A Holocaust survivor told Fox News on Tuesday morning that anti-Jewish protests at college campuses leave her feeling “scared.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters have occupied certain property and set up encampments at Columbia University for days. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has sent officers to the school to try to disperse them. Tova Friedman, a Holocaust survivor who later became an author and TikTok star, told Fox News’s Ainsley Earhardt that she is “pained” and “scared” for young Jewish people in America due to unrest following Hamas’ terror attacks against Israel Oct. 7, 2023.
“It is shocking! It is utterly shocking,” Friedman told Earhardt. “You know, when I walked out of Auschwitz with with my mother, walking through these gates, I said to, my thoughts — I was six and a half and I was a very adult six and a half, not like a child, you know? And I said, ‘I will never, never have any, anybody call me a dirty Jew, or, or anything else again. I am free now.’”
“And when I came to America at 11 and a half, it’s like I came to the promise land, and it was just, it was just a fabulous experience,” she continued. “And here it is today. I am shocked, I am pained, I’m scared, I’m scared more for America. I’m scared for the Jews. And very painful for our young people.”
“I have two children, two grandchildren at Wash U, and one at Cornell — and they’re scared! I can’t imagine, I just can’t imagine living through this,” Friedman said. “It, it reminds me — well, I was too young, uh, I wasn’t alive then. But I’d heard about that exactly what happened in, uh, before the Holocaust. And what’s shocking most of all is that the professors, some of them, are on board.” (RELATED: You Didn’t Let Me Finish My Point’: CNN Panel Heats Up Over Anti-Israel College Protests)
Some faculty members at Columbia University organized a walk-out in solidarity with anti-Israel protesters Monday.