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Goodbye, Ivy League? | Why Parents Are Rethinking Some Colleges. · CLUB NORMIE

• 0:00
  Host, Jennifer: You took Harvard off the list solely because it wasn't safe for Jewish kids.
• 0:04
  Guest, Johanna: Understand the difference between someone who disagrees with me and someone who wants me gone.
• 0:10
  Host, Jennifer: You don't think things will become normalized again?
• 0:13
  Host, Jennifer: I see them getting worse and worse.
• 0:14
  Host, Jennifer: Today's a conversation with three Jewish mothers who just dropped their freshmen off at college.
• 0:19
  Host, Jennifer: I'm Jennifer Weissman.
• 0:21
  Host, Jennifer: Welcome to Club Normie.
• 0:23
  Host, Jennifer: The show for people who feel like the world has shifted under them.
• 0:27
  Host, Jennifer: You're not crazy, you're just a normie.
• 0:29
  Host, Jennifer: Will they be safe in college?
• 0:31
  Host, Jennifer: That question started long before the move-in process.
• 0:35
  Host, Jennifer: It shaped which schools were visited, which schools kids applied to, and which schools came off the list entirely.
• 0:43
  Guest, Donna: Jewish peace had been a journey way before in thinking where to visit, where to apply, where to accept based on that.
• 0:52
  Guest, Donna: And because of that process, she very much picked a school that we believe as safe as she's gonna feel around anti-Semitism and lack of tolerance for any kind of hate.
• 1:03
  Host, Jennifer: Freshman drop-off.
• 1:04
  Host, Jennifer: It's one of life's great milestones.
• 1:07
  Host, Jennifer: We're so proud of our kids.
• 1:08
  Host, Jennifer: I cried in the parking lot dropping my son off.
• 1:11
  Host, Jennifer: This year, in 2026, Jewish parents have a different concern.
• 1:15
  Host, Jennifer: My concern was, is my son going to be safe?
• 1:19
  Host, Jennifer: Both of you, Johanna and Donna, dropped kids.
• 1:22
  Host, Jennifer: Did you both have the same experience?
• 1:25
  Guest, Johanna: It was on my mind the big question of safety being Jewish, doubly so because her dad is Israeli and the name is evident.
• 1:35
  Guest, Johanna: That was an undercurrent far before move-in day, and that that wasn't my preoccupation on the day itself.
• 1:42
  Guest, Johanna: But then my daughter, as she's meeting her roommate in person for the first time with a roommate who's not Jewish, came to me sort of in the corner.
• 1:50
  Guest, Johanna: She's like, I think she's all good.
• 1:52
  Guest, Johanna: She's all good.
• 1:53
  Guest, Johanna: And I look at her and she means about the Jewish piece.
• 1:56
  Guest, Johanna: So it was on her mind for sure.
• 1:59
  Guest, Johanna: My preoccupation was much more logistical, but there was a hundred percent the undercurrent leading up to it, to the point of why she selected where she went and the narrowing of a list to places we believed would be supportive of being openly Jewish.
• 2:16
  Guest, Johanna: Very much informed by what had gone on on campuses the year or plus before.
• 2:21
  Guest, Donna: So in my case, I have two children.
• 2:23
  Guest, Donna: My son is in his last year, and we didn't think about any of this when we applied to colleges.
• 2:29
  Guest, Donna: He ended up on a campus that was extremely hostile to Jews.
• 2:33
  Guest, Donna: So for my daughter, the application process was very, very different.
• 2:38
  Guest, Donna: It was not about the most prestigious, it was not about the most fun.
• 2:43
  Guest, Donna: We started like with that narrowed list.
• 2:46
  Guest, Donna: And that narrowed the list, helped us determine which of the schools she would attend.
• 2:52
  Host, Jennifer: Would you have taken an Ivy League school off the list based on the behavior since October 7th?
• 2:58
  Host, Jennifer: We're not sending our kid to XYZ.
• 3:01
  Host, Jennifer: I'm just gonna say Harvard.
• 3:02
  Host, Jennifer: You took Harvard off the list.
• 3:04
  Guest, Donna: Neither of my kids applied to Harvard.
• 3:05
  Guest, Donna: I think one of my kids would have been great candidate.
• 3:08
  Guest, Donna: The reason was solely because it wasn't safe for Jewish kids on campus at Harvard.
