Frontline Warriors: Watch New Documentary on the Fight Against Antisemitism on Campus

I wasn’t prepared for how moved I would be watching Aish’s new must-see documentary Frontline Warriors: The Fight Against Antisemitism on Campus. I’ve anguished over the past year and a half as my kids were thrust into the maelstrom of campus demonstrations demonizing Israel and promoting hatred against the Jewish state and those who support it. Frontline Warriors gave me a visceral insight into what Jewish students are going through.

It showcases students who’ve been threatened, who faced hostile faculty and feared for their safety on campus, and who lost friends because they were Zionists.

Hatred on Campus

The explosion of anti-Israel hatred began while Hamas terrorists were still inside Israel, massacring, raping, and kidnapping Jews and others. On October 8, the leaders of 34 Harvard clubs and student groups published a letter holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” thereby excusing Hamas from all responsibility for the massacre it was still carrying out. At Columbia, Professor Joseph Massad, wrote a piece published on October 8 celebrating Hamas horrifying massacre as a “major achievement of the resistance” against Israeli towns, which he termed “settler-colonies.”

In the film, we see campus after campus where students and professors gathered to celebrate Hamas and condemn Israel – even before Israel launched any military response.

Shabbos Kestenbaum, who graduated with a Master’s Degree from Harvard Divinity School in 2024, shows viewers the site on Harvard’s campus “where ten, twelve days after October 7, about 100 Harvard Divinity School students and faculty members gathered for a protest and called for divestment from the ‘Zionist entity.’ They called for the ‘freeing of Palestine from the river to the sea’. It talked about ‘globalizing the Intifada.’”

It was the first time he felt targeted for being a Jew: “Being a Jewish student living about 50 feet away, taking classes in these buildings, seeing your classmates, seeing your friends, so shortly after October 7, not condemning Hamas, not standing with Jewish students but actually standing for the cause of Hamas… That was my first real experience, at Harvard Divinity School and at Harvard more broadly speaking, of ‘Jewish lives don’t seem to matter as much.’”

Shabbos Kestenbaum on campus

At Columbia, Eden Yadegar, an undergraduate in the School of General Studies and Jewish Theological Seminary, describes months of harassment in the aftermath of October 7. Much of Columbia’s campus was transformed into an anti-Israel encampment in 2023 and 2024, where students and professors held demonstrations and barred pro-Israel students from walking freely within their own school.

“One night during the encampment, things got incredibly heated on campus,” Yadegar recalls. There were masked mobs chanting to bomb Tel Aviv and telling Jewish students to go back to Europe, to go back to Poland… It actually got so bad that the group of Jewish students that were on campus that night were practically forced off campus and chased off by this mob that was screaming at them to go back to Poland… And as these students exited campus, they were met with more masked protesters, this time screaming at them that they vowed to repeat October 7th not one more time, not 10 more times, but thousands of more times. And this sort of behavior went on for weeks unchecked while Columbia did absolutely nothing until students occupied Hamilton Hall” on April 23, 2024.

Eli Tsives, an undergraduate at UCLA, describes watching as UCLA was taken over by anti-Israel protesters and his shock as Rabbi Dovid Gurevich, director of UCLA’s Chabad, was threatened and assaulted in June 2024. The film shows graphic images of Rabbi Gurevitch being menaced by masked protesters who shout that Zionism is a racist ideology and grab his phone. One protestor threatens to kill the rabbi; others scream at him to go “back to Europe.”

“It’s just Jew-hatred,” Tsives concludes, after enduring this and other protests for a year and a half. “That’s why they choose to do what they do. They go out and they protest and they harass. Our own rabbi, our Rabbi Dovid Gurevich of UCLA Chabad, was physically assaulted by one these masked-up hoodlums” who took over UCLA after Hamas’ horrific attack.

“All of a sudden our children found that they could not get to class without being screamed at without being tormented without being bullied,” Rabbi Steven Burg, the CEO of Aish, explains in the film.

