“(JTA) – Yakira Galler, a first-year student at Barnard College, has had trouble sleeping.

Galler has an apartment that looks out onto Broadway, which divides Columbia University’s campus from Barnard, its women’s college. Each night this week, she has heard crowds of protesters banging pots and pans, chanting “Intifada, revolution” and calling for the Ivy League university to divest from Israel.

The street protests accompanied a much larger on-campus demonstration that devolved into unrest on Thursday, when the university asked police to dismantle an encampment pro-Palestinian students had set up; more than 100 people were arrested. The scenes from Thursday drew global attention, a statement from the mayor and passionate debate over the limits of campus civil disobedience.

For Galler, though, seeing hundreds of students – including some she knows – protesting Israel brought her back to a different time of trauma, not long ago: The days after Hamas attacked Israel, killing some 1,200 people and launching the war in Gaza.

“Wednesday at Hillel felt like October,” she said. “I remember speaking to one of the Hillel professionals, just telling her that all I feel is anger and I feel like I’m being radicalized and I don’t want to be.”

She added, “I just want to be able to think clearly and in a nuanced way and rationally but I am so overcome with these emotions.”

In the months since October 7, Columbia has at times felt like a battleground as pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students have faced off against each other and, often, the university administration. Thursday’s protest represented an escalation of those tensions, with police entering campus and loading students into NYPD vans.”

Read the full article in The Jerusalem Report here.