• 3:12
  Guest, Donna: Wow.
• 3:14
  Guest, Donna: The priorities have shifted.
• 3:16
  Guest, Donna: We're in an environment right now where everything is shifting for our children.
• 3:19
  Guest, Donna: The whole prestige thing with the colleges, um, I think at this point, certainly you're gonna be surrounded by really, really bright other kids.
• 3:27
  Guest, Donna: But the value of it isn't that you're gonna get a better education.
• 3:30
  Guest, Donna: The value of it is the networking that you're gonna do.
• 3:33
  Guest, Donna: So if your child wants to go into finance, or if your child wants to go into something else that requires knowing the right people who already come from the families that already have the resources, that might be important.
• 3:46
  Guest, Donna: If your child wants to do something that requires great grades to get into graduate school, there are a lot of other options, along with the shift in thinking, where is my child headed with this college education?
• 3:58
  Guest, Donna: Along with the skepticism really about the value of a half a million dollar education over a hundred thousand dollar education, this was an additional layer.
• 4:08
  Guest, Donna: Do we really want to trade off the name Harvard with being targeted or perhaps getting lower grades or whatever it is?
• 4:16
  Host, Jennifer: Your older son went through this Ivy League Jew hating experience on campus.
• 4:21
  Guest, Donna: I always told the kids, you don't need to own this conflict for Israel.
• 4:26
  Guest, Donna: You can just say, I'm not engaged in it.
• 4:28
  Guest, Donna: I also give them Anglo names in addition to my son recently on this campus.
• 4:33
  Guest, Donna: I was in a class with a kid, and this boy was smart, but he kept saying things to my son, like, oh, you know, you're built.
• 4:40
  Guest, Donna: I didn't know Jews could be so built.
• 4:41
  Guest, Donna: Um he kept dropping all these comments about Jews.
• 4:45
  Guest, Donna: And then at some point they got into a conversation about greater Israel and whether the Israelis are really committed to Greater Israel.
• 4:53
  Guest, Donna: And my son said, Listen, I have family in Israel.
• 4:56
  Guest, Donna: This is a very fringe perspective, this greater Israel perspective.
• 4:59
  Guest, Donna: Trust me, this is not what the vast majority of Israelis want.
• 5:02
  Guest, Donna: And this kid, who's by the way is Asian, said to him, Really?
• 5:05
  Guest, Donna: Trusted Jeop.
• 5:06
  Guest, Donna: So these are the kind of experiences that he's having.
• 5:10
  Guest, Donna: I've encouraged him to choose professors that don't come from a particular side of the political spectrum because they are likely, you know, to maybe have some biases.
• 5:19
  Guest, Donna: He's found the campus extremely politicized and interestingly, he's also found that each sort of ethnic group sticks to itself.
• 5:26
  Guest, Donna: He has ended up mostly making friends with other Jews, even though he would like to make friends with a lot of other uh there's a lot of international students here.
• 5:36
  Guest, Donna: He says the Asian kids, the international kids, all of these kids kind of stick to their own groups.
• 5:40
  Guest, Johanna: One of the conscious values that we have been trying to instill in our daughter, which is be tolerant of different people and have friends from all over.
• 5:50
  Guest, Johanna: It's so important, but be able to understand the difference between someone who disagrees with me and someone who wants me gone.
• 5:59
  Guest, Johanna: Being tolerant of difference and being tolerant of hate are very different things.
• 6:04
  Guest, Johanna: And one of the saddest parts is I'm seeing the same thing with my daughter.
• 6:09
  Guest, Johanna: She has almost all Jewish friends, and only seeking that for comfort and belonging.
• 6:14
  Guest, Johanna: It was not the case when I was in college.
• 6:17
  Guest, Johanna: And the friendships that my husband and I have made and invested in over the years are not with that mindset.
• 6:23
  Guest, Johanna: I think that's a difficult result here.
• 6:26
  Guest, Johanna: And how do we make sure that our kids continue to make friends that are different, continue to tolerate difference, have healthy disagreement, and yet know where to draw the line with putting themselves in a place where they learn to read the room and understand when it's going towards hate.
• 6:42
  Guest, Donna: This ambient anti-Semitism, right?
• 6:44
  Guest, Donna: It makes me wonder: are the Jewish kids self-segregating or are they being ghettoized, right?