Systemic Anti-Zionism

“This support for terrorism isn’t new,” Eden Yadegar of Columbia informs us, noting that “October 7 brought it to the surface at Columbia and at universities across the country.” Again and again, she and other students featured in this important movie describe campuses which demonized Israel and regarded Zionists as somehow evil and threatening – both before Hamas’ attack on Israel and afterwards.

“I was taught as fact that Jews have internalized the ways of Nazi Germany,” explains Shabbos Kestenbaum. He signed up for classes at Harvard that would ask him difficult questions because he wanted to expand and challenge his worldview. What he found too often instead was dogmatic anti-Israel hatred at Harvard’s Divinity School. “I was taught, for instance, that the Holocaust is analogous to Israel’s self-defensive war in Gaza.”

Columbia University

Eli Tsives at UCLA describes attending a Zoom history class where he angered his professor by speaking up to defend Israel. The professor muted Tsives’ computer: “I was silenced for being a Zionist,” Tsives explained. (Refusing to stop proclaiming his beliefs, Tsives hung an Israeli flag behind him as he continued in the Zoom class.)

Frontline Warriors shows affinity groups embracing Hamas’ goals. A popular slogan on campuses is “nobody’s free until we’re all free,” explains Yadegar at Columbia. The conclusion is that all social justice causes – including those that are anathema to Hamas, such as gay rights, feminism, and minority rights – must regard Hamas and other radical anti-Israel groups as their natural allies and foment hostility towards Israel. That leads to absurd situations, explains Yadegar, such as the Barnard College Gardening Club signing on to calls to boycott Israel and call for its eradication.

“Students are being taught to ideologically hate Israel and hate Zionism, which means hate Jews,” explains Michelle Achdoot – Director of Programming and Strategy at the educational organization End Jew Hatred. The film also features Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D – NJ 5 District), who is demanding answers about where the well-organized anti-Israel movement on college campuses gets their funding and organization. “There’s lots of people who make a claim that there is no agenda except education,” he explains. “I think something doesn’t add up here and I’m trying to the bottom of…where the money is coming from…. They’ve not been very transparent about it.”

Defining Anti-Zionism

Why direct so much hatred against Israel and Jews? For answers, I turned to Rabbi Elliot Matthias, Aish’s COO for Global Activities, who addresses this question in the film. He shared some of his wisdom about why campus activists have been so quick to side with Hamas.

“Antisemitism has always existed,” Rabbi Matthias notes. “We had this golden era when we didn’t feel it, but we should never lose sight of the fact that antisemitism is an integral part of our history.” Jews have always been a nation that dwells alone.

Anti-Zionism is different from criticizing Israeli politics. “Is there room for criticism of Israeli policy? Of course. If you think criticism of Israeli policy is antisemitism that would make the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) the most antisemitic place in the world,” Rabbi Matthias explains with a laugh. “If you say Israel has the right to exist and has been surrounded by enemies 1948, and you don’t support the murder of innocent civilians – but you want to say I criticize this specific Israeli policy, that’s fine. But once you say Israel has no right to exist or that October 7 was justified, that is no longer criticism of Israel. That is holding Jews to a double standard, and that is antisemitism.”

Eli Tsives at UCLA agrees. “They’re using Israel as a scapegoat… They say the word Zionist because it’s easier for them to say Zionist because if they’re saying Jew then it’s very easy to call them out for what they are. But by saying Israel – oh well – they just hate us because of our political opinions.”

Zionism is a Fundamental Jewish Value

“The connection that Jewish people have to this place called Zion, the place called Israel, goes back to the beginning of Judaism,” Rabbi Matthias wants viewers to know. “We’ve prayed for it for thousands of years to return to the Land of Israel and rebuild Jerusalem. When two Jews get married under the wedding canopy, they break the glass because they’re remembering the fact that they’re missing something, that they want to go back to the Land of Israel. On Passover, we say L’Shana Ha’Ba B’Yerushalayim – Next Year in Jerusalem. There’s this yearning that Jews have had for millennia. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people are intrinsically bounded to the Land of Israel and no matter where we are, this is the place that we want to go back to.”

