated with him until that speaker came to his campus.

Then, the student said, “I understood my father,” and burst into tears.

The director of the Black student group who had invited Ture stood up next and shared how the story moved him. He told the group how he could so deeply relate to the experience of being “the other” and also began to cry. The group then engaged in a respectful, yet difficult conversation about whether controversial speakers that include possible hate speech in their messages be invited to campus. The group was evenly divided. It was the painful dilemma of hate speech vs. free speech.

Following the session, the students in attendance decided to form a coalition that would together determine which speakers the other community needed to hear. That coalition lasted for several years, and similar incidents were prevented. Through that workshop — and thanks to that coalition — these students and administrators possess a deeper understanding of each other and a profound commitment to ally building work.

Just a few years ago, I received a call from two Hillel co-directors in New England frustrated by Students for Justice in Palestine’s (SJP) “no normalization” policy of not interacting with any Jewish students unless they were actively anti-Zionist. These Hillel co-directors — who did not provide permission to identify them or their school — knew that respectful dialogue would not just benefit the Jewish students they served, but would improve the campus climate as a whole. For the next three months, we worked closely with those Hillel co-directors to figure out how to go through the back door when the front door was slammed closed. As a result of our training and coaching, the Hillel co-directors were successful, and that campus became one of the only ones in the country with dialogue between Hillel and SJP.

In the post-Oct. 7 world on college campuses, violence and mistrust is sadly all too common. The end of that story — of students coming together — is far too rare. Campus administrators, faculty and students continue to seem stuck in a cycle of response, counter response and “cancel culture” rather than one of deescalation and community building.

Over the past year, we’ve seen a Cornell student make online threats to shoot Jewish students in a Jewish campus building. We’ve seen a pro-Palestinian group at Columbia University claim that “violence is the only path” and express support for armed resistance. We’ve seen outside efforts to dox the personal identities of pro-Palestinian students engaging in peaceful protest.

Four years ago, the NCBI launched a program to train campus leaders in coalition-building skills needed to counter antisemitism on campus through bridge building. Over three years, 500 Jewish-identifying students, faculty and staff from 11 college campuses across the country participated in NCBI’s campus antisemitism leadership training.

However, after Oct. 7, we came to the conclusion that NCBI could no longer tackle antisemitism on campus in isolation. 

Intergroup crises can tempt us to look inward when we feel under attack, mistakenly believing that the work of coalition-building is futile. But what NCBI recognized after Oct. 7 was that to create a greater unity on campus, we needed a new program that started at the intersections of antisemitism, racism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.

In particular, we must ensure we aren’t tackling antisemitism in a room with only other Jews. To do that, we need to broaden our work to include other communities currently under threat. 

Rather than fighting to exist, we must do the hard work to coexist.

Jewish students inhabit all sorts of spaces on campus — Greek life, political organizations, student government, sports clubs. If we’re to be effective in countering antisemitism facing the Jewish community, our work must engage the intersectionality particularly of antisemitism with racism. 

Since I founded NCBI in 1984 and trained thousands of leaders on dozens of campuses, we’ve put that premise into practice: bringing students, faculty and administrators of all backgrounds together for in-depth training in replicable skills to reduce conflict, bias and discrimination.

Our approach of building robust coalitions through training and ongoing support yields a campus community that is more unified and more informed about antisemitism, racism, Islamophobia and all other forms of hate. 

While it may be tempting to retreat into our corners and strategize among ourselves, I encourage campus leaders to acknowledge the reality that antisemitism, racism and Islamophobia all need to be addressed side by side. Every stakeholder in a college or university campus must “step into the divide” and invest in real, lasting relationship-building that yields safer, more unified campus communities.

That’s the goal behind our new initiative, “Stepping into the divide: Using coalition-building skills to deepen relationships in the face of antisemitism, racism, islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.”

When faculty and administrators are trained to facilitate respectful dialogue when emotions are intense and students are empowered to develop projects that address issues on their campus in a way that builds bridges, the whole community benefits. With “Stepping into the divide,” NCBI is determined to meet this critical moment with the intersectionality approach it warrants.

Our leadership team reflects that. We’ve recruited a team of 10 Black, Jewish, Muslim and Arab senior NCBI trainers to lead our first cohorts of “Stepping into the divide.”

Our training encourages students and administrators to adopt three practices: seek to change hearts, not minds; lean into heated conversations with an open heart and a willingness to listen and understand that training our allies is key to building diverse coalitions.

The past year has brought to the surface deep divisions on campuses across the country; it’s also revealed the consequences of not promoting training programs that can get at the heart of these divisions and offer replicable skills for tackling them. As tensions remain high and students continue through the fall semester, we all have an obligation to build bridges, double down on healing and listening, and get back to the important work of forming relationships across divides. 

As stakeholders in the future of institutions of higher education, it’s in our power to ensure that hate doesn’t win.

I often think back to the incident on that college campus years ago, when Ture proclaimed: “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.”

But then I also think of the day after, when members of that campus community came together ready to listen and face hard things together. As campus hate is rising at an unprecedented scale, we’d all benefit from following those students’ powerful example.

Cherie Brown is the founder and CEO of the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) and a leader in addressing identity-based hate on college campuses through bridge building.