• 6:49
  Guest, Donna: And this sort of ambient hostility where you're looking at somebody and wondering, as you said so well, Johanna, do you disagree with me or do you want to kill me?
• 6:58
  Guest, Donna: I think this is something that the African-American community has dealt with forever.
• 7:02
  Guest, Donna: They don't know who's dangerous and who's not.
• 7:05
  Guest, Donna: It's certainly a tax on your cognitive function and it's attacks on your social life, and it's a tax on everything.
• 7:12
  Guest, Johanna: So, how do you counsel your kids?
• 7:14
  Guest, Johanna: Listen, ask questions, try to hear the other side, learn to build instinct.
• 7:19
  Guest, Johanna: We've always tried so hard to tell our kids that 99% of the world is good, 1% way over indexes on noise.
• 7:29
  Guest, Johanna: And you start to question that percentage calculus.
• 7:33
  Guest, Johanna: But I still believe as a parent, we have to teach them to look for the good, to listen, to understand, but to have instincts and know when to draw the line again between hate and difference.
• 7:46
  Host, Jennifer: My son goes to a school where there are very few Jews, as it turns out.
• 7:50
  Host, Jennifer: And I have to say it's uncomfortable for me.
• 7:53
  Host, Jennifer: So that's kind of a different perspective.
• 7:55
  Host, Jennifer: Your daughter goes to a school that has many Jews.
• 7:57
  Host, Jennifer: My son has not had any issues.
• 7:58
  Host, Jennifer: He's only been there a month, and the people are lovely.
• 8:01
  Host, Jennifer: But in the back of my mind, I always think, is he gonna be okay?
• 8:05
  Host, Jennifer: That's a hard thing for a parent to wrestle with.
• 8:08
  Host, Jennifer: Donna, has your daughter confided in you about um being Jewish on a campus?
• 8:13
  Guest, Donna: This was a conversation that started before the application process.
• 8:16
  Guest, Donna: Um, and at this point, she's been in college for two to three weeks.
• 8:21
  Guest, Donna: So I haven't heard any particular stories.
• 8:24
  Guest, Donna: She decided that in classes she's gonna go by her Anglo name.
• 8:27
  Guest, Donna: Socially, she's gonna go by her Jewish name.
• 8:29
  Guest, Donna: My son did not.
• 8:30
  Guest, Donna: At a certain point, they are adults and they need to decide how much of this they want to take on for themselves.
• 8:35
  Guest, Donna: If they want to take it on for themselves, then it's really important that they are armed with information because there's so much thearing out as Jews these days, and it just runs the gamut of legitimate controversies to absolutely crazy attacks.
• 8:50
  Guest, Donna: They need to go in already being prepped to understand what's real and what's not, what the unspoken assumptions are that actually guide those kinds of attacks and not to fall for them.
• 9:02
  Guest, Donna: It takes a lot of energy and a lot of knowledge, and kids want to do that.
• 9:06
  Host, Jennifer: I love what you said about having the instinct.
• 9:09
  Host, Jennifer: It's a bit of a scary world right now.
• 9:11
  Guest, Donna: It is.
• 9:11
  Guest, Donna: We might need to work harder.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: You don't think the pendulum will swing back and things will become normalized again?
• 9:18
  Guest, Donna: Not anytime soon.
• 9:19
  Guest, Donna: No.
• 9:20
  Guest, Donna: I see them getting worse and worse.
• 9:21
  Guest, Donna: I see all of the other ambient political conflicts, Jewish Israel controversy gets baked into those two sides with hatred for Donald Trump.
• 9:31
  Guest, Donna: Are you left?
• 9:32
  Guest, Donna: Are you right?
• 9:32
  Guest, Donna: Are you a communist?
• 9:33
  Guest, Donna: Are you a socialist?
• 9:34
  Guest, Donna: I see that rolling over more and more and more, again, because of the coming of AI, because I think young adults in particular feel that their future is very uncertain and they they want to belong to something somehow and get some sense of stability.
• 9:49
  Guest, Donna: I think as we continue down this road, case-shaped economy, uh, geopolitical conflicts, we Jews and the Israel issue get swept up in all of that, it's going to continue.
• 9:59
  Host, Jennifer: So the anti-Semitic creep is going to continue and build.
• 10:01
  Host, Jennifer: Thank goodness we have Bill Maher at this point.