Eli Tsives on campus

“Zionism is a belief that Jews have a homeland called Israel, that was established 3,500 years ago,” explains Rabbi Steven Burg, Aish’s CEO. “Our history has been full of antisemitism, filled with hate and it was time for us to come home to be in a place where we have been for thousands of years and we could protect ourselves. Zionism is living in Israel in peace with our neighbors, being free to worship and be who we are.”

Shabbos Kestenbaum realized this after October 7. For the first time in his life, he found that he was being called Zionist as a pejorative. Seeking solace, he flew to Israel and spent weeks among his fellow Jews, learning from them and sharing their pain in the aftermath of Hamas’ attacks.

Holding up Jewish Values

Frontline Warriors begins and ends with words from the Passover Haggadah: “In every generation, they rise up to destroy us.” Rabbi Matthias notes, “Unfortunately, that’s the reality of being a Jew.” Recent violent anti-Israel and antisemitic experiences on campus are nothing new, he explains.

“The Talmud asks the question why was the Torah given on a mountain called Sinai?” Rabbi Mattias explains. “The Talmud (Shabbat 89a) gives an answer that there’s another word in Hebrew: it’s spelled differently but it sounds very similar to Sinai: the word sinah – hatred in Hebrew. What does this mean? What happened on Mount Sinai? The Jewish people were made messengers to bring values and morals to the world. But the Talmud tells us that those values and morals also bring hatred from those who want to rebel against those values.” By painting Jews as immoral and evil, “it takes down the values and the morals” that Judaism has traditionally championed.

Frontline Warriors

Facing rampant anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric at Harvard, Shabbos Kestenbaum recalls thinking of the Jewish sage Hillel’s words, “In a place where there are no leaders, strive to be a leader” (Ethics of the Fathers 2:5). That gave him the strength to stand up to anti-Israel protesters, demanding that they allow him to walk through anti-Israel protests. He eventually sued Harvard University, seeking it to make fundamental changes in the way it governed protests and protected Jewish students.

Eli Tsives describes how he first stood up to anti-Israel mobs at UCLA: “On October 11^th, I stood by myself on campus with an Israeli flag.” Surrounded by masked anti-Israel protesters, Tsives stood his ground. Eventually, a volleyball team member named Guy Guinness stood next to Tsives, lending him support in that first lonely vigil. Tsives explains he took that stand “to show other Jewish students there is no need to be afraid.”

Eden Yagedar became president of the Columbia chapter of Students Supporting Israel and was invited to give testimony to the US Congress in March 21, 2024, where she described rampant antisemitism on campus. Yagedar recounted that her parents fled Iran for the United States because of antisemitism and that she came to Columbia to “pursue the American dream” – a dream which “has turned into a nightmare.” She described unimaginable courage in standing up against anti-Israel radicals. “We have been attacked with sticks outside of our library, we have been surrounded by angry mobs, and we have been threatened to, quote, ‘Keep (expletive) running.’”

“I have a message for anyone who seek to silence us,” Yadegar told Congress. “We are not Jews with trembling knees. We are proud Jews who carry with us the tradition of resilience in the face of persecution, and we will not be silenced.”

Aish Ha’Am

The campus activists featured in Frontline Warriors are all standing for election in the World Zionist Party with the Aish Ha’Am party, a new pan-Jewish party that seeks to represent Jewish interests in the World Zionist Congress. They aim to prioritize funding for Jewish outreach and education around the world.

Rabbi Matthias hopes that the current situation on college campuses galvanizes Jews to explore their Judaism and ask themselves “What are those values and morals of Judaism that antisemites hate so much? Why are Jewish values such a threat to them?”

He wants those who watch Frontline Warriors to learn more about Judaism, whether that’s by reading Aish.com, attending Jewish events, reading Jewish books, or going to events at Hillel, Chabad, or other Jewish organizations on campus. “Antisemitism is a wake-up call,” he insists. “The question is: what do we do with it? Antisemites want us to be embarrassed to be Jewish. The more we understand that Judaism is there to bring beauty and values to the world, the more we can fight antisemitism together.”

Click here to register to watch Frontline Warriors online.