‘I was in a state of shock after Oct. 7,' says Harriet Jackson. “As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I could not imagine or accept another massacre of Jews. Antisemitism has been on my radar since I was a child. I believe in ‘Never Again.’”
At the time, Jackson worked as assistant director of research at Teachers College, Columbia University.
“I was immersed in a university culture that was predominantly anti-Zionist,” says Jackson. “A loud minority of faculty and students became intoxicated by Hamas propaganda and condemned Israel.
“What I heard on and off campus was silence in response to the pro-Hamas chants and the call for the annihilation of all Jews. I understood that extremist anti-Israel ideology, under the guise of being pro-Palestinian and financed by Iran and Qatar, has long been infiltrating educational and political institutions.
“My aliyah began at Columbia University.”
Jackson, an independent scholar, historian, educator, and Zionist crusader, joined forces with kindred spirits to combat antisemitism on campus, the irrational hatred, and disconnect from facts.
A few days after Oct. 7, 2023, Dr. Shai Davidai, now a former Columbia Business School professor, called out university president Minouche Shafik at a student vigil for not publicly condemning the Hamas massacre. The videographed outcry went viral. Soon Davidai became a vocal presence. Eventually, he left the university.
Anti-Jewish hatred on campus
In his forthcoming book American Intellectual Antisemitism: The Anti-Jewish Movement Tearing through Our Universities (Wicked Son, October 2026), Davidai describes his life-changing experiences and examines how “radical politics, ideological indoctrination, and institutional indifference have transformed campuses into incubators of anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and anti-American hatred.”
Recalls Jackson: “Prof. Gil Zussman introduced me to Columbia Faculty and Staff Supporting Israel (CFSI), which works to ‘support the inclusion, safety and voices of Jews, Zionists, and Israelis.’ I also joined Prof. Ran Kivetz’s informal, influential group of senior faculty, and had the opportunity to meet with Columbia presidents.
“I tried to explain to an interim president that our 4,000-year Jewish history has taught us to believe our enemies when they say they want to kill us.”
In the summer of 2024, Jackson joined the CFSI mission trip to the Gaza border communities, sponsored by Columbia Hillel. It was a gift to the activists.
“Our mission was to bear witness in Gaza, to visit the kibbutzim and the centers of rehabilitation. I stayed for a month afterward to travel through the country. I felt an infusion of light and sanity, and I made the decision that this is where I belong,” she says.
Jackson has felt drawn to Israel since her childhood visit to her mother’s family.
“I was born and raised in Queens, New York. My sister, Diana, and I grew up in a French-speaking home,” she explains. “My mother was Moroccan. My father was a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor who had relocated and recreated his life many times. He fled Nazi Germany to the US after being interned in a slave labor camp run by Vichy France in Morocco.”
After graduating from high school, Jackson earned certification in French civilization from the Sorbonne University. She then studied history at Stony Brook University and later received a master of philosophy in history and French studies from the Institute of French Studies at New York University.
Her graduate work took her back to Paris, where she attended classes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and the Institute d’etudes politiques de Paris. Jackson’s graduate work focused on the impact of World War I on the development of state benefits for injured soldiers and their families in France between the wars, and the anti-Jewish bias in the media in France before World War II.
But when her mother became seriously ill, Jackson was compelled to put aside her passion for research. She and her sister became their mother’s full-time caretakers.
Perhaps it was destiny when a chance encounter in 2005 with a Lubavitcher woman on a flight from Paris to New York led Jackson to an archival position at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and to a transformative experience. Founded by a group of Jewish scholars in 1925 in Vilnius, Lithuania, YIVO, now situated in New York, is one of the largest pre-war Jewish archives and libraries to have survived the Holocaust.
“YIVO hired me to process a collection of documents from wartime France, and specifically the archives of the Association des Israelites Pratiquants, (Association of Practicing Jews), under the direction of the Lubavitcher Rabbi Schneour Zalman Schneerson (1898-1980),” Jackson recalls.
In her article, “The Rescue, Relief, and Resistance Activities of Rabbi Zalman Schneerson: Does it count as rescue when a Jew saves a fellow Jew?” (French Politics, Culture, and Society, 2012), Jackson writes: “A descendant of the distinguished Schneerson dynasty from the Lubavitcher sect of hassidim, he was a Soviet émigré in France between 1936 and 1946.
“Schneerson’s personal experience of communist repression and arrest, his participation in clandestine activities and spiritual resistance in the Soviet Union, as well as his fierce anti-communism, placed him in a better position than many of his French brethren to deal with the authoritarian regime of Vichy and its anti-Jewish policies.”
Reflecting on Schneerson’s activities, she notes: “I have been a new immigrant for only five months. It amazes me that within one year of arriving in Paris, Schneerson set up a kosher soup kitchen, providing 400 meals a day. He also tended to the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of traumatized children ripped from their parents, emphasizing their Jewish identity.
“That Schneerson and his family were able to house, feed, and educate more than 80 children, save at least 53 children from deportation, help smuggle at least 35 children to Switzerland, and find creative ways to release people from internment camps demonstrates that he participated in an international and interfaith network of rescue and resistance.
“In documenting his life, I had two objectives: to integrate Schneerson’s resistance work into a larger scholarship by historians, and to demonstrate a broader definition of resistance that does not only mean a taking up of arms.”
TWO YEARS after witnessing the devastation of the Gaza border communities, Jackson made aliyah in 2026, a month before the ceasefire of April 28.
Reflecting on her life in Jerusalem, Jackson notes: “I came to Israel to begin a new chapter in my life – to continue advocating for Israel and fighting antisemitism. I am looking to collaborate with innovative organizations that are seeking new solutions, such as cultivating interfaith allies of the Jewish people.
“I am half German and half Moroccan, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, raised in a home that was primarily German, French, and Middle Eastern. Not at all American.
“I often felt invisible in the US, suspended between siloed Jewish communities. In Israel, these cultures are not contradictions but threads in a larger tapestry. I recognize the tastes, the sounds, and the traditions of my home.
“Making aliyah is a form of spiritual resistance against the fragmentation of my experiences. It is a declaration of strength, coherence, and wholeness.
“It connects me to generations of Jews who have drawn resilience from Jewish values and Jewish history: from the observant to the non-observant, from my parents and Rabbi Zalman Schneerson to the many known and anonymous Zionists who have stood up for Israel on US campuses and beyond.
“Israel allows all the disparate threads of my identity to weave a beautiful tapestry and become whole and healed.”
Harriet Jackson
From New York
to Jerusalem, 2026