• 10:04
  Host, Jennifer: Bill Maher has been just spot on.
• 10:06
  Host, Jennifer: What would you want a non-Jewish parent to understand about what this experience has been like for you?
• 10:12
  Guest, Johanna: Could swap Jewish for any identity, and you could say, don't we all as parents want our kids to feel safe, to feel like they belong, to feel like they can share what they believe in?
• 10:24
  Guest, Johanna: And I think anytime you kind of try to put it in their lens and say, this can be a really universal issue for all of us.
• 10:33
  Guest, Johanna: I did have an interesting perspective with a Catholic mom.
• 10:37
  Guest, Johanna: And I said to her, we worry about these things.
• 10:40
  Guest, Johanna: And she said, You do?
• 10:42
  Guest, Johanna: This school is so Jewish and Jews do so well and are so respected.
• 10:46
  Guest, Johanna: And she had like a completely different point of view.
• 10:50
  Guest, Johanna: It was refreshing and important to remember that the whole world doesn't hate us.
• 10:54
  Guest, Johanna: But she was like, What are you talking about?
• 10:56
  Guest, Johanna: I spoke to her about October 7th, and she's a very educated woman, but I kind of had to break it down to her.
• 11:03
  Guest, Johanna: And then she said to me, you know, Catholics, the Holocaust was awful for Catholics.
• 11:08
  Guest, Johanna: I said, Yes, I understand, but it's like you got to talk in their language about things that could be fearful for them.
• 11:14
  Guest, Johanna: Don't you also want your kid to feel safe?
• 11:16
  Guest, Johanna: She said to me she's worried about just a woman on campus and just like pure physical, you know, safety.
• 11:24
  Guest, Johanna: I think that if we only hold the conversation as it's just about us, we're always scared.
• 11:28
  Guest, Johanna: Remind people like we're all parents, we're dealing with concerns that we have.
• 11:32
  Guest, Johanna: And it's bigger than just the Jewish issue.
• 11:35
  Guest, Johanna: It's feeling safe, able to share our opinions, feel like we belong, feel like we found our people who we can trust, who respect us.
• 11:43
  Guest, Johanna: I think that's an important conversation to have across religion.
• 11:46
  Guest, Johanna: We're moving in.
• 11:47
  Guest, Johanna: My concerns were far more mama bear.
• 11:49
  Guest, Johanna: Is she gonna get her meals?
• 11:51
  Guest, Johanna: Is she gonna find time to do laundry?
• 11:53
  Guest, Johanna: Is she gonna know what to do when she gets sick?
• 11:56
  Guest, Johanna: Um, just making sure she's got the basics of health and getting through her days.
• 12:01
  Guest, Johanna: The Jewish piece was not so salient for me.
• 12:05
  Guest, Johanna: That piece had been a journey way before in thinking through where to visit, where to apply, where to accept based on that.
• 12:14
  Guest, Johanna: And because of that process, she very much picked a school that we believe as safe as she's gonna feel, I think, in this arena around anti-Semitism and lack of tolerance for any kind of hate.
• 12:26
  Guest, Johanna: I just wanted to be authentic that I was not thinking about this piece on move-in day or as we left.
• 12:31
  Guest, Johanna: We love mezuza.
• 12:32
  Guest, Johanna: I think that is important to say it wasn't front and center for me in that moment.
• 12:39
  Guest, Johanna: That's awesome.
• 12:39
  Guest, Johanna: You put up a mazuza.
• 12:41
  Guest, Johanna: So it was right.
• 12:43
  Guest, Johanna: We put up a mazuza.
• 12:44
  Guest, Donna: Donna, your daughter, would she put up a mazuza in her dorm room?
• 12:47
  Guest, Donna: Yeah, she did.
• 12:48
  Guest, Donna: Uh the concern for safety uh came up two years earlier when we were choosing where to apply.
• 12:55
  Host, Jennifer: Three moms, all Jewish, dropping kids off at colleges around America, different experiences.
• 13:00
  Host, Jennifer: One thing is for sure we all have the mama bear instinct, and we all want to make sure that whatever education they get, none of it is based on their skin color and certainly not their religion.
• 13:11
  Host, Jennifer: This is Club Normy.
• 13:13
  Host, Jennifer: I'm your host, Jennifer Weissman.
• 13:14
  Host, Jennifer: Thank you for listening.